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HUMAN SACRIFICES
IN
ENGLAND.
FOUR
DISCOURSES
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.,
Minister of South Place Chapel, and at the Athenaeum,
Camden Road.
LONDON:
TRUBNER AND CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1876.
�CONTENTS.
PAGE
1.
Human Sacrifices
2. The Daughters
of
...
...
...
$
Jephthah ...
...
7
3. Children, and their Moloch ...
... 19
4. The Sabbath-Jugernath
33
5. The Martyrdom
51
of
Reason
�HUMAN SACRIFICES.
I passed a morning of the last week in the St.
Marylebone Police Court, having been summoned
there as a witness. As I waited through the hours
there passed by a dismal gaunt procession or chain
gang of the captives of the ignorance, the brutality, the
shame, sorrow, despair, of this vast metropolis. There
were young men arrested in one drunken brawl, and
women arrested in another. A shop-girl of twentyone, who had been sent by her humble parents from
the country to earn her living, had stolen a little
finery, perhaps for a babe that would soon be born.
A young “ gentleman,” as he was described, who had
run through an estate, was sentenced for assaulting a
young woman, whose downcast eyes and deep blush
of shame confessed to the judge what her lips could
not utter. A woman of twenty-two, who might once
have been comely, had been arrested for intoxication.
During the night she had three times attempted
�4
suicide, and was barely saved for a life of despair. It
is terrible to look upon a face which tells only of a
life in ruins, and to listen to sobs broken by no plead
ing or word indicating any interest, however faint, in
what the next moment may bring. A little boy five
or six years old, wretched and ragged—with hardly
rags enough to cover him—charged with being “ desti
tute.” Every eye that saw him could testify to the
truth of that charge. The poor boy had been found
asleep on the pavement, and said he had slept there
for three weeks. The magistrate set himself to ferret
out the facts, and little by little was revealed his
story. He was one of six children who had been
living with their father and mother, in utter poverty,
all in one room. At length the mother left that
miserable room to wander and live as she could. But
this little boy had followed her, clung to her; she
carried him about with her for one day, in some
strange place he slept with her the same night; but
in the morning she sent him back home. The father
drove him out because he had gone off with his
mother, and so he had found a London pavement the
only pillow extended to his little head.
The magistrate was consideratej he did his best to
do justice to all, but he must have known—it was
plain—that in no case did he judge or sentence the
real criminal. The visible offenders before him were
�5
victims. Behind each stood the grim and awful
shadow of some ghoul that had fastened upon him.
As the wretched men, women, and children were led
away in custody, free and unfettered beside them stalked
their demons,—Ignorance, Strong Drink, Neglect,
Injustice, Hereditary Taint, Malformation of Brain.
These are the real criminals, and it is they that elude
the grasp of the law which can only deal its penalties
to the already punished, the utterly helpless creatures
on whom the ghastly vampires of our time are
battening.
I am about to speak for a few Sundays of what seem
to me the heaviest wrongs of the present time; but I
do not wish to point out wrongs for which there are
no remedies. Indeed, we can only very dimly dis
cover evils, we can not feel deeply concerning them,
until the light of its remedy falls upon each wrong.
The remedies may be, as yet, ideal; but that is not
their fault; they are necessarily ideal until they are
applied : it is the fault of those great Interests, em
bodying public Selfishness or Superstition, which reject
the truth and the justice which threaten them. But I
believe in the power of ideas. In the end they are
stronger than armies. Waiting there at St. Marylebone—as it were in some weird whorl of Dante’s Hell
__till, to my eyes, all present seemed impersonal,
types and shadows of remorseless forces which once
�6
St. Mary-the-Good tried to conjure down with her
tender image, and then departed, leaving only her
name, made way for the police,—there came upon me
by some association, a memory of early days passed
in a land where the Black-tongued Plague was raging.
Hundreds were struck down daily with swift death;
mourning was heard along the streets of every town
and village ; cries were heard in many homes that
had been happy. Every face was pallid ; the strong
est men and women moved about in the silence of
fear. One night the thermometer fell a degree, and
the Plague was dead.
Not swift and sudden, but just as certain is the in
visible power of the air which works through ideas.
“ God is a spirit.” There is an intellectual, a religious
atmosphere, in which lurks the miasma of moral
death, or through which breathes the spirit of life ;
and any least change in that ideal region will tell
upon the earth as surely as on it is recorded in frost
or flower the viewless march of the seasons.
�THE DAUGHTERS OF JEPHTHA.
Jephtha, Judge of Israel, marching against the
Ammonites, made a vow unto the Lord that, if
victorious, he would offer up as a burnt-offering to
Jehovah the first person that should come forth from
his house to meet him. Wife or daughter it must have
been : Jephtha had no other offspring but an only
daughter, and who so naturally should hasten to
welcome a father’s return from war and danger as an
only daughter? So went forth the happy maiden
with timbrels and dances to meet her father, the
Prince. The father was in distress, but it never
occurred either to him or his daughter that the Lord
might sympathise with their love and their reluctance
rather than with the vow, and so the fair maid was
slain and burnt on the Lord’s altar. Some efforts
have been made by casuists to show that Jephtha’s
daughter was not sacrificed literally, but only consesecrated to the Lord by not marrying : but such
attempts are unworthy of notice. Human sacrifices
were a recognised part of the Jewish religion, and
�8
careful provisions were made for the redemption of a
man or woman vowed to the Lord by money,—except
when devoted by anathema, in which case the man or
woman the law declared (Lev. 27) “ shall surely be
put to death.” I do not wonder that theologians
would like to escape the effect of the story, for it is
said “ the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephtha,” in
the Old Testament, and in the New that king who
sacrificed bis daughter is enumerated among saints of
whom the world was not worthy.
Well, the story drifted about the world and had its
effect. Jephtha’s daughter was caught up by the Greek
imagination, and reappeared as Iphegenia (probably
Jephthagenia), the daughter of Agamemnon, who was
nearly sacrificed in obedience to a similar vow made
by her father to Artemis. Human sacrifices were
unknown to the ancient Aryan race until it came in
contact with this dark and horrible Shemitic belief
that the deity required blood—and especially the blood
of some spotless being, as the dove, or the lamb, and
finally the most beautiful virgin. This wild and guilty
superstition may be tracked in blood wherever the
Jewish religion passed, and when Humanity had by
reaction revolted from it, the spirit of it was caught up
and preserved in the Christian idea that the world was
to be saved only by the sacrifice of the one most vir
ginal unblemished Soul, the Lamb offered up on Cal
vary to soothe the wrath of God.
�9
But even after that offering, though it was said to
be a final satisfaction of Jehovah’s universal claim
and thirst for blood, the old superstition survived to
the extent of teaching women that it was a holy
thing to vow their virginity to the Lord, to seclude
themselves from the world, and to count themselves
especially happy if they lost their lives by ascetic
devotion to their invisible Spouse. All the nuns of
Christendom were, and are, Jephtha’s daughters.
But that has been by no means the worst result.
The ancient Hebrew idea that woman is the natural
sacrifice to God coloured the whole relation of that
religion and its civil laws towards the female sex.
Woman became the law’s normal victim. We never
read of a Jewish Queen; we rarely read praises of a
woman of that race, except as part of the estate
of some man who was to her the representative of God.
She is sold and bought with her dead lord’s assets. It is
deemed no blot on Abraham when he drives Hagar
from his door. There is no law in the decalogue, or
elsewhere in the Bible, that mitigates the masculine
decree—“ Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he
shall rule over thee.”
All this was reflected in Christianity. It taught
women to submit to their husbands as to the Lord
himself; never to speak in public, or to appear there
unveiled; to stay at home and obey their husbands,—
�IO
“ as also saith the law,” adds Paul,—and understand
that woman is made for man and not man for woman.
I need not pause here to discuss the origin of this
view of the position of woman. We may admit that,
far away in some hard wilderness, or amid certain
primitive exigencies of society, such a theory of
woman was inevitable as a phase of social evolution.
To keep at home and obey might have been the only
way of continuing to exist, or to escape capture. But
when a particular phase of human evolution gets asso
ciated with divine sanction, it gains a permanence
which fetters progress. Most gods have been the
means of perpetuating the barbarism of the age which
invented them.
