Part 27 (1/2)
Sadly we look around us, and read the gloomy and dreary records of the old dead and rotten ages. More than eighteen centuries have staggered away into the spectral realm of the Past, since Christ, teaching the Religion of Love, was crucified, that it might become a Religion of Hate; and His Doctrines are not yet even nominally accepted as true by a fourth of mankind. Since His death, what incalculable swarms of human beings have lived and died in total unbelief of all that we deem essential to Salvation! What mult.i.tudinous myriads of souls, since the darkness of idolatrous superst.i.tion settled down, thick and impenetrable, upon the earth, have flocked up toward the eternal Throne of G.o.d, to receive His judgment?
The Religion of Love proved to be, for seventeen long centuries, as much the Religion of Hate, and infinitely more the Religion of Persecution, than Mahometanism, its unconquerable rival. Heresies grew up before the Apostles died; and G.o.d hated the Nicolaitans, while John, at Patmos, proclaimed His coming wrath. Sects wrangled, and each, as it gained the power, persecuted the other, until the soil of the whole Christian world was watered with the blood, and fattened on the flesh, and whitened with the bones, of martyrs, and human ingenuity was taxed to its utmost to invent new modes by which tortures and agonies could be prolonged and made more exquisite.
”By what right” whispers the Voice, ”does this savage, merciless, persecuting animal, to which the sufferings and writhings of others of its wretched kind furnish the most pleasurable sensations, and the ma.s.s of which care only to eat, sleep, be clothed, and wallow in sensual pleasures, and the best of which wrangle, hate, envy, and, with few exceptions, regard their own interests alone,--with what right does it endeavor to delude itself into the conviction that it is _not_ an animal, as the wolf, the hyena, and the tiger are, but a somewhat n.o.bler, a spirit destined to be immortal, a spark of the essential Light, Fire and Reason, which are G.o.d? What other immortality than one of selfishness could this creature enjoy? Of what other is it capable?
Must not immortality commence _here_ and is not _life_ a part of it? How shall death change the base nature of the base soul? Why have not those other animals that only faintly imitate the wanton, savage, human cruelty and thirst for blood, the same right as man has, to expect a resurrection and an Eternity of existence, or a Heaven of Love?”
_The world improves_. Man ceases to persecute,--when the persecuted become too numerous and strong, longer to submit to it. That source of pleasure closed, men exercise the ingenuities of their cruelty on the animals and other living things below them. To deprive other creatures of the life which G.o.d gave them, and this not only that we may eat their flesh for food, but out of mere savage wantonness, is the agreeable employment and amus.e.m.e.nt of man, who prides himself on being the Lord of Creation, and a little lower than the Angels. If he can no longer use the rack, the gibbet, the pincers, and the stake, he can hate, and slander, and delight in the thought that he will, hereafter, luxuriously enjoying the sensual beat.i.tudes of Heaven, see with pleasure the writhing agonies of those justly d.a.m.ned for daring to hold opinions contrary to his own, upon subjects totally beyond the comprehension both of them and him.
Where the armies of the despots cease to slay and ravage, the armies of ”Freedom” take their place, and, the black and white commingled, slaughter and burn and ravish. Each age re-enacts the crimes as well as the follies of its predecessors, and still war licenses outrage and turns fruitful lands into deserts, and G.o.d is thanked in the Churches for b.l.o.o.d.y butcheries, and the remorseless devastators, even when swollen by plunder, are crowned with laurels and receive ovations.
Of the whole of mankind, not one in ten thousand has any aspirations beyond the daily needs of the gross animal life. In this age and in all others, all men except a few, in most countries, are born to be mere beasts of burden, co-laborers with the horse and the ox. Profoundly ignorant, even in ”civilized” lands, they think and reason like the animals by the side of which they toil. For them, G.o.d, Soul, Spirit, Immortality, are mere words, without any real meaning. The G.o.d of nineteen-twentieths of the Christian world is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus, or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adona, under another name, wors.h.i.+pped with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic formulas. It is the Statue of Olympian Jove, wors.h.i.+pped as the Father, in the Christian Church that was a Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become the Virgin Mary.
For the most part, men do not in their hearts believe that G.o.d is either just or merciful. They fear and shrink from His lightnings and dread His wrath. For the most part, they only _think_ they believe that there is another life, a judgment, and a punishment for sin. Yet they will none the less persecute as Infidels and Atheists those who do not believe what they themselves imagine they believe, and which yet they do _not_ believe, because it is incomprehensible to them in their ignorance and want of intellect. To the vast majority of mankind, G.o.d is but the reflected image, in infinite s.p.a.ce, of the earthly Tyrant on his Throne, only more powerful, more inscrutable, and more implacable. To curse Humanity, the Despot need only _be_, what the popular mind has, in every age, imagined G.o.d.
In the great cities, the lower strata of the populace are equally without faith and without hope. The others have, for the most part, a mere blind faith, imposed by education and circ.u.mstances, and not as productive of moral excellence or even common honesty as Mohammedanism.
