^be ©pen Court
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
S>et>ote& to tbe Science of IReltaf on, tbe IRelfaf on of Science, an& tbe Bitension of tbe IRelfoious parliament f C)ea
Founded by Edward C. Hegeles
Vol. XXXTX (No. 4) APRIL, 1925 (No. 827)
CONTENTS
PAGE
Frontispiece. An Act of Faith — Burning the Talmud.
The Burnings of the Talmud. Dudley Wright 193
Telepathy — Science and Mysticism. Victor S. Yarros 218
Alan's War with the Universe. Hardin T. McClelland 223
The Herald of Emancipation. Charles Kassel 230
Science and the End (Conduded) . J. K. Snowden 243
The Caliph's Dream (Poem) . T. G. LaMoille 255
Immortal (Poem) . Robert Louis Burgess 256
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A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
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Vol. XXXIX (No. 4) April, 1925 (No. 827)
Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Company, 1925 THE BURNINGS OF THE TALMUD
BY DUDLEY WRIGHT
\^OLUAIES have been written upon the subject of the general ' persecutions of the Jews throughout the ages, but no attempt has hitherto been made to sum up the evidence concerning the perse- cutions of the Tahnud and Tahnudists, in particular. As a matter of fact. Talmudic persecutions were anterior to its compilation and completion as a book as well as afterwards. There were many at- tempts to destroy Talmudic teaching before even the codification was begun. The first attempt appears to date from immediately after the conclusion of the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, who died 164 B. C, when the high priesthood passed from the descendants of Zadok to other families, finally passing into the possession of the ]\Iaccabees. Antiochus had essayed to destroy the national faith and to this end had constituted Jerusalem a Greek colony, ordering all the sacred books to be surrendered and making the possession of a sacred book or the performance of the rite of circumcision a capital ofl:ence. Then the sect of the Sadducees came into existence and they joined forces with the Samaritans, and jointly they gave their support to Antiochus Epiphanes. After Jesus broke with the Pharisees and their prac- tices, in public, his disciples, it has been suggested, ranged them- selves along with the Sadduccees and Boethusians in opposition to the Talmudists, because the Talmud (then unwritten) laid more stress on external ceremonies then they deemed necessary.
For a time success seemed to favor the anti-Talmudists until the period of Simon ben Shetah, a Pharisee and president of the San- hedrin, which, except for himself, consisted solely of Sadducees, whom, however, he succeeded in expelling and replacing with Phari- sees. Simon recalled Joshua ben Peraliyah, formerly president of the college, who had found refuge from persecution in Alexandria, reinstated him as college president, and himself became vice-presi-
194 THE OPEN COURT
dent. Thus there began a revival of Talmudic studies, which spread beyond the boundaries of Palestine and Egypt into all the countries whither the Jews had dispersed. Simon not only restored the Phari- saical svstem, but he established schools where both the Torah and the Oral Law were taught, thus well meriting the title of "Restorer of the Law" given him by the acclamation of the Jewish people. After the triumph of Simon ben Shetah over the Sadducees the development of the Talmud progressed rapidly and from all parts of the world people came to Palestine to learn the doctrines and mor- ality of the Talmud.
Hadrian ( 117 — 138 C. E.), on his accession to the throne, did not remain content with sacrificing the sages of the Talmud, but also directed his energies to the destruction of the Talmud itself, by decreeing that if any Rabbi should confer the Rabbinical diploma upon another, both should be put to death and that the place where they had studied and taught should also be destroyed. R. Judah ben Baba, warned of the decree, betook himself to a place between two great mountains, where he licensed six of the oldest of R. Akiba's disciples as Rabbis, or teachers of the Talmud. He then offered his body to satiate the vengeance of the Romans, who pierced it with three hundred iron lances. The newly-ordained Rabbis were en- abled to escape and under their influence there was another revival in Talmudic study. Some joined R. Simon the Nasi in Shrephem and others founded colleges, of which they became the principals. Through their industry and influence the Talmud regained its former power and one of them. R. Ilai, became the tutor of R. Judah ha Nasi, the compiler of the Mishnah. Hadrian also forbade circum- cision, the reading of the Law, and the observance of the Sabbath.
Antoninus Pius, who ascended the throne in 138 and reigned until 161 C. E., renewed the decree of Hadrian, and it was only after long persuasion and at great risk of life that R. Simon ben Gamaliel, Nasi of Jamnia, induced R. Simon ben Jochai and R. Jose to accom- pany him to Rome to petition the king to repeal the decree. Yet even during that stormy period, in every place where Jews dwelt there was to be found a house of learning for the study of the Talmud.
In 261 C. E., Papa bar Nazor led the army which destroyed Nehardea, when it ceased to be the principal focus of Jewish life, although its academy still continued in existence. Many Rabbis escaped to Pumbeditha, which city became the seat, for a thousand years, of the most celebrated Jewish college after Sura.
THE BURNIXGS OF THE TALMUD 195
In consequence of the persecution and the banishment of several religious teachers under the emperors Constantin and Constantinus, the Palestinian academies decayed entirely. Constantine I. (Flavius A'alerius Aurelius Constantinus, 274-337 C. E.) succeeded his father Constantinus Chlorus in 306 C. E. He adopted a hostile policy towards the Jews and, in 329, the death penalty was ordained for one who embraced the Jewish faith, as well as for Jews versed in the Law who aided them.
Thus it will be seen that Talmudic persecutions began really when the Talmud was known only orally, when it was taught by the sages and considered, discussed, and analyzed by their pupils and students. Rut no sooner was the Babylonian Talmud completed and the Sab- urites had placed their seal upon it, declaring that nothing was to be added to it or subtracted from it. than Justinian, on 13th Febru- ary, 553 C. E., decreed capital punishment to all communities in the Byzantine who should fail to use a Greek or Latin translation of the Bible in their Sabbath services. He also forbade the traditional Jewish interpretation and illustration of the Old Testament, which, in manv points, was naturally opposed to the Christian interpreta- tion. This was tantamount to an absolute prohibition of the study of the Talmud. The Palestinian Talmud, more ancient than the Babylonian, had previously suffered from a like decree. Justinian's aim, of course, was to curb or repress the Haggadic or Rabbinical exposition of the Scriptures, which would prevent the Jews from accepting the Christological interpretation. Whilst the Babylonian Talmud was known and studied as far as Chorasan and India in the East, and as far as the end of the ancient world in the West, its companion remained for a long time unknown outside its birthplace, and whilst the former had commentators who explained and ex- pounded it thoroughly, the latter was for a long time neglected. It is noteworthy that Jewish scholars and authorities were among the earliest to prohibit the reading of those works which had not re- ceived the mark of their approbation. In the tenth chapter of the Mishn-ah Sanhedrin, R. Akiba forbids the reading of non-canonical writings by declaring that whoever did so would not have a share in the future life.
The Canon of the Talmud was closed in a season of opulence and repose, but the scene speedily changed. Gloomy and dark days were followed by a storm of persecution from the Persian kings, whose terrible onslaughts almost paralyzed the activities of the acad- emies at Sura and Pumbeditha. Yesdegerd II. instituted a persecu-
196 THE OPEN COURT
tion of the Jews which transcended in cruelty all they had hitherto experienced, forbidding even the observance of the Sabbath, but which, nevertheless, was forerunner of still more severe sufferings. Firuz, "the tyrant," continued the persecutions on a larger scale. In 468 C. E., the Jews in Persia underwent a year of suffering which in the Talmud is called "the year of the destruction of the world." From that year until 474 C. E., the study of the Law was prohibited. Then, amid other evils, Mazdak introduced the doctrine of commun- ity, both of property and wives, to which resistance was led by Mar Zutra IL, son of R. Chuna. The Talmudical colleges at Sura and Pumbeditha were closed and many teachers fled to Firuzshabas, where, under an Arabian governor, they were less exposed to espion- age. New colleges arose there, among which that of Mair was emi- nent, and there the devout Jews continued their Talmudic studies. When Bubrum Tshrubin, assisted by the Jews, usurped the Persian throne, the colleges of Sura and Pumbeditha were reopened, Chanan of Iskia returned from Firuzshabar to Pumbeditha and restored the college there.
After the Persian dynasty had gained the Caliphate (750 C. E.) it began persecuting the Israelites. Without regard to the flourish- ing condition literature had attained in those Oriental academies, they expelled the Jews from Babylon, closed their renowned colleges and dispersed their illustrious teachers. Four of these learned men were captured by a corsair despatched by Abderachman from Cor- dova to cruise in the sea of the Grecian archipelago. He sold R. Shemaris at Alexandria, and he became head of the Jews in Egypt. R. Heshiel was sold by him on the coast of Africa, whence he went to Alkirohan, at that time the most powerful of the Mohammedan western provinces, where he became Chief Rabbi. R. Moses and his son, R. Hanoch, were carried to Cordova. That city was actu- ated only by benevolence and was unaware of the identity of their two illustrious visitors. When, however, their identity was discov- ered, the joy of the residents was great: they made R. Moses judge of the congregation and the fame of his learning spread through all Spain and the West. The reputation of the academies at Pumbeditha and Nehardea was such that the Spanish Jews, who had no such institutions in their own country, had sent their sons thither, in spite of the long distance and the dangers attendant upon travelling. This was by no means pleasing to the Moors, whose subjects the Jews were. Xow, however, R. Moses and his son established at Cordova the first Jewish academy in Spain and thus engendered a love for
THE !;l'r.\i. xc.s oi- xiii-: tal.ml'd 197
the Talmud which the Spanish Jews had previously scarcely expe- rienced. Among the disciples of R. Moses was R. Joseph ben Isaac Shatnesh, who, by desire of Caliph Ilakin, translated the Talmud into Arabic. The Caliph became a great patron of this study. a..d subsidiary schools were founded at Grenada, Toledo, Barcelona, and elsewhere. R. Joseph, however, was sorely aggrieved that R. Hanoch was chosen to succeed his father instead of himself, and, being excommunicated from the congregation because of the disturb- ance he made, became a wanderer and died at Damascus. R. Moses was by birth a Persian and he only transplanted on to the soil of Iberia the studies which had made such progress under the Caliphs of Bagdad and Koufa.
It was loyalty to the Talmud which gave the Pharisees the vic- tory over the Sadducees and other sects opposed to the Oral Law, but as the Talmudists gained strength their decrees against the Sad- ducees, Samaritans, Kuthim, and the like, became more and more severe, leading to the only possible result, observable throughout the whole of religious history — rebellion and revolution. There is a special instance of this at Sura, when Anan expected to succeerl his uncle .A.nan b. David as Gaon, but was not elected because of his open hostility to the Talmud and his liberal ideas. This was in 760 C. E. In revenge, he founded the Karaite sect, who claimed to be strict adherents of the Written Law and they rejected all Oral Tra- dition, claiming also to be the legitimate successors of a by-gone sect. Anan took the field publicly as an anti-Talmudist fixing his headquarters at Jerusalem and assuming also the title of Exilarch. He made unceasing war upon the Talmud and even said that if he could have swallowed the book he would have done so and cast him- self into a lime-kiln, so that it might be burned with him and leave no vestige of its existence. Indirectly, he was the creator of a num- ber of Karaite sects and these internal dissensions were more inimi- cal to Judaism than external persecutions, since the former aimed at the undermining of that faith by those within the fold, while the latter were gradually impelled by an ulterior motive, which was the spoiling of the Israelites by the confiscation of their material wealth, or relieving them of a portion thereof by the imposition of bribes to escape persecution. The Karaites cared not whether the Jews be- came Christian or Mussulmans, so long as they forsook the hateful Talmud and its contents became lost. This, surely, is one of the greatest testimonies to the value of the Talmud as an incentive to high spiritual living that could possibly be adduced. It failed, how-
198 THE OPEN COURT
ever, in its purpose, because of the dissensions and divisions that took place among the Karaites themselves and, instead of weaken- ing the influence of the Talmud or diminishing the number of its followers, their propaganda had an effect entirely the reverse, in- creasing the influence and developing the spiritual life of its adher- ents.