The Christian system brought this idea of woman
into Europe. Whatever relation it may have had to
Arabia or Syria, whatever justification it might have
had in savage periods, surely it was out of place and
out of time when imported into Europe. And there
is not a more cruel chapter in history than that which
records the arrest by Christianity of the natural growth
of European civilisation as regards woman. In
Germany it found woman participating in the legisla
tive assembly, and sharing the interests and counsels
of man, and drove her out and away, leaving her to
day nothing of her ancient rights but a few honorary
idle titles, titles that remain to mark her degradation
�11
and ours, as they remind us that a peeress, a duchess,
a baroness, a princess, a queen, are not the political
equals of many an illiterate sot who calls himself a
man. Even more fatal was the overthrow of woman’s
position in Rome. Read the terrible facts as stated
by Gibbon, by Milman, and Sir Henry Maine, read
and ponder them, and you will see the tremendous
wrong that Christianity did to woman. All the laws
by which women were protected in their individual
existence were overthrown. The sum of money which
Roman law demanded should be settled by her father
on every married woman, the new Christian code
caused to be paid to the husband instead of her, as a
dowery, or consolation for taking her off her father’s
hands. The idea that the virgin belonged to God
survived, and her espousal to a man could only be by
payment of redemption-money, which is the marriage
fee.
Christianity struck the fatal blowat the independence
of woman by allowing her but two alternatives,—im
prisonment in a nunnery or servitude in a husband’s
house; anything else was for generations accounted sin.
But am I speaking of the far past ? Is it not true
also this day that women are sacrificed to this old
Jewish regime and its Lord? What woman needs to
day is to have her rights and her wrongs decided in
accordance with the conditions and the needs of
�12
Europe, not those of Judea; what she requires is the
unbiassed verdict of the sense and sentiment and
science of the present day ; and yet her case is yielded
up to the authority and law of an ignorant tribe, whose
very Judge knew no better than to burn his daughter as
an offering to his god.
It is to that same Jehovah,
to the laws he is supposed to have proclaimed, the
Bible he is said to have written, and the religion in
which his ferocity is still reflected through all later
mitigations,—it is to him that womanhood is still
sacrificed; and so long as the name of Jehovah,
the god of Jephtha, is bowed to with awe and
fear, so long will the victim-daughters of Jephtha
surround us.
But how are women sacrificed ?
First of all in education. The intelligence and
common sense of Europe declare that there can be
nothing more important, both for themselves and for
man, than the right and thorough education of women.
As the physical mothers of the race they have the
utmost need to know the laws of life, the nature of
their own frame, the principles of health. As the
intellectual and moral guides of all human beings
during the years when they are most susceptible of
impressions and influences, women have need of the
very best knowledge. Their need of scientific drill
is, if anything, greater than that of men. Yet in
�education they are thrown the mere crumbs that fall
from the table of our male youths. It has been shown
that over ninety per cent, of the provision for education
in this country is devoted to boys and young men. It
has been shown that in our universities there are large
sums of money inadequately used,—wealth accumu
lated from ancient endowments, furnishing annual
revenues to the extent of ^500,000,—and yet amid
all the discussions as to what shall be done with that
money, hardly one voice is heard demanding that it
shall be devoted to redressing the heavy wrongs
which woman has suffered through ages, and now
suffers as she sits famishing in sight of such abun
dance. And while the universities are thus barred
against her, and the keys of knowledge denied her,
she is compelled to hear the very weakness and
ignorance so entailed quoted for her further disparage
ment. We are told, woman cannot reason; she is
not logical; she acts by mere impulse and sentiment;
she is superstitious. Well, why is it so ? Who has so
made her? The god of Jephtha, the deity who
exacted the sacrifice of the fair virgins of Israel, and
who by his Bible still demands that we hold English
women mere appendages to man, against all the best
light and conscience of our own time.
Again, women are morally and physically sacrificed
by the denial to them of the right of freedom to enter
�i4
into all the avocations of life by which human beings
may find support, livelihood and independence. In
the laws made by the worshippers of Jephtha’s god it
was enacted that every woman should be sold to some
man as wife or concubine. It was strictly obligatory.
Even that miserable means of obtaining a livelihood
is impossible in this country, where women are in ex
cess of men by nearly a million; but still we find
male prejudice and law providing that marriage shall
be regarded as the only recognised profession, trade,
or vocation by which women may obtain an honour
able livelihood. Compelled by the over-powering
exigencies of modern life we are tolerating them in a
few other simple occupations, but without according
social equality to such; and we make no adequate
provision for their apprenticeship or training for occu
pations which would yield them that independence
which our theology and conventionality most dread.
The sacrificial results of such a state of things are so
appalling that I can hardly name them. By shutting
the usual lucrative professions and occupations to
women, society is driving them by thousands to sell
that which is alone left to them to sell, their own
honourj that which not one woman in a hundred
would part with, were not pauperism and starvation
the dread alternative ; and thereby society sacrifices to
ancient superstition the health and the purity of both
manhood and womanhood.
�i5
I have named but two out of the many forms in
which women are bound hand and foot on the altar of
Jephtha’s god. Why need I repeat the long catalogue
of her wrongs as a wife and a mother ? Even after
the battles and the appeals of generations have wrung
from the reluctant hand of her master a link or two
from the chain with which she was so long fettered, sheis still liable to alienation of her children, and other
wise subject to the caprice and the cruelty of man.
And yet we are told that her interest and necessities
may safely be entrusted to the care of a legislature in
which she has no voice or representation j and that
personally she is not equal to the task of political
deliberation and voting. The ballot is not my idol. My
desire to see woman enfranchised is not because of
any abstract theory of human rights. I admit that
because of the long thraldom that sex has undergone,
and because of the long denial of education and all re
lation to the large affairs of the world, it would be
better if men could be induced to relieve them of their
oppressions—liberate them from the altar to which
they are in large part bound by chains of their own
superstition, and so prepare them for that share in
political power which should be accorded only to
intelligence and moral freedom. Women need the
full advantages of education far more than they need
votes. What they are perishing for is not a ballot,
�i6
but the opening of all the work and culture which
make the equality and secure the liberties of man.
But, with them, I despair of such practical results until
they are admitted among the constituencies of Par
liament. They have amply proved their case. They
have clearly defined their wrong and its remedy.
They have appealed for redress in vain. They are
met by frivolous sneers, by sentimental evasions, not
by reason and argument. Their sufferings have edu
cated them sufficiently to know at least their own needs,
and the unwillingness of men to respond to them.
Their cry for enfranchisement is the cry of victims
bleeding on the altar of established error j it is the
cry of despair ; and it can only increase in painful in
tensity and grief until it shall be redressed. Indeed,
the very sentiment, no doubt sincere with the great
majority of men, which dreads the departure of woman
from the sacred sphere of domestic life, must ere long
be enlisted on the side of her enfranchisement. It will
become more and more clear that there can be no
peace with injustice ; that women in increasing num
bers are, and will continue to be, excited to protest
against the wrongs of their sex. They will appear on
platforms; they will be public speakers; they will be
stimulated to that very life of political agitation which
so many fear, but are blindly engaged in promoting.
For the sake of peace and quietness, if for no higher
�motive, this justice must assuredly be done to woman,
and my own apprehension is that it will not be done
until society has suffered yet more serious disturbances
through the obstinacy and folly of the opposition to a
measure which, if adopted, could not cause anything
more revolutionary than has been caused by the ad
mission of woman to the municipal franchises they
now possess. That which is to-day demanded in the
name of justice, must to-morrow be conceded in the
interest of social order. But this is a poor, mean way of
securing any measure of justice. When wisdom pre
vails the right will be conceded to reason, not wrested
by agitation. But however men may throw away
experience, it still remains true that trouble tracks
wrong like a shadow, and justice alone is crowned with
peace.
2
��I9
CHILDREN AND THEIR MOLOCH.
Five years ago I clipped from a newspaper the follow
ing letter, addressed to the Editor from Shetland :—
“Lerwick, July, 7, 1871.