”_Your property will be safe here_,” said the Moslem; ”_There are no Christians here_.” The philosophical and scientific world becomes daily more and more unbelieving. Faith and Reason are not opposites, in equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile to each other; the result being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed, or half-veiled as rationalism.
Over more than three-fourths of the habitable globe, humanity still kneels, like the camels, to take upon itself the burthens to be tamely borne for its tyrants. If a Republic occasionally rises like a Star, it hastens with all speed to set in blood. The kings need not make war upon it, to crush it out of their way. It is only necessary to let it alone, and it soon lays violent hands upon itself. And when a people long enslaved shake off its fetters, it may well be incredulously asked,
Shall the braggart shout For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself, Through madness, hated by the wise, to law, System and Empire?
Everywhere in the world labor is, in some shape, the slave of capital; generally, a slave to be fed only so long as he can work; or, rather, only so long as his work is profitable to the owner of the human chattel. There are famines in Ireland, strikes and starvation in England, pauperism and tenement-dens in New York, misery, squalor, ignorance, dest.i.tution, the brutality of vice and the insensibility to shame, of despairing beggary, in all the human cesspools and sewers everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman famishes and freezes; there, mothers murder their children, that those spared may live upon the bread purchased with the burial allowances of the dead starveling; and at the next door young girls prost.i.tute themselves for food.
Moreover, the Voice says, this besotted race is not satisfied with seeing its mult.i.tudes swept away by the great epidemics whose causes are unknown, and of the justice or wisdom of which the human mind cannot conceive. It must also be ever at war. There has not been a moment since men divided into Tribes, when all the world was at peace. Always men have been engaged in murdering each other somewhere. Always the armies have lived by the toil of the husbandman, and war has exhausted the resources, wasted the energies, and ended the prosperity of Nations. Now it loads unborn posterity with crus.h.i.+ng debt, mortgages all estates, and brings upon States the shame and infamy of dishonest repudiation.
At times, the baleful fires of war light up half a Continent at once; as when all the Thrones unite to compel a people to receive again a hated and detestable dynasty, or States deny States the right to dissolve an irksome union and create for themselves a separate government. Then again the flames flicker and die away, and the fire smoulders in its ashes, to break out again, after a time, with renewed and a more concentrated fury. At times, the storm, revolving, howls over small areas only; at times its lights are seen, like the old beacon-fires on the hills, belting the whole globe. No sea, but hears the roar of cannon; no river, but runs red with blood; no plain, but shakes, trampled by the hoofs of charging squadrons; no field, but is fertilized by the blood of the dead; and everywhere man slays, the vulture gorges, and the wolf howls in the ear of the dying soldier. No city is not tortured by shot and sh.e.l.l; and no people fail to enact the horrid blasphemy of thanking a G.o.d of Love for victories and carnage. Te Deums are still sung for the Eve of St. Bartholomew and the Sicilian Vespers.
Man's ingenuity is racked, and all his inventive powers are tasked, to fabricate the infernal enginery of destruction, by which human bodies may be the more expeditiously and effectually crushed, shattered, torn, and mangled; and yet hypocritical[1] Humanity, drunk with blood and drenched with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to gratify a revenge not more unchristian, or to satisfy a cupidity not more ign.o.ble, than those which are the promptings of the Devil in the souls of Nations.
When we have fondly dreamed of Utopia and the Millennium, when we have begun almost to believe that man is _not_, after all, a tiger half tamed, and that the smell of blood will not wake the savage within him, we are of a sudden startled from the delusive dream, to find the thin mask of civilization rent in twain and thrown contemptuously away. We lie down to sleep, like the peasant on the lava-slopes of Vesuvius. The mountain has been so long inert, that we believe its fires extinguished.
Round us hang the cl.u.s.tering grapes, and the green leaves of the olive tremble in the soft night-air over us. Above us s.h.i.+ne the peaceful, patient stars. The crash of a new eruption wakes us, the roar of the subterranean thunders, the stabs of the volcanic lightning into the shrouded bosom of the sky; and we see, aghast, the tortured t.i.tan hurling up its fires among the pale stars, its great tree of smoke and cloud, the red torrents pouring down its sides. The roar and the shriekings of Civil War are all around us: the land is a pandemonium: man is again a Savage. The great armies roll along their hideous waves, and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood shrieks in vain to l.u.s.t for mercy. Laws, Courts, Const.i.tutions, Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. G.o.d seems to have abdicated, and Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at universal murder, and urge the extermination of the Conquered, by the sword and the flaming torch; and to plunder and murder ent.i.tles the human beasts of prey to the thanks of Christian Senates.
Commercial greed deadens the nerves of sympathy of Nations, and makes them deaf to the demands of honor, the impulses of generosity, the appeals of those who suffer under injustice. Elsewhere, the universal pursuit of wealth dethrones G.o.d and pays divine honors to Mammon and Baalzebub. Selfishness rules supreme: to win wealth becomes the whole business of life. The villanies of legalized gaming and speculation become epidemic; treachery is but evidence of shrewdness; office becomes the prey of successful faction; the Country, like Actaeon, is torn by its own hounds, and the villains it has carefully educated to their trade, most greedily plunder it, when it is _in extremis_.