For many years the Talmudists seem to have been permitted to remain at peace and the next persecution of the Jews appears to have occurred in Germany early in the eleventh century. It arose through the conversion, in 1005, of Wecelinus, Chaplain to the Duke Conrad (a relative of the Emperor) to Judaism, when he wrote a lampoon on his former faith.
The first public official burning of Hebrew books (the Talmud not included) which took place in December, 1233, arose, strange to say, from a domestic quarrel or internal warfare ; a contest between INIaimonists (followers of Maimonides) and anti-AIaimonists (those opposed to philosophical study). Solomon of Montpelier, the leader of the latter, sought to condemn the writings of Maimonides as heretical, and he obtained the aid of the Dominican friars, who had firmly established themselves, along with the Inquisition, in his city. At his instigation, and by the command of the Papal Cardinal legate, a house search was made in Montpelier for Maimonist writings, and these, when found, were brought together and publicly burnt. According to Hillel ben Samuel, within a month of this incident some twelve thousand volumes of Hebrew literature were publicly de- stroyed in Paris, though there is no record that the Talmud itself was included in the conflagration.
A "conversion" was the cause of the next persecution of Tal- mudists, which began in 1239 and lasted for several years. Refer- ence will presently be made to the man who was the originator of all the trouble. On 20th June, 1239, Pope Gregory IX. issued a decree confiscating all copies of the Talmud, but this appears to have been generally disregarded. Early in the following year the Pope despatched the decree to the heads of the Church in France, Eng- land, Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, along with orders for the con- fiscation of all copies of the Talmud found in Jewish houses on the morning of the first Saturday in Lent, when the Jews would be assembled in their synagogues, the copies thus found to be handed over to the Dominicans and Franciscans. He further admonished the Provencal members of these two friarhoods to submit the con- tents of the Talmudical writings to special examination and if they
Till': lUKX I NCS OF THE TAL.M L'l) 199
were found to contain abuse of Jesus and the \'iro[in, distortion of the words of Holy Scriptures, or disgraceful representation^; of God, then every volume was to be burned. This decree seems to have been entirely disregarded in Sjiain and England and, apparently, it was only in France where, under the priest-ridden and weak-minded Louis IX., the confiscation of the Talmud was carried out with severity and the Jews were compelled, under penalty of death, to surrender their copies of the precious volume. In the midst of all the persecution arising from the crusade instituted by Gregory IX., there was only one spot where the Jew might feel free and happy and forget his sufferings, and that was the house of study, where young and old foregathered, in order to read and ponder over the Talmud. Graetz has given a delightful pen-picture of a scene common in those days, in the following words :
Absorbed in deep meditation, those who pored over the Talmud became entirely oblivious of the outer world with its bitter hate, its malicious laws, and its cruel tortures. Here they were the sons of a king, the majesty of thought cast a halo around their brows, and the delight of a spiritual activity illumined their characters. Their whole happiness consisted in solving some difficult problem in the Talmud, or in throwing light upon some obscure point, or in discov- ering something new which had escaped the notice of their prede- cessors. They loked neither for office nor honor in reward for their profound studies, and received no tangible rccompence for their nocturnal vigils. They desired only to gratify their intense longing for knowledge, to satisfy their sense of religious duty and in every way to assure themselves of their heavenly reward. The all-impor- tant occupation for all persons was study, and the flower of all scholarship was the Talmud.
How came this harmonious and peaceful condition to be dis- turbed? Mainly through the revenge and self-seeking of one despic- able individual. In 1225, one Donin, a Talmudist from La Rochelle in the north of France, was excommunicated in the presence of the whole congregation by R. Jehiel, of Paris, because he cast doubts upon the validity of the Talmud and Oral Teaching. For ten years, though excommunicated, Donin clung to Judaism, but at the end of that time he made a profession of Christianity and became a mem- ber of the Franciscan friarhood, assuming the name of Nicholas de Rupella. After stirring up the Crusaders to bloody persecutions in Brittany, Poiton, and Anjou, when three thousand Jews were slaughtered (five hundred accepting the alternative of Christian
200 THE OPEN COURT
baptism) Donin, in 1238, went to Rome and obtained an audience of Pope Gregory IX., when he denounced the Talmud, stating his charges in a document of thirty-five articles. A transcript of this document accompanied the Pope's order for the confiscation of the Talmud. The principal charges made by Donin were that the Tal- mud distorted the words of the Bible ; that in the Haggadic portions there were to be found disgraceful representations of God ; that it was filled with abuse against Jesus and the Virgin ; that it taught that it was a meritorious action to kill the best man among the Christians ; that it was lawful to deceive a Christian without any scruple ; and that it was permitted to Jews to break a promise made on oath.
In order to settle the dispute it was decided to submit the Talmud to a public trial. Four distinguished Rabbis of northern France were commanded by the King to hold a public disputation with Donin, either to refute the imputations levelled against the Talmud or to make confession of the alleged abuse against the Christian religion and the blasphemies against God it was said to contain. At the end of three days' discussion, which took place in the presence of the queen-mother Blanche, the Bishops of Paris and Senlis, and of many Dominicans, the Commission which had been appointed to make the inquiry condemned the Talmud to be burned on the ground (unwarranted by the evidence) that two of the Rabbis had been compelled to admit the truth of several of the charges. The sen- tence, however, was never carried out. Archbishop Walter Cor- nutus of Sena, who had great influence with the king, interceded on behalf of the Jews, with the result that many of the confiscated copies were restored to their rightful owners. It was alleged by his enemies that the Archbishop was bribed by the Jews to bring about this desired result, and the sudden death of the prelate occurring almost immediately afterwards gave the friars the opportunity of persuading the king that such event was the judgment of heaven upon him for thus befriending the Jews. The king now was easily induced to renew his decree for the confiscation of all cop-es of the Talmud that could be found and one morning in June, 1242, twenty- four cartloads of books were brought together in one spot in Paris and committed to the flames, this being tlie first public official burning of the Talmud. For many years the anniversary of this day was kept by the French Jews as a day of fasting. An important part in the discussions was taken by Eudes de Chateaureux, Bishop of Tusculum. Chancellor of the University of Paris, and afterwards
THE BURXIXr.S OF THE TAT.MUD 201
Papal Legate in the Holy Land. Two manuscript reports of the discussions are in existence, one in Hebrew and the other in Latin. The former is in the Strasbourg Library and the latter is in the BibHotheque Nationale. Eudes de Chateauroux edited the second manuscript, assisted by two Christians "very erudite in Hebrew" and Donin, doubtless, also rendered much assistance in the prepara- tion of this report.
Gregory IX. w'as succeeded in 1243, after practically two years' interrugnum, by a pontiff, who. had he been left to give expression to his own will, would have proved more tolerant than his predeces- sor. The French Jews appealed to Pope Innocent IV. for permission to retain their Talmudical writings, principally on the ground that without them they could not fulfil their religious obligations. The Pope granted the petition and, in the year of his accession, decreed that the Jews w^ere not to be deprived of such writings, the Talmud included, as they contained nothing antagonistic to Christianity. Again, however, a storm was raised by the fanatics, who protested against this edict so persistently that the Pope eventually withdrew it and gave, instead, early in May. 1244, his sanction to the condem- nation of the Talmud. In that year there was another solemn burn- ing of the Talmud and other Hebrew books in Paris, to the number of ten or twelve thousand and, also, probably, in other parts of France, by command of this Pope. In Rome, also, at this date, the Talmud w-as confiscated. A certain number of copies of the Tal- mud, however, escaped these various confiscations and remained hidden in Jewish houses, as was proved by an inquiry held in 1247, when the Jews handed over a number of copies to Eudes de Chateau- roux. Some were hidden in wells, others buried among the roots of trees, while copies were even snatched from the very flames. Possibly, also, all the copies w'ere not sent to Paris, or. if sent, were not all destroyed. On 12th August. 1247. the Pope wrote again to Eudes de Chateauroux asking him to undertake a fresh examination of the Talmud and other Jewish books, in order definitely to ascer- tain that they contained nothing inimical to the Christian religion. Eudes de Chateauroux appointed forty examiners, of whom Alber- tus Magnus was one, and he issued his report on 15th May, 1248. He condemned the Talmud. The book, he said, had again been examined and found to be full of errors and horrible blasphemies and could by no means be tolerated. It was decided that none of the copies which had been seized could be returned to their original owners. In that vear there were two more burnings of the Talmud
202 THE OPEN COURT
and other Jewish books in Paris, altogether twenty wagon-loads, but still some copies escaped the flames, hidden away in Jewish house- holds.
In 1255, under a decree from St. Louis to his seneschals in the Narbonnais, at the instigation of Pope Innocent IV., the Talmud was burned in France, and the teaching of it prohibited, although it was at this time that Moses of Courcy composed his great work on the Mosaic Law, and another famous Talmudist, Samuel ben Solo- mon of Falaise, prepared a new collection of Tosefta. He possessed no copy of the Talmud from which to work, because he had been deprived of it by the Dominicans, and so he was compelled to rely upon his memory. It is also said that Ezekiel of Paris had threes hundred students of the Talmud in his academy, to whom he deliv- ered discourses, probably from memory, but he was eventually com- pelled through poverty, to return to Palestine. Thus the Church met with a temporary success by suppressing the Talmudical spirit, which for ages had existed and had found its principal home in France. As H. C. Lea points out, the Church held the Jew to be a being deprived by the guilt of his ancestors of all natural rights, save that of existence.
In August, 1263, King Jacob of Aragon, doubtless with the aim of emulating his neighbor, ordered all Jews within his realm to delete within three months all the so-called objectionable passages found in their books, either by themselves or by Paul of Bourges. Failure to obey the command was to entail the destruction of the books and a heavy fine.
In 1264, Pablo Christiani (Paul Christian of Montpelier). an- other apostate Jew. with all the fervor of a convert, denounced the Talmud, reviving the well-worn theme that it contained passages of hostile import directed against Jesus and Mary. He persuaded Pope Clement IV. to issue a Bull to the Archbishop of Tarragona, commanding him to confiscate all copies of the Talmud that could be found and to submit them to the examination of the Dominicans and Franciscans, and decreed that if they declared them to be blas- phemous then they were to be burned. Pablo, himself, conveyed this Bull to Spain, whereupon King James issued his royal edict for the examination of the Talmud and ordered that the passages con- taining abuse or slander should be struck out. The Bishop of Bar- celona, Raymond of Penjaforte (General of the Dominicans, Con- fessor to King James, and Collector of Papal Decretals), Raymund Martial, the well-known author of the Pugio Fidei, was also a mem-
THE BURNINGS OF THE TALMUD 203
ber, as were Arnoldus de Sagurra and Petriis Janus, all Dominicans, together with Pablo Christiani. They were appointed censors by Clement lY. to expunge all passages considered derogatory to the Church. They marked the passages in the Talmud which were to be obliterated and thus this company formed the first Dominican cen- sorship undertaken against the Talmud in Spain. Pablo Christiani challenged the greatest Rabbi of his day, Moses ben Nahman ( Nach- manides) to a disputation, which was presided over by King James, being held in his P>arcelona Palace during the four days of 20th, 27th, 30th, and 31st July, 1263. Each champion boasted of victory. Eventually the king dismissed Nachmanides not only with honor, but also with the handsome reward of three hundred pieces of gold. Yet he ordered a number of Jewish books to be burned and, in other instances, alleged blasphemous passages in the Talmud to be ex- punged, whilst the Pope, in a decree dated 12th August, 1263, ordered the Jews of Aragon to submit all their books to Pablo Chris- tiani for examination. Two accounts of this disputation also are in existence, one in Latin, edited probably by the Dominicans, and the other, in Hebrew, edited undoubtedly by Nachmanides.
In 1264, Pope Clement I\". placed the penalty of death on any person who should harbor a copy of the Talmud in his house and, in 1267, he instructed the Archbishop of Tarragona to coerce by excommunication the King of Aragon and his nobles to force the Jews to deliver up their Talmuds and other books to the Inquisitors for examination when, if they contained no blasphemous statements, they might be returned to them, but, if otherwise, they were to be sealed up and kept securely.
On 30th November, 1286. Pope Honorius IV. wrote to the Arch- bishops of Canterbury and York ancnt "that damnable book." the Talmud, "vehemently to see that it be not read by anybody, since all other evils flow out of it," but there was no mention of confiscation in the mandate.