“ Sir,—It may interest some of your readers to know
that last night (being St. John’s Eve, old style) I
•observed within a mile or so of this town, seven bon
fires blazing, in accordance with the immemorial custom
■of celebrating the Midsummer solstice. These fires
were kindled on various heights around the ancient
hamlet of Sound, and the children leaped over them,
and ‘passed through the fire to Moloch,’ just as their
ancestors would have done a thousand years ago on
the same heights, and their still remoter progenitors in
Eastern lands many thousand years ago. This per
sistent adherence to mystic rites in this scientific epoch
seems to me worth taking note of.—A. L.”
In ancient times, however, the children had to leap
into the bonfire—which is defined in Cooper’s “ The-
�20
saurus ” as 11 Pyra, a bonefire, wherein men’s bodyes.
were burned,”—and not over it. I have often leaped
over a bonfire myself, with little thought that my sport
was the far away relic of the tragedies of human sacri
fice. Our bonfires of Virginia had been lighted from
those of Scotland, whence the first settlers of the neigh
bourhood had come; and there is some reason to
believe that in some obscure nooks of Scotland the
Midsummer fires are yet kindled, and some may still
be found who believe that it is good for a child to passover them.
The Reformers of Scotland made a tremendous
effort to trample out these survivals of ancient super
stition, and measurably succeeded in suppressing the
outward manifestations of them. But they preserved,
the very atmosphere of superstition amid which such
practices were bred originally, and there is reason to
fear they made matters worse. The sacrifice of chil
dren to Moloch had become a pastime, but their
subsequent sacrifice to Jehovah ofSabaoth was serious.
The Scottish Reformers also exterminated with
fierce piety the superstitions of the Church of Rome.
They particularly punished pilgrimages to the so-called1
holy wells which abounded in that region. On the
28th November, 1630, Margaret Davidson, a married
woman, residing in Aberdeen, was adjudged in an
“unlaw” of £5 by the Kirk Session “ for directing
�21
her nurse with her bairn to St. Fiack’s Well, and
washing her bairn therein for recovery of her health
- . . and for leaving an offering in the well.” The
point of idolatry, as stated by the Kirk Session, was
“in putting the well in God’s room.” After the fine
Margaret, perhaps, put God in the well’s room; but
we may doubt whether the change was of any advan
tage to the bairn. Pure water has its sanative effects,
and it is very likely that the wells became holy because
they were healing. But St. Fiack—a Scottish saint—
had to go, leaving only his name to a vehicle {fiacre),
in which his French devotees travelled to his shrine,
and instead of him was set up a Judaic deity whose
providence was not associated with anything so rational
as the use of pure water. Not one particle of super
stition the less remained in Scotland when the fires of
Moloch and the candles of Rome were put out. The
only religious advantage one could have hoped from
the revolution was not gained. It might have been
hoped that when popular Superstition was divested of its
picturesque features, its pilgrimages to holy wells and
shrines, and bonfires and images, its grim and ugly
visage would have been simply repulsive, and its
further reign impossible. But, strange to say, the
Scotch seemed to cling more to superstition the
uglier it became. A Puritanism arose in which all the
Molochs were summed up, and all human joys were
�22
represented, in Shakspeare’s phrase, as 11 the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire,” the flowery path tohell. It is passing strange that this hideous system
should have been able to desolate beyond recovery
the “merrie England of the olden time,” and to over
shadow America for more than a hundred years.
There is a singular society which met last week, called
the Anglo-Israel Society, whose object is to persuade
this people that they are the lost tribes of Israel, and
the eagerness with which the majority of this nation
has always laid hold upon everything Semitic, gives
some plausibility to their notion; but one thing is
certain, if we are the tribes that Israel lost, we have
never lost Israel. We have hebraised for ages, made
long prayers, sung psalms, named children Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob, and otherwise pertinaciously adhered
to the Semitic idolatry.
When Jehovah was brought to Scotland, Moloch
was nominally dethroned, his bonfires extinguished;
but the change was only nominal; all that was dark and
cruel in Moloch was superadded to all that was dark
and cruel in Jehovah; and the result was a Scotch
Jehovah more harsh and oppressive than the phantasm
which haunted the Jews.
For the ancient Jews do not seem to have generally
entered into the spirit of Moloch,—that old brass
deity, whose head was that of a calf, and whose stomach
�23
was a furnace in which children were consumed. The
Jews generally were careful of their children, and those
of them that worshipped Moloch and sacrificed their
children were sternly denounced. That old idol which,
according to Amos (v. 26) the Israelites bore with
them from Egypt through the wilderness, would per
haps have faded away had it not been for Solomon.
Solomon is odiously memorable for two things. He
erected a temple for Moloch on the Mount of Olives,
where children were burned to death, and he wrote
the sentence—which might appropriately have been
inscribed on that Temple—“ Spare the rod and spoil
the child.” The man who wrote that sentence had, of
course, no idea that any people would exist foolish
enough to believe it the very word of God; but,
nevertheless, in conjunction with human superstition,
he has been the cause of more evil to the human race
than any other one man that ever lived. The rod is
a little thing, but it is full of deadly poison ; it has
fostered in the world more deceit, meanness, cowardice,
servility, stupidity, and brutality than our race will
outgrow for many generations. Mr. Edward Tylor
recently exhibited at the Royal Institution the poison
ous Calabar bean used as an ordeal in Africa,
whose consecration enables the savage kings to put
out of the way every man who proposes any change
in their government; and he (Mr. Taylor) expressed
�24
his belief that the continued savagery of Africa was
in large part an effect of that little bean. And I be
lieve that it can be shown that the rod has been the
means of preserving the savage rule of physical force
in the greatest nations of the world. The parent or
teacher who strikes a child does so because his parent
or teacher struck him; and the child that is struck
catches the idea, transmitted all the way from Solo
mon, that the way to deal with people who don’t do
what you like is to strike them. That is, if you are
stronger than they. If they are little and you large,
that is a sign that the Lord has delivered them into
your hand. You must make the child yield his will
to yours, not by love and persuasion, but by brute
force and pain; break his spirit, though that harms
him far more than breaking his back-bone; make the
child another you : so will your child do the like by
his children, and they by theirs, and independence
and individuality be beaten down by violence, genius
crushed, character made characterless, as
“ To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,”
and all our yesterdays light us on the highway of
commonplace, though not, I hope, to the last syllable
of recorded time.
Does it not strike you that a child consists of an
individuality, a will, a spirit, a mind, and that its real
�25
existence depends upon these; and that if these are
not trained, encouraged, cultivated, the child has no
real existence at all? An animal existence it may
have, but beyond that it were a mere appendix or
sequel to somebody else, unless its peculiar powers
are healthily carried forward to maturity. If these are
sacrificed the child is sacrificed, and the man that is
folded up in him. Will a gardener beat his rose-buds
with a stick to make them grow ? The growing of
thoughts and emotions is more tender work than the
culture of roses. But children will be naughty; of
course they will sometimes be naughty if they are
healthy, and they will require restraint until they can
restrain themselves : they must learn morals as they
learn letters. But one might as well flog a child for
not knowing Greek as to flog it for a deception or for
selfishness. Every blow is an appeal to selfishness,
and a lesson in deception. We pardon our parents
and predecessors in this, for they knew not what they
did. But it is a scandal that the rod should linger in
the homes and schools of England, after Herbert
Spencer and others have proved the evil of it. For
many months now I have been trying to find a school in
Kensington for a boy in his eleventh year, and in that
great parish I cannot find one in which they do not
insist on two things,—Beating and the Bible. I must
leave the parish to find a school which will give me a.
conscience clause on these points.
�26
Now, I may ask any person of intelligence, not
hopelessly blinded by superstition, is the Bible a fit
book to put into the hands of a child ? I do not
believe that a child as it advances to boyhood and
girlhood should, with prudish jealousy, be kept in
ignorance as to the follies and vices of the world in
which it lives.