By what right, the Voice demands, does a creature always engaged in the work of mutual robbery and slaughter, and who makes his own interest his G.o.d, claim to be of a nature superior to the savage beasts of which he is the prototype?
Then the shadows of a horrible doubt fall upon the soul that would fain love, trust and believe; a darkness, of which this that surrounded you was a symbol. It doubts the truth of Revelation, its own spirituality, the very existence of a beneficent G.o.d. It asks itself if it is not idle to hope for any great progress of Humanity toward perfection, and whether, when it advances in one respect, it does not retrogress in some other, by way of compensation: whether advance in civilization is not increase of selfishness: whether freedom does not necessarily lead to license and anarchy: whether the dest.i.tution and debas.e.m.e.nt of the ma.s.ses does not inevitably follow increase of population and commercial and manufacturing prosperity. It asks itself whether man is not the sport of a blind, merciless Fate: whether all philosophies are not delusions, and all religions the fantastic creations of human vanity and self-conceit; and, above all, whether, when Reason is abandoned as a guide, the faith of Buddhist and Brahmin has not the same claims to sovereignty and implicit, unreasoning credence, as any other.
He asks himself whether it is not, after all, the evident and palpable injustices of this life, the success and prosperity of the Bad, the calamities, oppressions, and miseries of the Good, that are the bases of all beliefs in a future state of existence? Doubting man's capacity for indefinite progress here, he doubts the possibility of it anywhere; and if he does not doubt whether G.o.d exists, and is just and beneficent, he at least cannot silence the constantly recurring whisper, that the miseries and calamities of men, their lives and deaths, their pains and sorrows, their extermination by war and epidemics, are phenomena of no higher dignity, significance, and importance, in the eye of G.o.d, than what things of the same nature occur to other organisms of matter; and that the fish of the ancient seas, destroyed by myriads to make room for other species, the contorted shapes in which they are found as fossils testifying to their agonies; the coral insects, the animals and birds and vermin slain by man, have as much right as he to clamor at the injustice of the dispensations of G.o.d, and to demand an immortality of life in a new universe, as compensation for their pains and sufferings and untimely death in this world.
This is not a picture painted by the imagination. Many a thoughtful mind has so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our own faith is so well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt, who ruminate in patient contenment like the kine, or doze under the opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow which is the absence of the Divine Light.
To explain to themselves the existence of Evil and Suffering, the Ancient Persians imagined that there were two Principles or Deities in the Universe, the one of Good and the other of Evil, constantly in conflict with each other in struggle for the mastery, and alternately overcoming and overcome. Over both, for the SAGES, was the One Supreme; and for _them_ Light was in the end to prevail over Darkness, the Good over the Evil, and even Ahriman and his Demons to part with their wicked and vicious natures and share the universal Salvation. It did not occur to them that the existence of the Evil Principle, by the consent of the Omnipotent Supreme, presented the same difficulty, and left the existence of Evil as unexplained as before. The human mind is always content, if it can remove a difficulty a step further off. It cannot believe that the world rests on nothing, but is devoutly content when taught that it is borne on the back of an immense elephant, who himself stands on the back of a tortoise. Given the tortoise, Faith is always satisfied; and it has been a great source of happiness to mult.i.tudes that they could believe in a Devil who could relieve G.o.d of the odium of being the Author of Sin.
But not to all is Faith sufficient to overcome this great difficulty.
They say, with the Suppliant,_”Lord! I believe!”_--but like him they are constrained to add,_”Help Thou my unbelief!”_--Reason must, for these, co-operate and coincide with Faith, or they remain still in the darkness of doubt,--most miserable of all conditions of the human mind.
Those, only, who care for nothing beyond the interests and pursuits of this life, are uninterested in these great Problems. The animals, also, do not consider them. It is the characteristic of an immortal Soul, that it should seek to satisfy itself of its immortality, and to understand this great enigma, the Universe, If the Hottentot and the Papuan are not troubled and tortured by these doubts and speculations, they are not, for that, to be regarded as either wise or fortunate. The swine, also, are indifferent to the great riddles of the Universe, and are happy in being wholly unaware that it is the vast Revelation and Manifestation, in Time and s.p.a.ce, of a Single Thought of the Infinite G.o.d.
Exalt and magnify Faith as we will, and say that it begins where Reason ends, it must, after all, have a foundation, either in Reason, a.n.a.logy, the Consciousness, or human testimony. The wors.h.i.+pper of Brahma also has implicit Faith in what seems to us palpably false and absurd. His faith rests neither in Reason, a.n.a.logy, or the Consciousness, but on the testimony of his Spiritual teachers, and of the Holy Books. The Moslem also believes, on the positive testimony of the Prophet; and the Mormon also can say, _”I believe this, because it is impossible.”_ No faith, however absurd or degrading, has ever wanted these foundations, testimony, and the books. Miracles, proven by unimpeachable testimony have been used as a foundation for Faith, in every age; and the modern miracles are better authenticated, a hundred times, than the ancient ones.