In 1299 and, again, in 1309, the Talmud, in wagon-loads, was burned in Paris, by command of Philip the Fair, who ordered his judges to aid the Inquisition in its extermination. This last con- flagration was in accordance with the orders of Bernard Gui, the in- quisitor. He is said to have employed experts in the Hebrew lan- guage in a careful examination of the forbidden volume.
In 1307, Pope Clement \". was asked to condemn the book, but before doing so. expressed a desire to know something about it. and there was no one to satisfy that desire. He then proposed, though
204 THE OPEN COURT
in language so abstruse that it left the door open to many interpreta- tions, that three chairs be founded for Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic, these being the three tongues nearest to the idioms of the Talmud. He suggested that these chairs be founded at the universities of Paris, Salamanca, Bologna, and Oxford. He hoped that in time one or other of these universities might be able to produce a trans- lation of the mysterious work.
In 1315, Louis, the son and successor of Philip the Fair, invited the Jews who had been expelled from the country by his father to return to France, when he restored to them their property, but still denied them the Talmud. This gave Bernard Gui an opportunity for further activity. He caused an extensive search to be made in the Jewish houses and he was rewarded by finding a sufficient num- ber of volumes to fill two carts. After mature counsel between the inquisitors and the priests called in to assist, the condemned books were taken in the carts through the streets of Toulouse, when they were solemnly burned. Gui ordered all priests for three successive Sundays to publish an injunction commanding the delivery to the Inquisition for examination of all Jewish books, including the "Tal- amuz," under pain of excommunication.
On 19th June, 1320, Pope John XXII. commanded the Arch- bishop of Bourges to seize and burn all copies of the Talmud he could find in the city, and on the following 4th September, he issued a Bull against the Talmud to the French Bishops, while, in 1322, the Talmud was publicly burned in Rome by the orders of the same Pope. This occurred during the Feast of Weeks and the leaders of the community endeavored by force to prevent the execution of the sentence. In the Jewish Quarterly Review for January, 1890, H. Graetz refers to this burning, which followed a massacre of the Jews by hordes of shepherds and a second slaughter on account of the lepers. Calumniators then came before the Pope to annihilate the law of truth, audaciously boasting that they would quench Israel's light. An active part in the destruction of the Talmud was taken by Frederick, the rival of Lewis of Bavaria.
In 1380, Pedro Alphonso, another Jewish apostate, falsely as- serted that the Jews, in their prayers, daily invoked maledictions on Christians, which induced Charles II. of Navarre to issue the fol- lowing decree at the Cortes of Soria in the same year :
Whereas we have been informed that the Jews are commanded by their books and other writings of the Talmud daily to say the prayer against heretics, which is said standing, wherein they curse
THE DURXIXCS OF THE TALMUD 205
Christians and churches, we strictly command and forbid any of them, hereafter, to say it or have it written and in the said books, thev are to erase and cancel it in such a manner as not to be legible, which is to be done within two months after the publication hereof, and any one who says or responds to it shall publicly receive one hundred lashes. And if it be found in his breviary or other book, he is to be fined one thousand maravedis : and if he cannot pay the fine, one hundred lashes are to be given to him.
Joseph ha-Cohen has left on record, under date of 1.S94. the fact that he saw volumes that were rescued from hiding-places, particu- larly one which was externally in a very bad condition "because it was one of those which the Jews in these evil days hid for so long a time in the w^ells to await the passing of God's anger."
Then another persecution in consequence oi a "conversion." Joseph Halorqui, so called from the name of his birthplace, Lorca, near Muria, was a Spanish physician, who. on his adoption of Chris- tianity, assumed the name of Ceronimo de Santa Fc. He became an ardent anti-Talmudist and offered to prove from the Talmud that the Messiah had already come in the person of Jesus. He wrote two articles in which he repeated the old slanderous charges against the Jews and manufactured fresh accusations. As physician to the anti-Pope. Benedict XHI., he had great influence with that usurper, who, at that time, had a large following, and he persuaded him to arrange public disputations with learned Jews. This Pope, says Graetz, had been deposed by the Council of Pisa as schismatic, and the Council had deprived him of his spiritual functions and even excommunicated him, but on the Pyreanean peninsula he was still regarded as the legitimate Pope, and, in order to maintain his posi- tion, he essayed the conversion of the entire body of Jews in Spain to the Church, which he thought would procure a general acknowl- edgment of his authority. In his program in arranging the public disputations he was assisted by the King, Don Ferdinand, and the meetings were held at Tortosa towards the end of 1412, abottt twenty of the most influential of Aragonese Jews answering the summons. The Archiv. dc la Corona dc Aragon, xii.. c. 45. gives the following account of the disputation :
By the Pope's command the principal doctors and rabbis of all the Aljanas in the Kingdom assembled in the city of Tortosa for the purpose of being publicly admonished in his presence and in that of the whole Court, to acknowledge the error and blindness in which they walked. The principal Rabbins were Rabbi Fcner. Master .'"^olo-
206 THE OPEX COURT
mon Isaac, Rabbi Astrnth el Levi of Alcania, Rabbi Joseph Albo, Rabbi Matatias of Zaragosa, Master Touros, Benastrue Desmaestre of Girona, and Rabbi Aloses Abenabez : and though there were many distinguished Masters and Doctors of Divinity at the Pope's Court, who were men of learning and great divines, the Pope was, never- theless, anxious that in the questions and disputations propounded, the care of instructing and teaching these Rabbis should be more especially and particularly entrusted to Geronimo de Santa Fe, his physician, inasmuch as the latter was well read and grounded in the Old Testament, together with the glosses upon it, and all the treatises of the Rabbis, as well as their Talmud, by the authorities and sen- tences of which it was the Pope's intention that they should be con- vinced and led to see the blindness and unsoundness of their doc- trine, the obstinacy of their errors and lives, their rash and perverse interpretation of their Law.
The disputations, which are said to have extended over sixty- eight sessions and eighteen months and were conducted in Latin, not meeting with the success w^hich Geronimo de Santa Fe seems to have anticipated, he then came before the Pope as the censor of the Talmud, accusing it of containing all kinds of abominations, immoralities, and heresies, and demanded that it should be con- demned. He stated that the Talmud countenanced the beating of parents, blasphemy, the practice of idolatry, also the breaking of oaths, provided that on the preceding Dav of Atonement the pre- caution had been taken to declare them in\'alid. He was so far suc- cessful that on 11th Mav. 1415. P>enedict XTTL. who was violent in his hostility towards the Jews, issued a Bull of eleven clauses forbid- ding the Jews to studv or to teach the Talmud or any other Jewish book attacking Christianity and ordering the clergy to seek out and confiscate all copies of the Talmud. The first article of this Bull, as given in the Biblioteca dc los Rabinos Espanoles, reads as follows:
All peo])le in general, without respect of persons, are forbidden to hear, read, or teach the doctrine of the Talmud, publicly or pri- vately, and within the space of one month all copies of the Talmud, glosses upon it, summaries, compendiums, and other writings what- soever, bearing directly or indirectly upon the said doctrine, that can be found, are to be deposited in the Cathedral church of each diocese, and diocesans and inquisitors must look to the due observance of this decree, and visit in person, or by procurator (once every two years at least) all those places within the limits of their jurisdiction in
T1II£ I'.L'KXINCS OF THE TAL.AIUI) ' 207
which there are any Jews hving, and punish all offenders with the utmost rigor.
His decree, however, was never carried into effect, although a further Bull against the Talmud was issued hy this I^ope in 1417. Benedict XIII. was never recognized as other than anti-Pope by the mass of Christendom. He was supported in his pretensions by the King of Aragon and held his Court in great state at Tortosa from 1412 to 1417. In the latter year he was deposed by the Council of Constance and left to die in obscurity, abandoned by his Spanish protectors and denounced as "unfrocked and spurious" by his favor- ite, the flagellant priest. \'incent Ferrer, who had rendered him great assistance in his plans against the Talmud. Martin V., who appears to have been favorably inclined towards the Jews, was rec- ognized as the successor of St. Peter in his stead. He issued several Bulls favoring the Jews in different parts of Europe. One permitted the Jews to study books of Jewish science and philosophy, "provided they did not read, hear, or study Hebrew or Latin works containing anything contrary to the Catholic faith."
Alfonso y., the Wise, of Castile, caused the Talmud to be trans- lated in order that its errors might be exposed to the public, and, in 1426, the Jews of the Savoy expunged from the Talmud and prayer- books passages which the Inquisition pointed out as objectionable.
In 1426, when the Jews were expelled from Cologne, that city became the headquarters of an anti-Jewish movement, whence arose a crusade against Jewish bonks. It was there that afterwards Reuch- lin encountered his bitterest enemies and a city once noted for its liberalitv of thought became a noted center of bigotry.
In 1442, Pope Eugene took away all rights from the Jews and forbade them, under threat of confiscation of all their property, to busv themselves with the study of sacred matters outside the Bible. Duke John'T'rancis then opened ?\Iantua to them as a city of refuge and, shortly afterwards, on payment of a large sum of money col- lected by the Italian communities, he secured a repeal of the restric- tions.
In 1490, Torquemada caused many Hebrew Bibles to be burned publicly and shortly afterwards more than six thousand volumes of Oriental literature were treated in a similar manner at Salamanca, under an imputation that they inculcated Judaism, sorcery, or heresy. Many Jews at that time swelled the coffers of the Papal government by purchasing at high cost dispensations securing them freedom from the unwelcome attentions of the inquisitors.
J(J8 THE OPEN COURT
In the fifteenth century we come across Joseph, afterwards, by baptism, John, Pfefl:erkorn (born 1469) a Moravian Jewish convert to Christianity, a butcher by trade, who, it is said, embraced the Christian rehgion on his release from prison, whither he had been committed for burglary, a fact which has been established by docu- mentary evidence. He was placed in charge of the Dominicans and under their auspices he published several anti-Jewish pamphlets.
His first publication, issued in 1507. entitled Das Judenspiegel, urged the people to check Jewish usury, to compel them to attend church, and to listen to sermons, and to burn the Talmud, this last being characterized as a very venial ofifence. It was thought that if the ruling powers could be induced to sequestrate all copies of the Talmud, the Dominicans, as Inquisitors, would have the disposal of them, and the Jews, who could not do without the Talmud, would pour their wealth into the Dominican cofifers. in order to get the confiscation annulled. This pamphlet, having little or no efifect, and not inaugurating, as the author and the Dominicans had hoped, a persecution of the Jews, further and rnore scurrilous pamphlets were issued, but with like negative result. Through Pfeft'erkorn's machi- nations, an edict was promulgated by the Emperor Maximilian, dated 19th August, 1509, to the efifect that all Jewish writings against Christianity should be destroyed. This was followed by a second decree, dated 10th November. 1509. ordering the destruction of all Hebrew books, except the Old Testament. Pfefiferkorn went the same year to Frankfort-on-the-Maine, where there were many Jews and, on 10th April, 1510. the Jews were forced to surrender to him all books in their possession. He was aided in his campaign by Ort- win de Grace, one of the chiefs of the Dominicans in Cologne.