But our children do not live in
ancient Judea. The Bible, moreover, is not limited to
any years. It is believed by bibliolaters to be so holy
that it can do no harm even to a child of tenderest
years, who so soon as he or she can read is permitted
to receive the unnatural stimulant of perusing narra
tives obscene, shocking and cruel. What would be
a glass of gin in the child’s throat, compared with its
first familiarisation with the grossest vices of semibarbarous tribes; vices many of which are even unfit
for more advanced youth to read about, for they are
not those which they will now find in the world
around them, or require to be guarded against. The
very memory of some of the primitive brutalities of
mankind is kept alive only by the Bible. With its
pages are broadcast narratives which the law does not
permit to be printed in any other book. And when
these crimes and vices are laid before a child as the
word of God ; when it reads in that book that many
of the worst of them were instigated by Jehovah,—
that he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and ordered persons
�27
to be stoned to death, and children to be put to thesword, and so on,—why it is enough to slay theirreverence on the spot, and strike them with moral
idiocy. This is, indeed, the way in which, morallyspeaking, the sins of the father are visited on the
children, to much more than the third and fourth
generation. The Bible is an invaluable book, but it
is not a book for children : there are many forms in
which the incidents and chapters suitable for them
can be separately procured; and for the rest, the
volume may be safely left on the shelf to be searched
out when it is wanted.
The Rod, and the Bible which consecrates the Rod,
along with many other barbarities, make up princi
pally the Moloch of children in the present time. The
sacrifice of the young among us is mainly moral and
intellectual. Physically a great deal is done for the
average of them. There are indeed terrible regions
where children are caught up in the great engine of
commerce and labour, and crushed. There are mines,
and fens, and factories where the struggle for existence
means a joyless existence—hunger and pain, and pre
mature death to many a child ; and yet, because it isa struggle for existence we can only look upon it with
sympathy and with resolution that no man shall add tothe anguish of it. But when we follow even such appa
rently inevitable evils as these to their causes, we dis-
�2S
•cover that they could not continue but for the radical
•error of English Christianity—the principle of sacrifi
cing man to God. We can never hope thoroughly to
master the evils of society while the great religious
organisations of the country, and their vast endow
ments, are directed to divine service instead of
human service, and the poor are taught that their
■chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.
When the wealth and the religious earnestness of this
nation are devoted to the benefit of humanity, instead
•of to the childish notion of personally pleasing and
■.satisfying the deity, there cannot long remain an
unhappy home in it.
But until that Gospel of Pure Reason is heard round
the world, bringing its glad tidings, the weak and
ignorant must still bleed as victims on the altar of an
imaginary being who may be called God, but is much
nearer the ideal of a Demon.
Dogma, too, has still its altar in England upon
which the child is sacrificed. It is true that among the
educated the old doctrine that every child is at birth
a child of the devil, and human nature totally de
praved, has ceased to exist; and even among the
illiterate parental affection has been too strong to
admit of its practical realisation. But still it is taught
by vulgar sects to many millions, and avails to mis•»direct many fathers and mothers, and teachers, in their
�29
dealing with the natural instincts and needs of child
hood. The mirth, the love of beauty, the longing for
amusement, in the young, so indispensable for a healthy
and happy growth, are forbidden, the dance is held tobe sinful, the theatre immoral, and thus many thousands
of children never have any real joy, and pass on to a
youth of precocious anxiety, and a manhood or woman
hood of hard, morose alienation from nature.
The only relief to the gloom of this unnatural
religion, which casts its shadow over so many young
lives, is that dogmatic preaching has become so inhar
monious with the enlightenment of civilised society,
that it tends more and more to sink into the hands of
pulpit mediocrities, who rehearse it in such a dull,
perfunctory way that it loses all impressiveness, and
can now hardly keep congregations awake. Sermon
ising is almost another name for boreing.
In an admirable story just published, called “ The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain,” the
author presents a picture of an average congrega
tional assembly on Sunday, among whom his little
hero was a sufferer. After the lugubrious hymn came
the long, long prayer. “ The boy,” says the author,
“ did not enjoy the prayer, he only endured it—if he
even did that much. He was restive all through it;
he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously
-—for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of
�3°
old, and the clergyman’s regular route over it—and
where a little trifle of new matter was introduced, his
■ear detected it, and his whole nature resented it; he
considered additions unfair and scoundrelly. In the
midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the pew in front
of him ”—but I will pass over the fate of that fly.
The sermon came on. “ The minister,” writes our
author, il gave out his text and droned along monoto
nously through an argument that was so prosy that by
and by many a head began to nod, and yet it was an
argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone,
and thinned the predestined elect down to a company
so small as to be hardly worth the saving. The boy
counted the pages of the sermon; after church he
always knew how many pages there had been, but he
seldom knew anything else about the discourse.”
Once, indeed, he became interested for a moment. It
was when the preacher, instead of his own dreary
thoughts, drew from an ancient poet the picture of the
hosts of the world gathering at the millennium, when
the lion and the lamb should lie down together, and
a little child should lead them. The boy said to him
self that he would like to be that child, if it was a
tame lion.
I suppose there are many poor little sufferers like
this lad, dragged this day into the chapels and churches
of the world, but we may console ourselves partially
�3r
with the reflection that in their sufferings many a false
hood is smothered. The deadly dogma is happily
also dull, and sinks through the vacant mind into the
gulf of oblivion. And yet that boy is passing through
the years which should be sown with the seeds of
truth, and the germs of thought and purpose. His
faculties need encouragement : they say briars and
thorns are non-encouraged buds. So long as those
sweet, susceptible years are passed amid such errors
that apathy to them all is the child’s best hope, we
must still confess that in this age of light innumerable
children are still passing through the fire to Moloch.
�_______ _ __
�33
THE 8ABBATH-JUGERNATH.
On the sands at Puri, in India, stands the famous
temple of Jugernath. It is nearly seven centuries old,
and the building of it cost as much as a half million
sterling. It is six hundred and fifty feet square, and
its sanctity consecrates the soil for twenty miles around
it,—that land being held rent-free on condition of the
tenants performing certain sacred rites in honour of
Jugernath. There are twelve great festivals held every
year at this shrine, and the alleged performances at
these festivals have been the never-ending theme of
mission meetings ever since we can remember. You
must have been fortunate children if you have no
memories of Sunday School days when your childish
heart was harrowed by accounts of poor Hindoos
crushed under the wheels of Jugernath, and a tithe of
all you possessed annually sent away to convert that
hard god into a Christian, and stop that terrible car.
Some old missionary once estimated the immense
amount of money and labour devoted to the care, the
3
�34
ablutions, and other affairs of this temple, and he said
the same amount of wealth and toil usefully bestowed
might make every barren spot of India into a garden ;
and that missionary might have added that the amount
of money which has been evoked from Christian
pockets by that one idol might have made an equal
number of gardens there, or here,—whereas it has all
been spent, and the car rolls on just as grandly as
ever.
And not only this, but we have now learned on the
best authority that all those pictures of Hindoos cast
ing themselves beneath the Jugernath car to be crushed
were purely imaginary. When the car is drawn, with
the sacred image of Vishnu set up in it, the crowd of
the curious and the devotees is enormous, and no doubt
many accidents have happened. It may be, because
some from a distance are ignorant of the danger, or that
enthusiastic devotees put themselves unintentionally in
danger by going too near the image they believe
holiest on earth, or try to draw the car with hundreds
of others when they are too weak or aged to do so.
But there are no intentional sacrifices under the car of
Jugernath, nor could there ever have been at any period.
For Jugernath, or rather Jaganatb, means simply
“ the Lord of Life •” it is a title of Vishnu, and the
temple is purely sacred to Vishnu. Nothing is more
rigidly forbidden than to slay anything that has life in
�35
the neighbourhood of the Lord of Life. The Hindoos
declare that the holy pages of the Vedas themselves
sprang from drops of blood lost by their Saviour while
protecting Agni in form of a dove from Indra in form
of a hawk; and to Vishnu they offer only things that
are fresh and beautiful, like flowers, and even the
. flowers must not be in the least faded. So it is
impossible that there could have been human sacrifices
to Jugernath except by accident. The accidents were
probably very frequent at one time,—at least it is
•charitable to missionary reporters to think so,—the vast
increase of popularity in the festivals having made the
crowd unwieldy. But in recent years British authority
has insisted upon carefulness—threatened to stop the
car if men and women were injured—and there is now
far less destruction of life by the car of Jugernath than
by the London cab.