The edict of 19th August, 1509. gave Pfefi'erkorn full power over the Jews, which was exactly what he had wanted to secure. It gave him authority to examine all Hebrew writings throughout the Ger- man Empire and to destroy anv whose contents were hostile to the Bible and to the Christian faith, according to his judgment. The Jews, however, demanded a delay of the confiscation, although fifteen hundred manuscripts were seized in Frankfort alone, in order that thev might appeal to the Emperor and the Supreme Court of Judicature, and so eft'ectual was their protestation that the Arch- bishop of Mayence. in whose diocese Frankfort was situated (Uriel von Gemmingen, by name) prohibited his clergy from lending Pfef- ferkorn any assistance. Confiscations, however, had already taken place in Worms, Lorch, Bingen. Laufen. Mayence, and Deutz. A
THE BURNINGS OF THE TALMUD 209
remarkable man, named John Reuchlin, the legal adviser of the Dominicans, was appointed coadjutor with Pfefferkorn in the exami- nation of the Jewish books. Reuchlin is said to have been the only Christian in Europe at that time familiar'with the Hebrew language. He was certainly the first Christian to compose and publish a Hebrew grammar. It was through his influence that on 24th May. 1510, the Emperor rescinded his edict for the destruction of the Talmud. Reuchlin issued his report on 10th October, 1510. The question propounded to him was whether it was godly, laudable, and advan- tageous to Christianity to burn Jewish writings, whereby the Talmud specially was meant. From personal investigation he arrived at the conclusion that the Talmud, the Zohar. the commentaries of Rashi, and other books should not be burned, as they were useful for theol- ogy and science, and no heresy was contained in them, but he recom- mended the destruction of the Tolcdot Vcsliu (a Life of Jesus that originated in the Middle Ages, previously condemned and viewed with disfavor by the Jews). He also recommended the destruction of Lipman's anti-Christian writings. With regard to the Talmud, he declared he must oppose the destruction of "a book written by Christ's nearest relations." Tn this report he was supported only by the University of Heidelberg, but only to the point of recommending the appointment of a committee for further deliberation. The uni- versity of Alayence recommended that the Talmud be burned, while the other faculties and the Dominicans urged the establishment of a perpetual Court of Inquisition for the Jew^s. Reuchlin seems to have entered upon his task in the true spirit of a researcher — he tried to forget that he was the advocate of any special form of reli- gion and that, as an earnest Christian, he was supposed to be an opponent of the Jews. He admitted his inability to understand the Talmud, but he expressed the opinion that, even if it contained libels on the founder of Christianity, which he did not admit, still it ought not to be destroyed, for, he said, "if the Talmud were deserving of such condemnation, our ancestors of many hundreds of years ago, whose zeal for Christianity was much greater than ours is, would long ago have burned it." As an alternative to confiscation and burning he suggested that at every German university two profes- sors of Hebrew should be appointed for ten years, who might also be asked to teach Rabbinical Hebrew, and thus "the Jews might be led by gentle means to embrace Christianity." The report was ordered to be sent for review to PfefTerkorn. It is not. therefore, surprising that Reuchlin was bitterly attacked by the Dominicans
210 THE OPEX COURT
for his expression of opinion and, indeed, there was inaugurated a prolonged conflict between him and the Dominicans into which the whole scientific world of Europe was drawn. He was even sum- moned by Jacob von Hoogstraten, professor of theology at Cologne University and Chief Inquisitor, to appear before the Inquisition and be examined on charges of heresy and of favoritism towards the Jews. When the trial was almost ended, however, a mandate arrived from Archbishop von Gemmingen ordering judgment to be suspended for a month and, in the event of disobedience, he took away from Hoogstraten and his colleagues their privileges as judges of the Inquisitorial Court and decreed that all previous sentences passed by them should become null and void. Reuchlin was a prom- inent German Humanist and he was strongly supported in his feud with Pfefferkorn by Ulrich von Hutten, another Humanist. Reuch- lin, also, was, with Luther, Melanchton, Erasmus (who, with Franz von Sickingen, became an adherent to the cause of the Talmud), and Hitten among the promoters of the Reformation, although, in 1520. he had declared himself against the movement. Hoogstraten was the prime mover in the burning of Luther's works at Cologne in November, 1519. Reuchlin published a treatise on the Kabbala, called Dc ]\-rho Mirifico, which is in the form of a conference be- tween Beruchias, a Jewish sage; Capinon, a Christian scholar; and a Greek philosopher, the outcome of which is a declaration of the supremacy of Jewish wisdom and of the Hebrew language. Event- ually the Dominicans were ordered to pay the costs of their proceed- ings against Reuchlin. It may be noted, in passing, that, in 1520. Pope Leo X. permitted the Talmud to be printed by Daniel Bomberg at \'enice, the very year in which Luther burned the Pope's Bull at Wittenberg.
As noted already much of the trouble was caused by the machi- nations of apostates from the Jewish faith, who seemed with their change of religion to have lost all sense of honesty and truthfulness. In this connection the following letter from Joseph ha-Cohen, a con- temporary of this period, quoted by Popper, is of special interest :
In those days certain worthless men came forth from our com- munity, and began to commit in secret, oiYences against the Lord our God : they became stiff-necked, deserted the Lord, and violated the covenant which He had made with our fathers. They walked in the way of those people whom Od has forbidden us to follow, and roused them with lying words to anger, thus heaping sin on sin. They even laid before the Pope a derogatory opinion of the Talmud,
THE BURNINGS Ol- TlIK T.\[,MII) 211
and said : '"The Talmud, a work possessed by the Jews, contains laws, which differ from those of every other people, and it preaches oppo- sition to your ^Messiah: there can then be absolutely no advantage to the Pope in permitting it to exist." The names of these slanderers are Hananael de Foligno, Joseph Moro, and Solomon Romano (after baptism John Pattista Romano Eliano^ — he was a grandson of the well-known Hebrew grammarian, Elias Levita) O God! may their sins not be blotted out : on the day of wrath call them to judgment.
These renegades were the cause of much suffering to the Jews. They invented false charges against their former co-religionists and denounced them. A good example of this is furnished by the well- known Alenu praver, which was said to contain an expression directed against Christianity. The prayer contains the lines : "They bow down to vanity and naught and worship a god who cannot save them." The words ''and naught," quoted from Tsaiah xxx., 7, were said by the apostates to be numerically equivalent to "Jesus." Simi- larly, the common abbreviation "Akum," i. e., worshippers of planets and constellations, was supposed to represent worshippers of Jesus and Mary. These false charges led to persecution. Thus to this day the passage from the Alenu prayer is expunged from the Ash- kenazi liturgy, though it survives among the Sephardim. who lived under the more tolerant rule of the Crescent, but so late as 1777. the charge of blaspheming Jesus in the Alenu prayer was brought against the Jews and refuted by Moses Mendelssohn.
The following letter from Rabbi Abraham Saba, exiled from Portugal in 1497, also speaks for itself :
I brought all my books into the city of Porto in obedience to the royal decree ; but yet I took my life in my hands by carrying with me to Lisbon a Commentary on the Law, which I had composed, as well as a commentary on the treatises EtJiics of tJie FatJiers, and one on the Fii'e Scrolls. But when I reached Lisbon all the Jews came to me and told me that it had been proclaimed to the community that every Jew who might be found with a book or Avith phylacteries in his possession would be put to death. So straightway before I en- tered the quarter outside the city. I took these books in my hands, two brothers went with me, and dug a grave among the roots of a blossoming olive-tree : there we buried them. Yet. although a tree flourishing with lovely fruit stood there, because of the Law which was in it, but I called it '"Tree of Sorrow," for I had buried there all that was pleasing in my sight — the Commentary on the Law and
212 THE OPEN COURT
the Commandments, more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. For in them I had found consolation for the loss of my two little ones, torn from me by force to become unwilling converts.
On 12th August, 1553, Pope Julius III. issued an edict demand- ing the burning of the Talmud (which he called Gemaroth Talmud) which decree was carried out at Barcelona, Venice, Romagna. Urbino and Pesaro. On 9th September of that year, a large number of copies were publicly burned in Rome. The copies were carried across the river to the public square, the Campo di Fiori, some dis- tance northwest of the future ghetto. A vast crowd was assembled there and the pyre was lighted "amid the greatest applause of the populace." Over in the synagogue a multitude had assembled also and the sound of applause was echoed back with sighing and wailing as "the Jews bemoaned the pyre which the Lord's enemies had pre- pared." Julius III. also prohibited the printing of the Talmud by Christians. Again, on 29th May, 1554, the Talmud was publicly burned in Rome and a Papal Bull commanded the Jews, on pain of heavy punishment, to give up, within four months, all books con- taining alleged blasphemous utterances or vituperations against Jesus, but they were allowed to retain other Hebrew books that contained no objectionable passages. Thus, the expurgation of all Hebrew books was practically demanded. An ecclesiastical decision from Rome give;i through the Essecutori contra la Blastema, towards the end of 1553, declared, in answer to an inquiry as to what Talmudic books outside the Talmud itself should be burned, that the non-Tal- mudic books should be revised by Christians who knew Hebrew. At this time also there was a burning of condemned books in Romagna, and a little later in the Duchy of Urbino. The inquisitor, GerolamT Muzio. in Pesaro ordered a search throughout the Duchy and had all the seized books brought to that city. PTe sent to Rome for an expert and one, Raphael, was commissioned. All the books he con- demned were burned in the public market-place on 16th December, 1553. Previously, in the same year — on 12th September — the Inquisi- tors had issued a manifesto, as follows:
By these presents, and by the authority of our office, and by spe- cial order of our most sacred master. Pope Julius III., given to us lately viva we exhort every Christian prince, every state ruler, every Ordinary, and every Inquisitor, warn and charge them under threat of excommunication: As soon as these presents shall come to their notice they shall cause all copies of the Talmud to be sought for throughout the homes and synagogues of the Hebrews who dwell in
THE BURNINGS OF THE TAT^MUD 213
their respective states and countries, and when found to be pubHcl) burned.
Furthermore, we command all Hebrews dwelling in Christian states and countries under penalty of confiscation of all their prop erty . . . that wnthin three days . . . they shall surrender all copies of the Talmud, both Babylonian and Palestinian, and each and ever) part of them which they may possess. They shall hand them to the Cardinals themselves, or to their officials, to the Ordinaries, or to the Inquisitors in Rome, either at the Campo di Fiori, or in theii own synagogues, in other cities or countries at designated public oi private places. And henceforth they may not and must not have such similar books written, printed, or bought through faithless coun- tries to the countries of the faithful, nor shall they in any way seek to have or retain them.
Finally, we warn all faithful Christians . . . that they shall noi presume to read the above-mentioned work, the Talmud, inasmuch as it has been condemned by the Church . . . nor shall they dart give advice, aid. or favor to the Hebrews in holding, writing, oi printing books of this sort. Every transgressor of this provision in addition to excommunication shall receive the punishments meted out by law to the protectors of heretics.
The first officially appointed censor was Jacob Geraldino, a bap tized Jew, who was proposed by the Jews themselves, made Apos folic Commissioner by the Pope in 1555, and given general charge for his work over the whole Papal territory, his salary being paid by the Jews. In 1556, he was appointed Ducal Commissioner bv the Duke of Modena, which position gave him supervision outside Papal territory. Another apostate, Andrea del Alonte, the baptismal name of Joseph Zarphati Alfasi, was appointed, not by the Pope, but at the request of the Jews, and became associated with the first-named. The Jews, however, received no leniency from either, for both had the customary zeal of converts.
In 1554. the Talmud was pul)liclv burned at Ancona (although in a Bull dated 5th December, 1553. the Pope had shown himself especially friendly to the Jews of that city). Ferrara. ]\Iantua, Padua Candia. and Ravenna. Emanuel ben Jehutiel. an eye-witness of one of the burnings, writes :
And when I came over the sea to my home in Ancona. and saw the dastardly burning of my Talmud, strong man though I was. in the bitterness of mv soul. I wrent mv garments and burst into tears.
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It is said that there was great mourning by the Jews for the books were burned by the hundred thousand. On 29th May of that vear Julius III., after consultation with the Cardinals, issued a Bull forbidding absolutely any interference with books not expressly pro- scribed by the Inquisition. He further stipulated, however, that in the future, before any book should be published it should be sub- mitted to the authorities for revision and that all books already in the possession of the Jews which contained statements derogatory to Christianity should, under penalty of fines and corporal punish- ment, amounting to death, if deemed necessary, be surrendered with- in four months. The obnoxious passages were then to be blotted out and the books returned to their owners.
On 1st May, 1557, Rome ordered a new confiscation of Hebrew books, paying no attention to the previous prohibition of interfer- ence with non-Talmudic writings. All works in Hebrew, including even prayer-books, that could be found, were seized — even a copy of Abraham ibn Ezra's Commentary. In the same year the Talmud was burned in Poland, while in the Duchy of Milan, the Jews sub- mitted willingly to a rigorous censorship and expurgation, in the hope of preserving their precious volumes from the flames. In 1558, the Talmud was again burned in Rome by Cardinal Ghielieri ; again in Rome in 1559 by Paul IV., and in 1566 by Pius V. Pope Pius IV. (1559-1566), who founded the Vatican Press, in giving permission for a new edition of the Talmud, stipulated that it should appear without the name "Talmud." In 1559 a Papal Index was published by command of Paul IV., hated alike by Jews and Christians, and the prohibited books included the Talmud "with all its compen- diums, glosses, notes, interpretations, and expositions." As soon as the Index was published in Cremona, Baptista Clarius. the Inquisi- tor-General of that city, ordered the Jews to deliver their Talmuds to him and in April or May of that year he burned between ten and twelve thousand volumes, under the superintendence of Sixtus Sinensis. Sixtus was a convert from Judaism, who became a Dom- inican friar. There is another record of a burning by him in the same year of two thousand volumes in one day in the public square of Cremona.
On 21st October, 1559, an edict was published at Venice by the Central Council of Ten in charge of State affairs decreeing that not only all copies of the Talmud, or portions of it, but also "all com- pendiums, summaries, or other works dependent on the Talmud" should be surrendered within eight days, those from outside Venice
THE BURNINGS OF THE T^ALMUD 215
should be sent there and with those of the city be burned on the Place St. Marcus. \'iolation of the order in any way was to be punished by exile from all portions and dependencies of the State and by fines, in the case of one found with forbidden books in his possession. A certain physician, Elazar ben Raphael, who had apos- tatized from Judaism, tried to have the decree extended to almost the whole of Jewish literature, and at one time it seemed as though even the Scrolls of the Law would be seized, but prompt action on the part of the leaders of the commtmity prevented that outrage. The sentence was carried out on a Jewish Sabbath and R. Judah Lerma, a Spaniard, who was living in Venice at the time, says that the books taken from him included Alfazi's Talmud Compendium, Jacob ben Chabib's Haggadoth : and the Mishamayoth. He adds :
And among them they burned all the copies of my own works, which I had had printed, and which amounted to fifteen hundred volumes. I lost every book which I had in \^enice, and nothing printed or written was left to me— not even a single page for remem- brance. So I was forced to begin to write my work all over again from memory ; but then, after I had written three chapters of it, I found a single copy of the edition in the possession of some Chris- tians, who had snatched it from the fire, and this I secured at a great cost.
The Index issued on 24th March, 1564, by Pius l\. (who was not a Dominican), permitted the Jews to use Hebrew and even Tal- mudic books, provided they were purged from vituperations against the Christian religion, but prohibited the Talmud as before. In 1569, the famous Jewish library in Cremona was plundered and closed through the activities of a reactionist. Cardinal Carl Bor- romeo, and twelve thousand copies of the Talmud and other Jewish writings were committed to the flames. Between 1578 and 1581, a mutilated edition of the Babylonian Talmud appeared in Basel, by permission of Pope Gregory XIII.. with many of its passages changed beyond recognition, issued under toleration, rather than under approbation. In 1592, the Inquisition declared, in accordance with the wishes of Pope Clement VIII., that the Jews had no right to keep any Hebrew books, except the Bible and grammars, and in the following year a Bull issued by the same Pope limited the prohi- bition to a few Talmudic and Kabbalistic works.
On 12th November. 1613. the Inquisitor-General, in a decree, graciously permitted all Rabbinical books in the royal library of the Escorial to remain, providing they were placed in a separate case
216 ' THE OPEN COURT
and marked as prohibited^ but they could be read by the prior, chief librarian, and professors. In 1618, the Seville tribunal of the Inqui- sition was ordered to seize all Hebrew books that had belonged to Arias Montana. In 1686, Pope Sixtus V. permitted the printing of the Talmud, after it had been subject to censorship, but in the year following his death, the Inquisition wrote that the expurgation of the Talmud was a ridiculous and useless work. On 25th February, 1693, Clement ATI. reimposed the old restrictions on the Jews in Rome, Ancona, and Avignon, the only Papal cities in which Jews were permitted to reside, and he forbade them to read or to possess the Talmud or other Rabbinical writings. Those Jews who were expelled from the Papal States were received by Ferdinand, Duke of Tuscany, who, in July, 1593, had assigned Pisa to them as a dwelling place. He allowed them to possess books of every kind and in all languages, these included the Talmud, but the copies had first to be expurgated, according to the regulations of the Commis- sion instituted by Sixtus V. The Jews, moreover, were exposed to all kinds of annoyances and extortions. They had to pay various sums to the censors for the mutilation of their writings. These censors were generally baptized Jews and there was no assurance that the books would not again be confiscated and the owners punished, merely because some obnoxious world or other remained unobliter- ated. A notorious persecutor of the Talmud in the seventeenth cen- tury was one John Andreas Eisenmenger, who devoted almost the whole of his life to the attempt to destroy the Talmud.
In 1707. some copies of the Talmud were confiscated in the Prov- ince of Brandenburg, but were restored to their owners by command of Frederick, first king of Prussia. In 1731, there was a confisca- tion of Hebrew books throughout the Papal States by command of Pope Clement XII. (1730-1740), but it was cancelled and nearly all the seized books were returned to their owners. In 1738, however, there was a further search and seizure and R. Solomon Basilea was arrested on the charge of being in possession of uncensored books and condemned to remain within the ghetto. Two further confisca- tions took place during the pontificate of Benedict XIV. (1740- 1758). At one, in April, 1753. thirty-eight carts were filled with books from the Ghetto of Rome alone. Again, on 10th August, 1753, there was a searcli and seizure at Lugo, in the province of Ravenna ; in Pesaro, on 31st August, 1753: at Ferrara on 24th September; at Urbino, on 5th October ; at Ancona, on 16th October, all in 1753 ; at Sinigallia (.Ancona) on 29th January, at Carpentras. on 13th
THK BURXINGS OF THE TALMUD 217
April ; at Avignon. Carpentras, Cavaglione, and at Lilla, on 5th August, all in 1754. A few, but very few, of the books seized on these occasions found their way back to the possession of the right- ful owners. On 14th October, 1757, as an outcome of the Frankist movement, the last serious attack on the Talmud was made, when Bishop Dembowski ordered copies to be confiscated, brought to Kamieniec (Poland) and there publicly burned by the hangman. One thousand copies were dragged through the streets of the city, tied to horses" tails, and then delivered to the executioner to be burned. The Jews were powerless and could do nothing, except proclaim a fast-day for the "Burning of the Law." The clergy, in conjunction with other anti-Talmudists, daily made domiciliary visits into Jewish houses in order to seize any copies of the Talmud that might be found. Yet once more, however, was the censorship of books renewed and, for a time strictly enforced by Pope Pius VI. (1775-1798).
And why? Apart from a general hatred of the Jews, which has existed through the ages on the part of certain fanatical Christians, but which, happily, is disappearing, the question is, perhaps, best answered by Llorente, in his History of the Inquisition, in the fol- lowing words :
Facts prove beyond a doubt that the extirpation of Judaism was not the real cause, but the mere pretext, for the establishment of the Inquisition by Ferdinand A'. The true motive was to carry on a vigorous system of confiscation against the Jews, and so bring their riches into the hands of the government. Sixtus lA^. sanctioned the measure, to gain the point dearest to the Court of Rome, an extent of domination. Charles A\ protected it from motives of policy, being convinced it was the only means of preventing the heresy of Luther from penetrating into Spain. Philip II. was actuated by superstition and tyranny to uphold it ; and even extended its jurisdic- tion to the excise, and made the exporters of horses into France liable to seizure by the officers of the tribunal, as persons suspected of heresy! Philip III., Philip I\'.. and Charles II. pursued the same course, stimulated by similar fanaticism and imbecility, when the reunion of Portugal to Spain led to the discovery of many Jews. Philip \\ maintained the Inquisition from considerations of mistaken policy, inherited from Louis XI\'., who made him believe that such rigor would ensure the tranquillity of the kingdom, which was always in danger when many religions were tolerated.
TELEPATHY— SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM
BY VICTOR S. YARROS
WHATEVER may be thought and said concerning psychic re- search generally and the relations between the results of that effort and religious belief, it is certain that every truth-seeker will welcome the present attempt to separate the various phenomena called supernormal and psychic and to study them, severally, in a scientific way, by experiment and observation.
One of the phenomena now again challenging attention and under- going experimental verification is telepathy. Naturally enough, the radio rage and the real wonders of national and even international broadcasting have stimulated interest in telepathy. At first sight, the connection between the two things is slight, if apparent at all, but here is what a recent scholarly and imaginative British writer said in a book on broadcasting:
"Wireless is in particular league with ether. . . . Thought is probably permanent, and a means may be found to ally thought with ether and to broadcast and communicate thought without the inter- vention of any mechanical device." (J. C. W. Reith in Broadcast Over Britain.)
What vistas of interchange of thought — in addition to literature, music and serious discussion — this bold speculation opens up !
Of course, conjectures and hopes are not science. But they may encourage and guide science. They lead to the formation of pro- visional theories, while theories require testing and experimentation. In England, we learn from recent correspondence, men of science and lay members of the Society for Psychical Research have been holding seances for the purpose of ascertaining the actuality of tel- epathic communications. Some experiments seem particularly inter- esting, by reason of the standing and character of the men who par- ticipated in it— among others. Lord Balfour, the eminent philoso-
TELEPATHY — SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 219
pher, metaphysician and statesman, and Prof. Gilbert Arnrray, one of the most open-minded, progressive and accompHshcd educators and essayists of Great Britain. We may reproduce here the details of one experiment, which has been discussed with keen interest and wonder.
The investigators met at a private house. Lord Balfour and other distinguished persons were in the drawing room, the doors of which were shut. Prof. Alurray was in the dining room, which was not connected with the drawing room. Lord Balfour, in a whisper, said to his fellow-guests: "I am thinking of Robert Walpole talk- ing Latin to George ILL" Prof. Murray then was asked to come into the drawing room. He promptly said to Balfour: "Something eighteenth century. The latter nodding assent, Prof. Murray con- tinued: *T do not think I shall get it exactly. Dr. Johnson met George III in the king's library, but I am sure he is talking Latin, which he would not do. . . . Wait, I have nearly got it : somebody talking Latin to a king."'
Now, indisputably, this is a most remarkable case — and probably of telepathy. Mere coincidence is practically ruled out by the theory of probability. Moreover, it seems that Prof. Murray had made other experiments and had achieved other results quite as striking, though he had failed on certain occasions. Lord Balfour is reported as commenting in this strain on the series of experiments :
"They seem to prove conclusively that there is a wholly unknown, unexplained, unconjectured method of traversing space between two conscious organisms, upon which neither the theory of sound nor of electricity can throw any light."
It would be too dogmatic to assert that physicists, psysiologists and students of light, sound and touch can never hope to account for telepathy, and that investigations and experiments by them, from their respective points of view, as men of exact science, would be a waste of time. But perhaps for the present the need is rq.her for more empirical experiments by all sorts and conditions of men thar, for theorizing. If telepathy be a fact, it is a fact of tremendous sig- nificance. To demonstrate it beyond cavil or doubt is to necessitate the reconstruction of neurology, psychology and other sciences, in- cluding medicine. Again, if telepathy be a fact, it is important to ascertain what may be called its quantitative value as well as the con- ditions under which it is rendered possible and likely.
Are all human beings sensitive, responsive and delicate enough to be capable of registering and interpreting thoughts in the minds of
22.0 THE OPEN COURT
others under certain favorable circumstances? Or is this power pos- sessed only by certain peculiar persons? Does education, does cul- ture, does imag^ination play any part in telepathy, or are untutored and mediocre persons as susceptible and responsive as their intel- lectual and spiritual superiors? Such questions as these, and others, await answers. Prog^ress will no doubt be slow, but it should be sure, especially if the problem is attacked simultaneously from many points of view.
It may be noted that the British Society for Psychical Researcli has been engaged for many years in such investigations, and that many cases of telepathy have been recorded in its proceedings and in special volumes. Many of those cases raised certain baffling ques- tions and led some writers to the conclusion that telepathy proper cannot be entirely divorced from w^hat F. W. H. Myers called teloes- thesia, which he defined as "any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions independently of the recognized channels of sense, and also under circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained." The last half of this sentence hints at supernormal forms of telepathy and at communications between human beings on this earth and disembodied spirits.