Happy Hindoos ' who have at hand an enlightened
authority willing to respect their religious customs so
long as they are harmless, but ready to put Vishnu
himself under arrest if he injures humanity. I would
match an Englishman against any man living for good
sound sense in dealing with such superstitions, pro
vided they are not his own. But when that clear
headed English authority which has put out the fires
that burned widows in India comes to deal with laws
that torture women here, it gets confused among
�36
Scripture texts and precedents. When it is needed
to curb a fanaticism here which deliberately sacrificeshuman life—that, for instance, of the Peculiar People,
who, because of a text in the New Testament, refuse
to call medical aid for their sick, letting them die in
numbers every year, even helpless children—why then
all that common sense seems to vanish. When it is
called upon to regulate our Sabbath-Jugernath, beside
which the car at Puri is an innocent toy, beneath
whose wheels millions of hearts and brains are crushed
in this kingdom, why then the intelligence of the nation
grows timid, and its arm is paralysed.
The celebrations of Jugernath, the Lord of Life,
bring to the poor twelve festivals in the year, The
celebrations of the Sabbath, Lord of Lifelessness, bringto our poor fifty-two funereal vacancies in their exist
ence. They ought to be fifty-two festivals of Reason, of
Beauty, of Happiness, but to the poor they are days of
unreason, of ugliness, of torpor and drunkenness ; days
hateful to children and hurtful to all. Now it is not
merely fanciful to bring together the Jugernath and the
Sabbath superstitions. Even in origin their consecra
tion came from the same source. Our theology has
arbitrarily transferred the sanctity of the Jewish Sab
bath, the Seventh Day of the week, to the Sun-day, the
day consecrated to sun-worship, our first day of the
week. I say arbitrarily, for' there is not a word in the
�New Testament consecrating Sunday, but there are
•strong sentences declaring one day as holy as another.
The early Christians when they went among so-called
pagan ” races met for worship on the first day of
■the week because it was a holiday, and they could only
then get at the people. For the same reason we meet
to-day, because it is the day when people are liberated
from business. But the Primitive Christians had as
•little thought of consecrating the “pagan” Sun’s day
as the Jewish Sabbath, just as most of us would abhor
•the notion that any day is less sacred than another.
But Vishnu also was to his provincial worshippers the
-quickening sun, and his chariot is the car of Jugernath.
So the two institutions are linked together archeeologi•cally. But in a more important sense they are related
by the fact that they are both idolatries. lhe Sab
bath is one of the only two visible idols which pro
nounced Protestantism has left standing for a race of
kindred origin to the Hindoos, and like them
naturally loving outward symbols and images. We
•all belong to the Great Aryan race, from which pro
ceeded all the bright gods and goddesses of Greece
and Rome, and Germany, and all their variegated
symbolism.
Through certain historic combina
tions our Aryan race as it migrated westwaid, became
invested with a Shemitic religion, one which had no
arts and pictures itself, and regarded them as impious
�38
in others. In obedience to this alien religion, our
race now wrote on its temples, “Thou shalt not make
to thyself any graven images, or pictures of anything
in heaven, earth or sea.” But it was one thing to say
this, another to practise. The Eastern Church evaded
the law by putting up certain holy pictures with
frames in relief, which are something like sculpture.
The Roman Church boldly disregarded the law in its
lordly way of requiring the Bible to accommodate itself
to the Pope. In this country all the sacred visible
images were swept away by Puritanism from its own and .
many other churches—leaving all the more graven
images in the mind ; but that race-instinct, that love
of outward symbols and objects of worship with which
the Eastern Church compromised, and to which the
Romish Church succumbed—that instinct and senti
ment remained in our people, and in the empty niche
of the Madonna, on the altar from which god and
goddess and crucifix had been successively swept,
there were now set up the only two visible images of
determined Protestantism—the Bible and the Sabbath.
There are some branches of the Church of England
which approximate to the Catholic Church enough to
preserve other symbols—exalting the sacrament, mag
nifying the cross, or the liturgy—and such care less tomake overmuch of the Sabbath, and respect saintly
tradition as much as the Bible. But when you find
�an out-and-out Evangelical, or a Calvinist, or a member
of a sect which has nothing symbolical about it, you
find one who will fight for the literal Bible and the
literal Sabbath, exactly as a barbarian fights for his
idol. They are his idols. They are to him precisely
what the Jugernath is to the devotee in India. The
Bible and the Sabbath are all he has left; and if you
were to really take from the average sectarian his
idolatry of those two visible objects, he would feel as
if he had nothing to lean upon at all. For this aver
age religionist has not a vivid interior life, he has not
the mystical sense cognisant of pure ideals, most
visible when the outward eye is closed. He needs to
have something he can see and handle, and feel
physically, or realise by physical effects.
There is not the least use in trying to argue with an
idolator. Nothing can be influenced by reasoning
which was not reached by any effort of reason. Real
thinkers, even in the sects themselves, have tried their
strength against this miserable Sabbath superstition,
Luther and Calvin, and George Fox, as well as the
most learned men of the English Church. But the
Sabbath stands like the Hindoo Temple described in
the curse of Kehdma :—
“ And on the sandy shore, beside the verge
Of ocean, here and there a rock-cut fane
Resisted in its strength the surf and surge
That on their deep foundation beat in vain.”
�40
Even so, deep-cut in the plutonic rock of human
ignorance, is this idol shrine, against which all our
protests, appeals, facts, and arguments will beat in
vain, until the ignorance itself shall be undermined and
crumble away.
There is no advantage, therefore, in pleading with
Sabbatarians. The more we groan the better they
feel, for it shows them that Jehovah is having his will
by crushing ours. But there is great reason that we
should appeal to the constituted rulers of England, in
the name of our religious liberty, against the claim of
Sabbatarians to oppress consciences that are not
Sabbatarian. The right of any individual to be him
self a simpleton seems inalienable. We do not deny,
though we may deplore, the claim of Sabbatarians to
pass their “ holy time ” in any depth of sanctimonious
stupor they like.
But they have no right to bind on
the altar of their ugly idol the life of other people.
That they are still able to do so is not due to any
Sabbatarianism in those who make our laws. There
is not one member of our Government or Parliament
who does not violate the Judaic Sabbath law every
week of his life. Nearly fifty years ago, William Lovett,
and several thousand working men with him, drew up a
petition to Parliament, declaring their conviction that
much of the drunkenness and crime in London is due
to the absence of proper resources for instruction and
�amusement on Sunday. Honest Joseph Hume pre
sented their petition and appealed to Parliament for
the opening of such resources. Since then the appeal
has been repeated by Sir Joshua Walmsley, Peter
Taylor and others, but steadily refused, even while
the principle has been conceded by the opening of
museums in Ireland, where Puritanism is not strong.
The last-named valiant member of Parliament has
now for some years moved that body to admit the
poor drudges of this metropolis to gain some know
ledge, to catch some gleam of light and beauty, on the
one day when they are released from toil, in our grand
national collections which they help to support but
never see—institutions which represent the secrets of
nature and ideality of poets and artists, the history of
man in his steady mastery of the earth by skill and
genius, the sacred story of heroes, saints, saviours of
humanity. But at last that member has declined to
renew his appeal, because, as he has stated to me, he
has ample evidence that while the majority of the
House are quite convinced that his motion is right,
and have no respect for Sabbatarianism, they yet vote
for it. The Puritan Sabbath can always roll up a
majority even in a House that applauds arguments
against it. The member referred to is naturally not
willing to go on convincing men already convinced.
But why then do these politicians vote against the
�42
relief of suffering non-Sabbatarians ? Why, because
they do not wish to be also victims of the Sabbath.