I may quote some of the observations of Mr. Myers in his im- portant work on "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death" on the subject of telepathy in its various aspects, obvious and obscure :
"Men have in most ages believed, and do still widely believe, in the reality of prayer ; that is, in the possibility of telepathic com- munication between our human minds and minds above our own. which are supposed not only to understand our wish or aspiration, but to impress or influence us inwardly in return.
"So widely spread has been this belief in prayer that it is some- what strange that men should not have more commonly made what seems the natural deduction — namely, that if our spirits can com- municate with higher spirits in a way transcending sense, they may also perhaps be able in like manner to communicate with each other. The idea, indeed, has been thrown out at intervals by leading think- ers, from Augustine to Bacon, from Bacon to Goethe, from Goethe to Tennyson.
"Isolated experiments from time to time indicated its practical truth. . . . To make such experiments possible has indeed been no easy matter. It has been needful to elicit and to isolate from the
TELEPATHY — SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 221
complex emotions and interactions of common life a certain psy- chical element of whose nature and working we have beforehand but a very obscure idea.
"If we possessed anv certain method of detecting the action of telepathy, of distinguishing it from chance coincidence or from unconscious suggestion, we should probably find that its action was widely diffused and mingled with other more commonplace causes in many incidents of life. We should find, telepathy, perhaps, at the base of many sympathies and antipathies, of many wide com- munities of feeling, and operating, it may be, in cases as different as quasi-recognition of some friend in a stranger seen at a distance just before the friend himself unexpectedly appears, and the Pheme or Rumor which in Hindostan or in ancient Greece is said to have often spread far an inexplicable knowledge of victory or disaster." The foregoing quotation satisfactorily indicates the scope of telepathy as well as the snares and confusion to be guarded against by the scientific investigator. On the relation of prayer to telepathy, however, a word of qualification should be said. Despite high authority, it is safe to affirm that today no one really considers prayer to be a form of communication between the human being and a higher personality or super-personality. The rational modern advocates of prayer define it as communion ivitJi one's own better and nobler self, as a process of heart-searching and mind-purging. The efiicacy of prayer thus understood is undeniable, even in our skeptical age, but the argument for telepathy must be dropped in this connection and sought elsewhere.
We may profitably recall what scholarly and keen thinkers have said about telepathy in the past. According to Sir William Crookes, telepathy is probably due to brain waves of small amplitude and great frequency. It is conceivable that such waves pass from one brain to another, perhaps to several others, and excite in those brains images similar to those in the first brain. This hypothesis is an interesting and useful one to bear in mind, for it harmonizes with modern physical and metaphysical ideas. But it soon encoun- ters difficulties, as Mr. Myers pointed out. P)rain waves may trans- mit images, but can images be changed and transformed during the process of transmission, and if so. how and under w^hat infiuences ? That images or pictures are modified in the minds of ])ercipients is believed to have been well established ; in fact, in some cases the likeness between the two pictures is quite symbolical and in need of much interpretation.
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Mr. Myers, recogjnizino^ the difficulties in the way of the brain- wave hypothesis, limited himself to the proposition that "life has the power of manifesting itself to life," and ventured the suggestion that, since we do not know how life acts on matter, or how con- sciousness is connected with the brain, telepathy might prove of great aid in clearing up that mystery. "For," to quote him, "from the mode in which some element of one individual life, apart from material impact, gets hold of another organism, we may in time learn something of the way in which our own life gets hold of our own organism, and maintains, intermits or abandons its organic sway."
Since these hints were thrown out, it must be confessed, little advance has been made by students of telepathy. A new and vigor- ous attack on the problem, such as has been undertaken in England, is highly desirable.
In such an attack realists and mystics, scientists and theologians should co-operate effectively and harmoniously. To repeat, telepathy may bring fresh strength and aid to spiritualism, or it may not. Ir may help religious thought and speculation, or it may not. But it is bound to yield vital and important truths while stimulating re- search in various further directions. The United States, by the way, should not lag behind Europe in the fascinating field uf telepathy.
IMAX'S WAR WITH THE UNIVERSE
BY HARDIX T. MCCLELLAND
IT IS not the mystic aspect of reality ruthlessly trampling over the impotent powers of human will and reason which makes the universe seem so grand and august a body of forces. But it is, as in Bertrand Russell's meritorious philosophical argument, the far nobler mysticism of man courageously fighting against the inexor- able laws and lugubriousncss of reality which forces the prime dis- tinction between the apparent impotence of man and the undeniable omnipotence of universal power and persistent necessity. Both daily and eternally man is at war with relentless Fate, with implac- able Time, with the very transcendent and transmutive spectacle of the Universe. But to protect himself nobly as best he can. with courage and sanity and dispassion, the while he carries his torch ot culture forward, makes him free ; it is the attitude of every free man's worship to yearn for spiritual emancipation, "to abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things," aiming to identify his own meagre aspirations with those vast existences which make up the life of the Universe.
This is a token of consolation and serves our occasional tend- ency toward spiritual rehabilitation. But going further, beyond the impending probability of our succumbing to the ever-recurrent plague of social chaos and cultural disaster, we feel, dreadfully enough at times, that this comparatively local struggle is but a pre- visionary and preparatory trial or rehearsal looking forward to an ultimate cosmic failure of human ambition and effort. Man's life, man's origin, growth, aims, experience, ideas, works and destiny — • all are as yet not sufficiently adjusted to the eternal integrity of the Universe to share its balance of power, its pure themistic dignity and its inexorable justice. Man's love and faith are yet not suffi- ciently devout or pure to match the devotional fidelity and creative function of the Divine. Being so much an ephemeral issue of the
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dust, man has not yet risen very high in the scale of Hfe; he has ambitions still of the earth earthy and doe^ not yet aspire wholly to be wise and good. How then can he escape the doom of all finite material existences? How can he offer adequate subterfuge to evade inevitable judgment on his narrow, physical, vulgar and worldly affections? — that last day when the solar system has fallen into ruins and the debris of worlds, moons and asteroids smother his poor lukewarm vestal fire to extinction.
Man's life has significance and importance largely by contrast with the inert mass of inorganic matter, with the apparently aimless and indeed unconscious urge of weight, heat, light and buoyancy. He is thrust into a vulgar, dour, material world and must somehow grow erect and give himself prestige over the rancor and wreck of the non-human. But he must not make the all-too-easy mistake of believing that the natural world affords no worthy pattern for his copying, that the non-human phase of existence bears no ritual worthy of his devotion. Nature was there first, long before man or any of his petty purposes obscured the aim and amplitude of life, long before any of his paltry ideas, ambitions, hopes or fears were even in embryo. The non-human zone of reality was a scene of vast effort and achievement long before man ever came to meditate and plan his own devices for ennoblement ; it laid out man's powers and possibilities for him in the dim and prehistoric antiquity of the world. To say that man is superior or of priority over Nature is foolish and presumptuous ; to hold that he is at all a serious match for the non-human designs and ruthless disposition of the Universe is ridiculous, the clumsy fallacy of pinch-penny minds. It is the usual sophist scheme for giving a man a specious significance and importance in the cosmic game of life and thought and action.
Man is comparatively weak, both in structure and in function, when matched against the forces of Nature, the energies, agencies and destinies already set against him by the external world. The common phrase which seeks to extenuate a man's moral insufficiency by saying "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" is in reverse of the true situation, which shows instead (and too sadly often) that the "flesh is willing while the spirit is weak." It is just this spiritual weakness which is the bane of our modern world, leaving us invari- ably in the lurch just when we are most in need of succor and en- couragement. The flesh-pots of a starving culture always invite a greater majority than the porticoes and gardens of philosophy ; the finite satisfactions of a snecious civilization always bribe more
man's war with the universe 225
devotees than ever to make pilgrimage to Mecca or Helicon. Hence, under duress of such conditions we can never rightfully hope for an ushering in of the millenium so long as we obscure our own vision with mistaken maxims and skew-joint apologetics.
Right here I should like to recall a few examples of opinion to show how precariously our modern civilization is placed, and from them to argue the necessity for greater discretion and decision in all our cultural aims and processes. No one will deny, I am sure, that it is largely by means of whatever cultural education and in- spiring example we can bring into practical use that we can hope to ever effect any actual departure from the brutalities of life, any actual refinement or spiritual regeneration into a nobler manner of existence.
First, the late Professor Carleton H. Parker's suggestions that social control and the validity of economics to handle modern prob- lems can be had and maintained only as we admit and take counsel of the humanism of motive and instinct, and that most of the unrest and insanity of today are merely the manifestations of the different fallacies of our industrial and political psychoses. Human nature is in constant turmoil and war and riot because there is no honest concern to understand its paradoxical demands, its hungering expec- tations of recognition and reward from a sterile and vulgarian age. No one is satisfied with the vicary of government, the rules of the game being set for us by others equally individualistic. Our peren- nial social delinquency results mainly from conditions not suited to the genius and requirements of human nature, conditions which are partly traditional, partly forced, inherited, acquired or otherwise made treacherous adjuncts to human life.
The individualism of might and the collectivism of national im- position, the rhyomism of despotic power as well as the conservative inertia of Bourbon "ideals" are equally fallacious. It is only the right between individuals and the justice of proper desert between nations which can ever be truly said to make lasting foundation for peace, prosperity and happiness all around. Without those two basic principles held in full recognition and honest application to daily duty, life will be ever insecure, government will be ever corrupt, and the world will be ever weary with wickedness and war.
Another phase of worthy public opinion is that of the Boston architect. Dr. Ralph Adams Cram, on the very impending possibil- ity of universal degeneracy and man's pitiful political failure to cope even halfway successfully with the social exigencies of the day.
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There may well enough be set up nominally the various forms of democratic government, but the inevitable necessity in any case for genius, courage, strong and heroic leadership leaves it largely as it was before — an aristocracy ; or, without these, it is really an olig- archy, an oclocracy or perhaps a pluto-doulocracy ever threatened with violence and revolt. Dr. Cram holds that the whole nation (America), almost the whole world, seems bewildered by the chaos of its false philosophies, misled by the folly of its passions and be- trayed by the insanity of its fake pretige-mongering. We should be astonished at the effrontery of our misleaders, especially in put- ting up mediocre demagogues to spread false rumors how they intend to salvage us from a well-nigh total perjorism and lead the wander- ing world out of its tragic crisis. A certain pessimism can be read out of every hegemony creed, every plot to rejuvenate the world, for it is assumed from the very start that humanity is in need of guidance and protection. But this does not minimize the risk we moderns take in our efforts to gain health, wealth and happiness, for the times are critical and the current chaos threatens further rout into the very sanctuary of practically every phase of human activity in religion, literature, art, science, ethics, philosophy and politics, of course. In short, we must share Dr. Cram's final acknowledgement of the adequacy of the title of his volume — that the aristocracy of heroism, genuis and ideal social construction is and always will be "the nemesis of mediocrity," it will alwavs qualify the oligarchic limits of every "pure" democracy and will always have sufficient justice and decency to champion the rights of the submerged but not yet wholly drowned majority. Alany pessimists and near-cynics will be aroused and perhaps redeemed to a more cheerful outlook by the emphatic prospect that the near future may see the world re-Chris- tianized, unified and connected by irenical revival of the old-time monastic orders. But there will perhaps always be controversial and cultural struggles, for, as an instance, with the Pope never again to be the lone arbiter of civilization, many theologians will be more an intellectual obstacle than an economic vehicle to the re-establish- ment of a world-wide religion. We are not told how such a bright future would be affected by the cult of the Virgin which, as Henry Adams says, grew up in Twelfth Century France and materialized in the form of Notre Dame cathedrals because she appealed to the medieval mind as a merciful means to circumvent the austere pater::- alism and justice-power of the Trinity.
.MAX S W AR WITH THE UNIVERSE 11/
Man has no just war with the Universe in the same sense that he has an everlasting conflict within himself hetwecn his good and evil impulses, between the vital tendencies of both body and spirit. But it is an unavoidable conflict : like Miss Winifred Kirkland's fine introduction to the nczv death, it is an "enforced familiarity with fate that is so far mainly an immense yearning receptivity, an un- precedented humility of both brain and heart toward all the impli- cations of survival. It investigates and does not dogmatize. It practices rather than theorizes. It also demands independence and personality in all its workings." The law of bio-genesis as discov- ered and now argued by embryologists. is given in terms of palin- genesis, holding that from conception in the womb to maturity and death, man's life physically and mentally repeats the entire evolu- tionary development of the species. So then could we consider the numerous laboratorv experiments, observations, the behavioristic philosophv, and find that there is a close collaboration between biol- ogy and psychology in trying to solve the problem of the origin of consciousness, of instinct, reflex appetite, intelligence and fidelity in the evolution of consciousness, and that the terms of this evolution can be used to plat the orbit of our spiritual journey through the Universe, tragic and disastrous though it may often seem to be. There there will probably be immediate knowledge and trials of character rather than the superficial pleasantry of novel situations, to intrigue our fancy. Xo idees fixes or forces Fouillces will be there to blurb and chirk up like an economic conference or the cleri- cal notes on the Congressional Calendar, for man cannot bluff or wheedle the Universe like he does his ignorant gullible fellows.
In his two great works. Atala, and Le Genie dii Christionisme, Chateaubriand has shown how we can make an orderly and pro- gressive redemption of Christianity from the pseudo-romanticism of melancholy and sorrowing passion, from the rues gancherics of eighteenth century sensationalism, and by means of nature-worship and the recreation of Gothic culture bring the emotional naturalism of Rousseau to its highest expression, its moments of supreme crisis and decision. It is indeed fortunate for us to have in our midst an actual application of this scheme, shorn of its defective demonology and supematuralism. I refer to Felix Adler's Society for Ethical Culture, the aims and aspirations of which he outlines in his Etiucal Philosophv of Life." Therein will be found the following exhorta- tions: reverence for the personalities of others, especially women: sympathy and consideration for all who are weary with toil and
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heartache ; honest cuhural aims, including both intellectual develop- ment and spiritual ennoblement ; the occidentally accepted fact that Christ is the only great pioneer of moral permanence in the ethical progress of the world ; the worth and inviolability of the human soul ; that any adequate ethical theory, like the valid practice of it, must be independent of theology, politics, industrialism or any other finite worldly interest ; that we should not seek but attribute more worth and integrity in others because it is necessary to consider others as moral beings or ethical units of the world-order if one expects to become or act the part of a moral being himself ; that the affirmation of the eternal verities, with all superlative values and functions openly attached which are contained and continued in the Universe, is man's highest beatitude, one fully as inevitable and unwavering as ever Rossetti could have promised, one which is the supreme prize anyone can ever wrest from life's unequal struggle, life's faltering ideal, life's chastening experience. Even Doctor Durant's manner of getting at the social problem with a live philoso- phy combining Spinoza's ethical democracy. Bacon's naturalism and scientific control, Plato's political free-will and Socrates' dynamic aretism, cannot but eventually have real and durable efifect even in a vulgarian age, and lead us to the honest social theory of a liberal reconstruction backed up by an inclusive ethical brotherhood and a just economic control of all who take shelter in Solomon's House.
Those who can drive through the bumpy detours of Freud's psychology without shock-absorbers and reciprocal springs will find that much of our savage past is pretty well restrained from an open voice in our present policy or action. If the study of disease can reveal a collateral science of mind and psychic healing, then a con- scientious study of our savage inheritance should show further items indicating the scope of our true heredity from Nature, whether it be a descent from the Divine or an ascent from the bestial.
J. W. Wickwar has refuted Freud's sexual theory of dreams on the ground that it springs from the usually brutal Teutonic method of erotic interpretation and is built almost wholly on observation of individuals of low moral type ; in fact, as we go higher in the scale of virtue and character the less do we find a savage past forc- ing expression through the superficial imagery of sleep. To be sure there are instances of multiple psychoses, methectic states in a dual or disturbed personality, but so are there numerous phases of exist- ence in the Universe, various cycles of realitv which may or may not be communicable or intelligible to one another. Perhaps there
man's war with the universe 229
is no real chaos or madness in the Universe because it is perfect, self-sustaining and functions in complete harmony and integrity. Hence it never suffers from man's war against its rulings and disposi- tions, although man himself does often break his half -tempered lance in a too violent attack. But, fortunately for most of us, as Oliver Wendell Holmes points out, "a weak mind does not accumulate enough force to hurt itself ; stupidity often saves a man from going mad." The proper moderation is not to be like the ephectic philoso- phers Carneades &nd Arkesilaos who suspended all judgments and conflicts, but to be like John Stuart Mill whose argument against them and all other sceptics held that "courage and faith are man's greatest weapons against an adverse world; if we were never to act on our opinions because those opinions might be wrong we would leave all our interests uncared for and all our duties unperformed."
THE HERALD OF EMANCIPATION
A MEMORY OF EDWIN MILLER WHEELOCK BY CHARLES KASSEL
WAR. as a subject of ethical speculation, fills a large place in literature. Its champions and apologists have built up whole libraries in its defense, while those who challenge its rightfulness under any circumstances rank among their number some of hvmian- ity's profoundest philosophers and noblest religious teachers.
Upon its face war is absurd and criminal. It is the perpetuation of an order of life we look for only in the lowest nature. The motive of achievement at any cost belongs to a stage of evolution which, in many other departments of activity, man has long outgrown. Though the arbitrament of reason instead of force in the disputes of indi- viduals is not of old date, and trial by battle was carried over from nature into the historic period, courts have long supplanted the con- test of arms in the decision of private quarrels.
It is only in the controversies of peoples that war still persists. There, in spite of logic and religion, and against what would seem to be the urgings of common sense, the old impulses linger, break- ing out into murderous fury, and, when the instinct of nationality is aroused, acts of savagery from which in other moments the hand and heart would shrink in horror, take on a heroic aspect, and even an epic grandeur. How much is biological and how much psycho- logical in the war-madness of nations might be hard to say.
Sometimes, however — and not unoften, possibly, at the present stage of the human story — war, tragic and terrible an instrument though it be, serves a needed use. From its fiery baptism nations rise, now and then, into transformed life and purpose. When noth- ing else can break the stubborn crust of national habit, when abuses have struck too deep a root or false systems of thought cast a hope- less spell over the mass of minds, the sword of some Alexander cuts the knot no statesmanship can untie.
THE HERALD OF EMANCIPATION 231
^\'ar, indeed, to be justified at all. must be looked upon as an act of national surgery, relieving what disease, misfortune or evil cus- tom have brought about. The philosophic mind, musing upon the mutual slaughter of peoples, is driven to the thought of war as a scalpel waelded for human good, though at the cost of suffering and mutilation. Whac the surgeon's table is, therefore, in the lives of individuals the battlefield may be in the lives of nations. It is only in this wav that we may measurably reconcile the thought of an anguished world, writhing in the pangs of universal conflict, with the idea of a beneficent Fate or Destiny working in the affairs of men.
Perhaps it is needful, after all, that nations exulting in their pride of strength, end heedless or forgetful of loftier things, should be wracked and broken till out of suff'ering, in time's alembic, wis- dom is distilled. It is the lesson of common experience magnified to national proportions. No less of peoples than of individuals is it true that those who gain nothing from the discipline of life must suffer the buft'etings of evil fortune. All evils are remediable, if taken soon enough in hand, and a world periodically torn asunder may learn at last to substitute methods of restraint and accommo- dation for self-seeking and mutual distrust. Aleanwhile the shock of battle continues to resound through history and, where moral in contrast with mercenary issues are at stake, exalted and heroic nat- ures hail the contest as a providential agency for correcting wrongs which w'ill not right themselves.
On the whole, perhaps, the great conflicts within and between nations, whatever the immediate cause or pretext, have serv^ed higher ends than could be foreseen. Certain it is, moreover that throughout all human annals, from Homer on. a belief has lived in an influence mightier than man's shaping events to its own will. Awful as is the spectacle of death in mass, disheartening as may be the thought of armies washing out in torrents of blood evils that should have yielded to a more rational process, lofty souls seem always to hear beyond the frightened or boding accents of the time the calm voice of the ages, with its admonition to steadfastness and patience.
In the hour of war it is to our poets we go rather than to our statesmen for prophetic vision of far-off events. The statesman deals with cause and effect, more or less immediate, but something in the poet's genius penetrates beyond to an inner world where events exist in first principles. It was the poet, or what is often the
232 THE OPEISr COURT
same, the prophet, in Edwin Miller Wheelock — flowering later into the magnificent rhapsody he called Proteus — to which we owe the rare utterances that form the burden of recently published install- ments of the present biography. It was scarcely the logical faculty which wrought out those striking deliverances. Had it been so the full vision of coming things would not have been denied to so many others of the fine mindsworking with the same problems at the time. It was rather in his case a native insight into the great prin- ciples underlying the course of history and which are not always discernible by the practical mind.
In the September issue, 1920, of this magazine, we beheld in rapid outline the episodes of a career unusual among clergymen, of however liberal a gospel. The issues of February and July. 1922, March, August and December, 1923, and March and July, 1924, retraced in more leisurely fashion the swifter steps of the biographi- cal sketch and paused to examine the remarkable discourses which, in the fateful years just before and just after the outbreak of the Civil War, came from the inconspicuous pulpit of the Unitarian Church at Dover, New Hampshire.
It was no small piece of intuitive forevision which saw in the raid at Harper's Ferry the symbol of a nation in arms and in the gallows-tree of John Brown the promise and potency of a new crusade, nor was it of merely petty moment that through all the early years of the war-^when defeat sat upon the banners of the North and Northern statesmen shrank from the thought of enforced emancipation — the redoubtable young minister, again and again, in tones like rolling thunders, could proclaim the imperative need of abolition, whether constitutional or unconstitutional, as the indis- pensable condition of union victory and even of national preserva- tion.
It is easy to suppose at this distance of time that all men rea- soned so. Viewed across the chasm of the years Lincoln's great proclamation seems the voice of a united nation, held back only by the desire of a military triumph as a proper setting for so august a decree. Let the reader who cherishes this delusion compare the discourses quoted in earlier portions of this biography with the utterances usual at the time from pulpit and press and the lips of distinguished statesmen at the North.
The victory of Union arms which Lincoln awaited as the fitting hour for oromulgating the plan of negro freedom did not come, but on September 23, 1862, thinking further delay dangerous, the Presi-
THE HERALD OF EMANCIPATION 233
dent availed himself of the check administered to Lee at Antietam and gave out the preliminary declaration requiring the Southern states to return to their allegiance within one hundred days upon pain of having freed by Presidential order all slaves within their borders. It is familiar history, of course, that the Southern states disregarded the proclamation and that it was accordingly followed on January 1, 1863, by a final edict of emancipation.
Thus, in the autumn of 1862, the nation definitely committed itself to the policy which our minister from the very beginning of the war had so insistently urged. The abolitionists had won. The movement which had been a hissing and a scorn among the respect- able and cultivated classes of the North was vindicated, and John Brown's gibbet had become the fount and spring of victory.
The Dover minister was not of the Garrison order of abolition- ists. He was more militant, though he did not share the contempt which John Brown expressed for the followers of Garrison as being reformers who talked and did not act. In general, however, aboli- tionists of whatever class w^ere a distinct type, standing apart in thought from the rest of the community, though sympathetic toward reforms of all kinds. Because, now, abolitionists ceased to be looked askance upon and were taken to the bosom of Republicans, it may not be amiss to pause a moment for a glance at the order of men whose unique triumph meant so much in the nation's history.