To the average Member of Parliament his seat there
is the immediate jewel of his soul. He would, no
doubt, like to have right on his side, but he must have
his borough. He knows perfectly well that if he
votes for opening museums and picture galleries to the
people, on the very next Sunday his constituency
will be listening to awful burdens against him from
all the reverend Chadbands and Stigginses and
Mawworms and Cantwells and Pecksniffs, whose com
bined power can defeat any man in England, as their
like defeated the great man in Jerusalem who broke
the Sabbath, and declared it subject to man, not man
to it. Nevertheless, we must not proceed upon the
opinion that the average Member of Parliament is so
much afraid of this power behind him, or so tenacious
of his seat, that he will carry it to the extent of sup
porting what he felt to be a very serious oppression.
All the honour and courage have not entirely gone
out of this nationality. Men will be found ready to
risk their seats when they have fully apprehended
the nature and extent of the wrong that is
suffered. Parliament consists mainly of wealthy
gentlemen, whose every earthly need is so com
pletely answered that they can only with difficulty
realise the wants of the poor. On Sunday they have
�their carriages to drive in, their right to visit botanical
and zoological gardens, their libraries, pictures, clubsand billiard-rooms. Their Sunday is free enough.
They turn it to repose or recreation as they may need,
In all their lives they have never had one day of
serious want, not one day of confinement in a miserable
lodging with no alternatives but the chill street or thegin-shop. In some way it must be brought before
these gentlemen, and kept before them— like the
widow’s plea in the parable before the judge, who waswearied out at last—that the lot of the masses whose
labour makes so much of their comfort is a mean and
miserable lot. They must be made to know that
there are millions who from the cradle to the grave,
toil—and toil—and toil, year in and year out, and
whose life is one long want. It must be impressed
upon them that a large part of the sorrow and heavi
ness of the poor man’s and poor woman’s fate is the
presence in them of mental and moral faculties and
possibilities which are a perpetual hunger without any
supply, which never rise to be real intellects and tastes
because they are kept by drudgery as seeds under the
sod, unquickened by any beam of light shining from
all the knowledge around them, unsunned by any ray
of beauty. Then they will comprehend that a fearful
system of human sacrifice is going on around them,
and they will not find their parliamentary seats easy
�44
if retained by any connivance with those sacrifices.
There is an Eastern fable of a throne luxuriously soft
to any monarch who sat upon it, until a wrong had
risen somewhere in his realm; then the throne became
so hard that no sovereign could sit upon it, until the
wrong was sought out and redressed; and there is
•conscience enough among our commoners to change
many a legislative seat to flint, when its holder shall
know that he maintains it only as a coward, through
the servility that dare not grapple with serious in
justice because it is in the majority.
Those are the men who must ultimately listen to
our cause and decide it rightfully. And our cause is
that the brain and heart, and even the work of the
poor, is suffering grievously because of the restrictions
placed by superstition upon that day of the week
which represents their all of opportunity for any high
enjoyment or improvement. The Sundays of life
represent one-seventh of every man’s time; but for
the drudges of the world it represents the whole of
their time. All the rest of life is not their time; it
belongs to their employer; it is mortgaged by physical
toil. What life is at their own disposal is counted by
.Sundays. If those free days are unimproved or
unhappy the whole life goes sunless to the grave.
What provision does this nation make, and wnat
■does it permit to be made, for the elevation, instruc
�tion, and happiness of those whose other days, asGeorge Herbert said, “trail on the ground,” on the
one day susceptible to nobler impressions ?
First it provides sermons.
Twenty thousand
churches are open this day for the people, and in
them are places for a limited number of the poor.
Well, let us forget how many dull sermons are
preached, how many gloomy, false, repulsive dogmas,,
how many threadbare superstitions, and how few work
ing people have any disposition to enter these assem
blies, or such dress as would let them feel comfortable
when there. Let us pass over all that. Admitting
that one hour and a half or two hours of the poor
man’s only leisure day may be so passed, what provision
is made for the remainder ?
Why, there are the parks in which he may walk.
But that is a very inadequate reply. Our English
weather renders the park attractive for but a small
part of the year. Much of the labour done is too
wearisome to render mere walking on Sunday any
delight to the workers. Nor is there anything in that
merely physical exercise which answers the real
demand, a demand not of the feet but of the head.
Well, there is the great provision that comes next
to the church, the public house. This great nation
has been appealed to by some of its noblest scholars
for permission to accompany the poor on Sunday
�46
■afternoons, when churches are closed, through the
national collections of art and science, to explain to
them the objects of interest, to interpret for them the
wonders of nature and unfold the splendours of art.
But thus far our rulers have replied, “ No, we will
deliver you to the publican, but never to Dr. Carpenter;
Ruskin shall not teach you the glory of Raphael’s
•cartoons, but you may gaze at pleasure on the interior
decorations of the gin-palace; you must not see the
grandeurs of art, nor the fine traceries of skill, nor the
antiquities of humanity, nor the wondrous forms and
•crystals of Nature, but do not complain : do we not
allow you limitless supplies of whiskey and beer?”
And just here, by the way, I remark a little sign of
hope. The Sabbatarians begin to perceive the scandal
that the beer-house should be kept open while the
museum is closed, and they begin to demand the
closing of the public-house also. They have carried
a. measure of that kind for Ireland, and I sincerely
hope they will manage to carry one for England. For
the day that sees the beer-house close will see the door
•of the museum start. The great ally of the Sabbatarian
has been the publican, and when that alliance is broken
our success will draw near. The parson drugs the
people’s brains with superstition, and the publican
drugs with beer those whom the parson cannot reach;
and the streams from church and tap-room blending
�47
together reinforce the Lord’s-day people, so that they
can always outnumber us. If the Sabbath were not
an idol it would long ago have recoiled from all this
part of its work.
It would have said, “ Open a
thousand museums rather than drive the poor to find
their only Sunday amusement, and spend the means
for which their wives and children suffer, in drink !”
But an idol may always be recognised by just this
fact: z? demands human sacrifices. It may not always
demand the cutting-up or burning of its victims; but,
if not that, it will demand the sacrifice of his intellect
or his affections, his happinesss or his welfare; in
some way a human body, or heart, or brain will be
found bound wherever an idol stands. And though
I cannot, in such brief space, enter into all the details
of the holocaust of human benefits offered up to the
Sabbath, I will affirm for myself that the more I have
considered the needs of this people, and the lost
opportunities of meeting them, the more have I felt
that there is now no cause worthier of a good man’s zeal
than the overthrew of this Sabbath oppression. It is
a wrong for which I have no toleration at all. I can
tolerate any man’s religious conviction about the
Sabbath or anything else ; but I cannot tolerate him
when he insists on binding his dogma upon others.
I will not tolerate his intolerance. This is no issue of
abstract opinion for theological fencing. It is no
�48
sentimental grievance.
The hunger of a million
famished souls is in it. It is a great heart-breaking
wrong, crushing lower and lower one class of society
at a time when other classes are rising higher daily.
And that the poor do not feel it to be so, are in boozy
contentment with their beer or their prayers and
demand nothing better, is only a proof of how fully
the oppression has done its miserable work.
Yet they use this as an argument against us ! They
cry, “The workmen do not want it; behold our
majority.” I answer, the majority is always wrong.
The majority crucified' Christ and poisoned Socrates.
Part of the masses you have deceived by the con
temptible fiction that their day of release from toil will
be endangered by that which would make it more
attractive and therefore more precious; and a larger
part you have so besotted with beer and ignorance
that they are pauperised in soul as well as body, and
hug their own chains. Theirs is not the real voice of
the people.
A true statesman will take the only
suffrage they are competent to cast from their degraded
foreheads and their brutalised forms and faces. The
gardener will not follow the will of the weeds, though
they report the soil he works in. At any rate a rational
man’s duty is clear. The authority of the Sabbath
rests upon what every intelligent mind knows to be
fiction; upon a deity who is said to have created the
�49
universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and
then ordered that anyone working on the seventh
should be stoned to death. That is a fiction. There
is no deity who did anything of that kind. We are told
this is the Lord’s day. We know that if that Lord be
other than a phantom every day is his day. J esus
said, 11 My Father works on the Sabbath and so will
I.” Rest is not stupor. It is well to change our
occupation occasionally, but never well to be idle.
There is no ground whatever for this superstition.
The day of rest originated no doubt in a human want,
afterwards invested with sanctity: but the sanctity
must be entirely removed if the day is to be changed
from a curse to a human benefit.
4
��51
THE MARTYRDOM OF REASON.
Reason is that supreme faculty of man by which he
is cognisant of principles apart from their applica
tions, of laws as distinct from particulars, of ideas as
separate from relations. It differs from the under
standing, which is concerned with those special appli
cations and relations, as a code of laws differs from
the various decisions of courts and judgments made
under that code. A man may reason rightly when his
understanding is in error. A Hindoo walking out saw
a large and dangerous cobra, as he supposed, across
his path, preparing to dart upon him ; it so overcame
his nerves that he fainted; the object proved to be a
piece of rope. The man had reasoned correctly; he
knew the nature of the cobra, and rightly inferred the
danger, but his judgment was in error. Now judg
ment is at the point of distinction between reason
and understanding. By origin it is an organ of rea
son, by result it is the agent of the understanding.
�52
When we consider our human faculties in this
abstract way, we find them perfectly harmonious.
They move in their appointed orbits, in constant rela
tion and interaction, but without collision or jar, their
very differences completing the harmony. Abstractedly
no mortal can conceive of a special judgment with no
general principles to guide it, and none can think of
ideas and laws as things inapplicable to the particulars
of nature and life.
And yet we find in all races and ages a wide-spread
suspicion of reason. Even at this day, and in nations
which are daily reaping and enjoying the fruits of
reason, we find vast numbers of people who have an
impression like that which Shakspere puts into the
mouth of Caesar, “ He thinks too much ; such men
are dangerous.” Still more general is the notion that
the man of ideas must be unpractical. It is easy to
perceive the origin of that notion; it is suggested in
the common saying, “That is well enough in theory,
but it won’t do in practice.” Of course the phrase is
a mistake ; it should be, “ That is wrong in theory, for
it won’t do in practicebut it discloses the fact that
there has been so much false reasoning in the world
that many have come to distrust reason itself.
And just here arises a misunderstanding and a
quarrel between the theorist and the practical man.
One says the error is in the theory, the other that it is
�53
in the application of it. Among educated people the
matter would be tested by experiment. Science, for
instance, has long affirmed that when salt water freezes
it loses its saltness; but the Arctic explorers melting
the sea-ice found it so briny that they could not drink
it. The result is, of course, a revision of theory by
experiments which will probably show that the salt
does not remain strictly in the ice, but between its
crystals, that the theory is not wrong but requires more
careful statemeht to include the practical fact. In this
way the old feud between theory and practice has
entirely ceased from the domain of science.
• But it is in religion that we find the distrust of rea
son most intense and familiar.
On that distrust
Christianity is founded. Christ appealed to reason;
but Christianity has very little to do with him ; it re
lapses into barbaric ages and finds its corner-stone in
a fable that the first effort of intellect led to the cor
ruption of the whole human race. It said that when
God made man and woman he put them into a para
dise for enjoyments sensual and sensuous. The one
thing he was opposed to was knowledge. So resolute
was the Creator on that point, that he did not hesitate
to accompany his prohibition of that one fruit with a
deception. He told them that on the very day they
should eat of the tree of Knowledge they would die.
The serpent persuaded the woman that this was a
�54
fiction, as it proved to be. The truthful serpent also
said, “ Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,”
and no sooner was the fruit eaten than Jehovah,
making no mention of what he had said about their
dying, acknowledged the veracity of the serpent.
“ Behold,” he said, “ the man is become as one of us
(gods) to know good and evil.” Then, lest the gods
should have no advantage at all, and man should eat
of another fruit and become immortal, the first pair
were expelled from Paradise. This fable, which re
presents the first priestly scream against education,
shows us a deity cursing knowledge and a demon en
couraging it; it shows a deity trying to delude man to
remain in ignorance, while the demon speaks the
truth, and secures the birth of intelligence for man and
woman, where Jehovah meant them to live only the
life of the senses. On that fable the whole Plan of
Salvation is founded. The knowledge gained that day
brought on mankind the curse of total depravity, and
doom of eternal torture. To avert that the Son of
God became incarnate on earth and suffered in a few
years all the agonies which the whole human race
would have suffered if every man, -woman and child
that ever lived were damned to all eternity. All of
this is meaningless, and the whole theology of Chris
tendom mere chaff, except to avert the wrath and undo
the curse which fell from a deity jealous of the attain
�55
ments of his own creature, upon man, because of his
first endeavour to gain knowledge.
Fortunately, while that is the theology it is not the
religion, and still less the morality of this country. It
is a sublime example of the kind of theory which does
not do in practice. Nevertheless we must not under
rate the results of the long pressure of instructions like
these upon every human being through a period of
sixteen hundred years. Even now, in the most en
lightened nations, the money devoted to teach that
theology is counted by millions where the money
devoted to pure knowledge is counted by tens. And
we need not wonder that the spirit of that old curse
on knowledge still survives to haunt every seeker of it
for its own sake. It is still strong enough to cast a
certain odium on the tasks of reason. To the popular
mind there is something uncanny about the rationalist,
which means a reasoner, and the sceptic—literally, he
who considers a thing—has still an evil name. Thou
sands who shout for every other kind of freedom will
cry down freethought. They will mourn over an en
slaved African thousands of miles away, but have no
tears to shed for fettered minds at their own door.
Nay, even among those liberated from the old
theology, how much suspicion of reason do we en
counter ! How often do we hear such speak of science
as cold, and of the intellect as inferior to something
�56
they call faith or intuition ! They who have no doubts
about reason are still comparatively few. And yet our
age is full of the grandest facts and illustrations, proving
that it is among the devotees of reason and science
that the divinest life and fire of our age is manifest. I
have just been reading a history, written by the leading
rationalist minister in America, of what is called “ the
transcendental movement” in that country.
*
And it
is well called a “movement ;” for the chief impres
siveness of it lies in the fact that what had been mainly
a speculative philosophy in Europe, there, among one
of the most shrewd and practical nations of the world,
blazed out into a movement, a noble enthusiasm for
humanity, a passionate religion which kindled the hearts
of young men and women, and made them Reformers,
Apostles, Martyrs, who gave up all their goods for the
poor, who brought glad tidings to woman and lifted the
heaviest burthens of her life, and who broke off the
bonds of the slave. There was not an orthodox man
or woman among them. They were rationalists. The
Bible they studied was Kant’s “ Critique of Pure
Reason,” Goethe’s Works, Carlyle’s Essays, Cousin’s
Philosophy: the ideas of Europe became ideals in
America, rose up like pillars of flame; they became a
* Transcendentalism in New England. A History. By Octavius
Brooks Frothingham. New York : E. P. Putman & Sons, 1876.
�57
gospel in the genius of Emerson, the mind of Parker,
and the heart of Margaret Fuller, and under its charm
humble people formed themselves in communities,
ceasing to care for worldly wealth and honours. There
is no type of character that is beautiful in the past
which did not reappear. St. Francis d’ Assisi, Fenelon,
Madame Guion, Berkeley, Sydney, they all had true
counterparts in the piety, devotion, virtue, and genius,
which characterised that movement. This is the
hundredth birth-year of America as a nation; they
who established its independence in the name of
humanity were free-thinkers—Washington, Jefferson,
Adams, Franklin, Thomas Paine—and they broke for
ever the power of a priesthood in the State. And now
remark, in that country where conscience is free, a
hundred years has witnessed but one great religious
movement—but one which corresponds with the
movements under George Fox, and Wesley and Whit
field in this country—but one which exhibited power
to command the passions, conquer selfishness, and
trace itself in practical reforms and a new Church
and that one was a movement born of pure reason.
Such has ever been the work of reason where it has
been set free. And yet there are eloquent men, like
Pere Hyacinthe, who are going about imploring the
priests and prelates of Europe to make a holy alliance
of Anglican, Greek, and Gallican Churches against
�58
this terrible monster—Rationalism. I rejoice to hear
they think there is need of a new league. It is a valu
able testimony to the stream of tendency that makes
for truth. But we must not allow the good father’s
confession, that many people are not only, like him
self, denying that two and two make five, but even
running into the excess of denying that two and two
make three—a radicalism he so much deplores—we
must not allow that to make us over-confident. We
must still face the fact that Reason is a sacrifice and a
martyr amid the great institutions around us.
What is the history of nearly every child born
in this country? The few who are brought up by
rational methods, and taught to cultivate and obey
reason as their highest guide, are hardly notice
able as to numbers.
A large proportion are
neglected, so far as Christian fables are concerned,
but they are victims of popular superstitions, believe
in ghosts and goblins, fortune-telling and the evil eye,
their minds overgrown with rank weeds. The ave
rage Christian child is taught superstition above every
thing else ! Other and true things may be taught, but
they spring up only amid those briars which choke
each other growth before it can bear its fruit. Car
dinal, and bishop, and cabinet, alike agree that no
seed of wheat shall be sown in any mind without a
tare of fable or dogma beside it. Of what use is
�59
geology if one believes that Jehovah created the
universe in six days ? What is the use of any science
to a mind which believes that the laws of nature are
arbitrary, have often been suspended, and may be
changed and altered by the breath of a mortal’s peti
tion ? There can be no reason cultivated where the
law of cause and effect is disregarded. To believe in
the connection of things that have no connection—for
instance, that a man’s word can raise the dead to
life—is to strangle reason. To believe in an effect
without adequate cause—for instance, that the
world stopped revolving that a captain might have
more daylight to fight by—vastates the mind. To
believe in anything whatever for which there is no
evidence, or insufficient evidence, is superstition; and
the essence of superstition is that reason is dethroned
and a mere compulsion of habit, fear, or self-interest
set up in its place to direct the life.
Well, the ordinary studies of the average Christian
child having thus been prevented from developing his
reasoning powers in the direction of religion, he is
completely subjected to the powerful stimulants of
those preternatural fears and hopes which make the
ordinary sanctions of what is called religion, but
really is selfishness. He is warned to avoid certain
things, and do others, because he will go to hell if
he doesn't comply, but will enjoy eternal bliss if he
�6o
does,—motives of calculating self-interest, which it is
the very mission of Reason to restrain and to remand
for the work of mere physical self-preservation.
While we despise the man who loves and serves a
wife or a friend from such base calculations of interest,
children are taught to love God and serve him for
fear of punishment and hope of reward.
But let us follow the growth of the child thus in
structed. The time comes when he must enter into
life. Physical cares, business, the healthy work of
the world claim him. Amid them he is pretty sure to
discover that the theology he has been taught is not
confirmed by experience. Then, haply, he may be
able to assert the rights of his own reason. But, sup
posing he does not, one of several other results will
follow, i. He may believe that the doctrines he has
been taught must have a formal homage as divine
mysteries which he is not expected to understand, but
only blindly to obey. 2. He may become a hypocrite.
3. He may become utterly indifferent to the whole
thing, and utterly reckless. In either case his sacred
reason has been sacrificed.
But do we fully appreciate the tragedy which has
thus happened ? Do we fully realise that even when
men and women do not become either hypocrites or
reckless, they are almost certain, as things now stand,
to reach some day the appalling discovery that they
�6i
have wasted the best years of their life on a sham and
a fraud ?
In the twenty-five years during which I have been
in a position to receive the confidences of those who
were struggling amid doubts, and in the pangs of
transition, the chief agonies I have witnessed have
been those whose awakening came too late for oppor
tunities to be recovered. Youth is gone, enthusiasm
has gone, the time for study and devotion for ever
passed away, and the collective force of all the light
around them enters at last only to bring the bitter
consciousness that the glory of life has been cast away
upon the barren deserts of delusion.
These are the martyrs whom every devotee of
reason should see around him. There is no sorrow
equal to theirs. No doubt rationalism may bring
with it many trials so far as the world is concerned.
There may be separations, friendships clouded, affec
tions wounded ; for superstition can turn hearts to
stone even against their own blood where its autho
rity is denied. There may be intellectual doubts,
too, not to be satisfied, some loved legends vanish
ing, and some pretty dreams made dim along with the
nightmares escaped. But amid all these there is
nothing half so terrible as the fate of those who have
no alternatives but either to slay their reason
.altogether, or to admit its testimony only to find
that the whole life has been a gigantic mistake.
�62
Therefore it is the high duty of every human being
to maintain openly and valiantly the verdict of his
own faculties. Unfortunately the guardians of the
young are so eager to teach them how to say
prayers, and keep sanctimonious on Sunday, and to
refrain from kneeling down to graven images, that few
have ears to hear the great decalogue announced in
their own time. The first of the new commandments
is this,—Seek truth ! and the second is like unto it,
Live the Truth in thought, word, and deed 1 So little
has the virtue of self-truthfulness been taught, that we
often meet people who actually make a merit of con
cealing their convictions, especially if they think they
are thereby saving somebody’s feelings. There is a
great deal of selfishness, as well as sentiment, sheltered
under Paul’s dangerous maxim about being all things
to all men, and a great deal of Jesuitism hides itself
under Christ’s admonition against casting pearls before
swine, which is true only if read by the light of his
own martyrdom for speaking the truth. As a rule the
men and women you meet are not swine, and you
need not fear to offer them—it is cruel to refuse them
—your pearls of truth and sincerity. Many of them,
indeed, are going about silently seeking those very
pearls. No doubt there are times for reserve, no doubt
there are rocks of prejudice and ignorance which have
to be slowly pulverised into a soil before any seed can
�63
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be sown in them. But no one will ever lack wisdom
for all occasions who is animated purely by that love
which is not seeking his own, nor vaunting himself,
but seeking only to advance Truth. Reason supplies
an instinct adequate to all emergencies. Remember
again what reason is, and the ground of its supremacy I
Remember now and always, that its very soul is dis
interestedness. It is the clear vision of the mind as
it rises above all the considerations of self-interest, pre
judice, conventionality, passion, which would lower and
discolour its pure light. Reason is to see things as
they are, and not as majorities or institutions say they
are, or wish them to be. And it is just as much as a
mind can do to keep that holy lamp burning steadily
through life in a world where the most powerful threats
and bribes are continually used to sway and pervert
the judgment. In legal affairs no judge is allowed to
decide a case involving his own interest; a heavy
punishment follows any attempt to bribe judge or jury
man. So we can get just verdicts. But how are
we to get just verdicts on religious questions,
when untold millions and all social advantages
are set apart by Church and State to influence every
mind in favour of creeds and dogmas, as against pure
reason? We can hope for a true verdict only from
those who have ascended above such considerations,
and surrender themselves wholly to the guidance of
reason and right.
�64
When the poet Heine was in Paris, poor, sick,
wretched, he renounced his rationalism. His friends
in Germany heaped scorn upon him. Heine then
wrote :—“ They say Heine has changed and become
a reactionist. Ah, well, lately I went to the Louvre,
and knelt before our lady of Milo. Many tears did I
shed as I gazed upon her beautiful form and face, but
I rose and left her, for she had no arms. She had no
arms, and I was poor and needy.” So he turned to
our lady of the Church, for she had arms and hands,
all full of rich gifts to reward any poet for singing her
praises.
We cannot help feeling compassion for those who
yield to rich and powerful superstition the homage
which is due to reason alone: but the standard cannot
be lowered, whoever may go away sorrowful. He
alone is a true man who stands firm to the mandate of
the Sinai within him, and sees that whatever may
bend or break, it shall not be his fidelity to truth.
��
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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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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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
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Title
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Human sacrifices in England : four discourses
Creator
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Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907 [1832-1907]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 64 p. ; 16 cm.
Notes: Contents: I. Human sacrifices -- 2. The daughters of Jephthah -- 3. Children and their Moloch -- 4. The Sabbath-Jugernath -- 5. The martyrdom of reason. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Trübner and Co.
Date
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1876
Identifier
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N178
G3343
Subject
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Religion
Rationalism
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Human sacrifices in England : four discourses), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Child Rearing-Moral and Ethical Aspects
Children
Children's Rights
Education
Morris Tracts
NSS
Rationalism
Reason
Religion and Civil Society
Sabbath
Social Justice
Women-Religious Aspects-Christianity
Women's Rights