Says Schouler in his history of United States of America Under the Constitution, Vol. 6, page 225 :
"The new course which the Civil War now took brought into closer union all who could co-operate for the great end of emancipa- tion and gave political standing to the sect hitherto aloof from affairs of the Free States known as the "Abolitionists" — a mere handful in point of numbers identified with a few Atlantic cities, but respected and courageous in their conviction. Non-voters for the most part, noncombatants, critics and unsparing ones of passing events, their ground was reached by the Northern people and their responsible leaders through the process of dire experience. Advanced Republic- anism came now to recognize that the abolitionists were after all right in their moral conviction, whatever might be said of their prac- tical methods, and to accept them as preachers and forerunners of the faith with a growing reverence. . . , Though great prophets they were no politicians ; and that public opinion must be watched and guided they never regarded. They were the avowed dis-union- ists on the N^orthern side of the line and their plan for getting rid
234 • THE OPEN COURT
of slavery was to leave its defiling company. . . . The abolitionists moreover had grown to be extremely intolerant ; half friends and enemies they anathematized and long training with pen and speech made them pungent in personalities and exasperating to the last de- gree. All who could not come up to their ideal standard they lashed without mercy, which meant for years past every Republican leader from Lincoln down. Long variance with prevailing modes of thought lead them to upraid the churches, to largely repudiate reli- gious worship, to pronounce the society of the age as false and accursed, to distrust even the Almighty for permitting wrong to flourish upon the earth. Yet it must be owned, and the now inevit- able conflict deepened that impression, that they were persons of thorough earnestness, disposed for their cause to make worldly sacrifices, despisers of sham and self-seeking; that they had great moral courage and for opinion's sake braved social ostracism at the North. They contributed of their worldly goods to the cause ; they were plundered, were robbed, practiced self-denial, bore all the martyrdom of menace; some went to jail, one was shot dead. There was much intellectual force among them, especially as writers and speakers. For all this, something in their narrow methods had repelled Lowell, Emerson, the Beechers, Greely and other practical champions of freedom, and even such antislavery statesmen as the two later Adameses, Sumner and Thaddeaus Stevens."
It is a notable tribute to the calmness of Lincoln that while he appropriated the thought of the abolitionists and made it do service for the L'nion cause, his feeling for the people of the states still in rebellion was ever present as a check against hasty or ill-considered action. In his annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862, he took as his text the words, "Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed, without slavery it could not continue," which time and again had formed the burden of the discourses at Dover ; but he was reluctant still to enforce too sudden a change in the status of the negro, lest the disruption of economic and social relations at the South react disastrously both upon the whites and the blacks.
Making mention of the fact that the President in this message pleaded for gradual emancipation, appointing January L 1900, as the time when it should be completed, James Ford Rhodes, whose richly freighted volumes we have so often quoted from, pauses sadly to comment upon the indifl'erence which Lincoln's plea encountered, and to lament that the message was not considered by Congress and that it was without noticeable eflfect upon public opinion. "It is
THE HERALD OF EMANCITATION 235
matter of regret," says this historian, "that fortune had not at this time favored Lincohi ^vith signal miHtary victories to give to his words the strength that enforced the decrees of Caesar and Napoleon."
Whatever the reluctance of the great emancipator, the subject of this biography saw in the preliminary declaration the certain pledge of negro freedom. To him the words of Lincoln were an indubit- able proof that the hand of Providence was guiding the struggle from the beginning. He had felt, and in stirring tones had said, that the bloody strife was divinely meant to rid America from the stain and reproach of slavery, and now his intuitive feeling was vindicated and the handiwork of the Almighty in the shaping of events was plain.
\Mth the great consummation attained, the thought of our preacher turned from the sterner things that were passing to gentler themes. A deep satisfaction filled his soul and it reflected itself in kindlier phrases and softer tones. The nobliest evidence which comes to us in the manuscripts of this changed attitude is a beautiful ser- mon delivered in October, 1862, called "The Christ." The pages of that discourse breathe a spirit unwontedly tender. The warrior nature of the man was set aside and it was the poet, the ministering pastor, who was speaking again.
This discourse is the last of the manuscripts coming to us from the pastorate at Dover. It may, indeed, have been the very last of the sermons delivered from that pulpit, for the late fall or early winter of 1862 saw a farewell on the part of our minister to the priceless friends his first pastorate had made. He was about to take a step unusual in the life of a clergyman — a step which was to give to his utterances of the preceding years an emphasis they could not otherwise have worn, and which, so far as concerned his own future, was to involve consequences he could not foresee.
In every life there is a supreme crisis when the soul is tossed upon the surge of doubt, and then a decision is fateful and charged with mightiest significance. Such was the present hour in the career of our friend. A long life was before him in the midst of those he loved and with lordlier honors in his chosen calling easily within reach. Beside him was the devoted wife of his bosom, his young son, and a little daughter less than two years old. The choice was a hard one between the charm of the home circle and the grateful labors of the pulpit and study, on the one hand, and the call of duty as it sounded in his own conscience on the other, but the behest of
236 THE OPEN COURT
duty, even with its privations and its danger to life and limb, rose above the blandishments of professional glory and even the power- ful feeling of the husband and father.
So it was that in October, 1862, our minister resigned his pulpit at Dover and enlisted as a private in the 15th New Hampshire Infan- try. On November 24, 1862, his congregation met and gave expres- sion to their feeling in words still preserved to us in the manuscript — words sufficiently indicative of the affection and reverence in which he was held by those to whom he had ministered.
A retrospective glance reveals that in the enlistment of the bril- liant and earnest young minister as a soldier in the Union cause his whole future swung away, radically and permanently, from what would have been its destined course. In New England, a pulpit orator of power and grace, even in the Unitarian church, could not long remain obscure, and, even as it was, the name of the minister from Dover was known far beyond the borders of New Hampshire. A few years more, and a call would surely have come to a larger pastorate where the field for his culture would have been wider and less secluded, and here his gifts and intellectual powers would have found an ample theatre for their expression. In the country's liter- ary centers, moreover, the exquisite English of which he was cap- able upon occasions would have led to extended authorship, and this, coupled with his powers as a preacher, might have carved for him a distinguished niche in the Pantheon of illustrious Unitarians.
These hopes, if he cherished them at all, were dashed now for all time. A missionary and crusader in every grain of his being, the years at the South, during the war and after, convinced him that his divinely appointed lot was not in a place of scholarly ease at the North, where a Unitarian would be in the house of his friends, but at the South where Unitarianism was unknown, and, where known, was identified with that abolitionism which had proved the South's undoing. So long as the war lasted, and while reconstruc- tion was in progress, he would have felt it incumbent upon him to remain and do the work allotted to him, whatever his plans for the future. The conclusion of the war and of reconstruction, however, with his experience of Southern feeling and his increasingly sym- pathetic understanding of the Southern viewpoint, saw the convic- tion that Unitarianiasm was in his hands as a fitting instrument for the promulgation of its teachings in the South, and his dedication to the task became all the easier when he found, as the years went
THE HERALD OF EMANCIPATION 237
on, that the health of his beloved wife took kindly to the warmth and brightness of Southern skies.
Whatever the satisfaction to our minister that he was fulfilling a high mission, whatever the happiness which may have come from the light of the returning health in the eyes of his cherished companion, repeated it must be that the new life upon which he entered now blasted for him those higher hopes of pastoral and literary achieve- ments which we might have indulged on his behalf and which, more or less strongly, he too must have felt. To Unitarian thought, admin- istered by whatever hand, the South was intellectually inhospitable, and when promulgated by a Northern minister, by an abolitionist of the John Brown type, by a Union soldier and a friend and servant of the Reconstructionists, the work became almost a forlorn hope. The beautiful discourses which were spoken from his simple pulpit in the sunny South to the merest handful of a congregation may rejoice us now as we read them, as they rejoiced the sympathetic few who heard them, but their influence was bounded by the nar- rowest limits, as he knew must necessarily be the case. Patiently and uncomplainingly he did a work which there was no one else to do and the inevitable reward was a life of comparative obscurity, literary and ministerial.
Let it not be thought, moreover, that the surrender of the Dover pulpit was an act of an enthusiast drunk with the victory of his cause and who saw before him the victor's meed. The hour of the resig- nation and enlistment was a gloomy one. The North, with whose fate in the light of history the emancipation of the negro was so closely blended, maintained a solemn stillness when that word was uttered by its President, and vented its feeling in the fall elections of 1862. The importance of the anti-slavery crusade as a necessary preventive of foreign intervention, and as an essential prerequisite to Union success, was largely lost upon the North, and the heart of Lincoln was saddened. Says Rhodes in Volume 4, page 162, of his great work :
"Lincoln himself, with his delicate touch on the pulse of public opinion detected there was a lack of heartiness in the response of the Northern people. . . . His despondency is revealed also in his reply to an address by a pious Quaker woman and in his Meditation on the Divine Will, in which his belief in a divine Providence min- gled with his present disappointment to produce doubt whether in- deed God were on our side. ... In October and November elec- tions took place in the principal cities with the result that New York,
238 THE OPEX COURT
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, all of which except New Jersey had cast their electoral voice for Lincoln, declared against the party in power. The elections came near being what the steadfast Republican journal, the New York Times, declared ihem to be, a vote of want of confidence in the President. Since the elections followed so closely upon the Proc- lamation of Emancipation it is little wonder the Democrats said that the people protested against Lincoln's surrender to the radicals, which was their construction of the change of policy from a war for the L'nion to a war for the negro, and many writers have since agreed with them in this interpretation of the result."
It might readily have been foreseen that the talented preacher from Dover would not long remain a private in the ranks. A chap- laincy awaited him, and in that office he accompanied to New Orleans the regiment of volunteers which was to form a part of the Bank's Expedition. The regiment was composed of nine- months' men and was raised under the call of President Lincoln for ninety thousand.
Among the manuscripts is a discourse delivered evidently to his regiment before their embarkation, and it is eminently deserving of quotation in full.
"David, the ruler of Israel, was involved in a terrible war. The peace of the land was unjustly disturbed by sedition and revolt. There was much suffering and hard fighting but through it all David was filled with the ever-deepening conviction that the Lord was his strength, teaching his hands to war and his fingers to fight.
"His foes were God's foes. He knew God to be on his side. So we doubt not that God is with us. He must be with us for it is against his truth and justice that our foes are fighting. God speaks to us and in us and bids us do what we can to maintain the right, through all griefs, however bitter, through all conflicts, however stern.
"We know that we are right, my friends, just as David knew it, by the living witness of our souls. We need no other proof. We know that God does keep us and bless us and cheer us and will con- tinue to help us So long as we seek and try to deserve his help. We know that our brave men have gone out to fight not for evil but for good — not for Satan's sake but for God's.
"We, the peace-loving men of the North, having tried reason- ing, expostulation, compromise, all in vain, to ward off a terrific evil, have at last left our quiet homes and taken up arms religiously
THE HERALD OF EMANCIPATION 239
— under a clear sense of duty — in defense of a principle greater than life.
"The defense of justice, law, country, to a true man, is a neces- sity. He is obliged to defend these, cost what it will. A necessity is laid upon him so to do even as it was laid upon Paul to preach the gospel of Christ. Says Paul: 'Necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is unto me if T preach not the Gospel.'
"\\>. then, who are going into this earnest conflict put on the Christian armor and go our way feeling that in very truth we are carrying the banner of the Lord. If we enter upon it as a religious war, if we go to it in obedience to the call of God, we shall be invinc- ible. It was said of the soldiers of Cromwell that they were doing the Lord's work. One the eve of battle they lifted up hymns and prayers against the sky. No swearing was heard nor was a drunken man seen among them, and in no battle, from first to last, were their backs ever seen by the enemy.
"Let this regiment keep profanity and intemperance out of our camp and lean upon the Almighty arm. and the same may be said of us. The spirit of a long line of ancestry will roll through us and breathe upon us. we shall be lifted out of ourselves and look with contempt upon death. If we have needed in peace the hope, the strength, the inspiration of Christian faith, much more will we need them now. Be faithful to your own souls if you would have God upon your side. Say nothing and do nothing that you may not carry up to him in prayer.
"We have learned already in this war that the genuine stuff that enters into the composition of a soldier must be a courage higher than that inspired by rowdyism or rum. Ellsworth's Zouaves were drawn from the groggeries and bar rooms of New York to fight the battles of our country ; and the regiment broke in pieces at the first shock of battle at Bull Run and went back to its holes of vice. But in that battle there was an Ohio company which drew off with ranks unbroken. They were without rations from Friday afternoon till Monday. They went through that terrible fight and long march with empty stomachs, but full hearts, and three days afterwards were rested and ready to fight again. On returning to Cincinnati they were met by a grateful people with showers of roses as the company who kept cool amid the rout. Their captain was one who a few years ago was seen playing in the streets of a New England village, a boy belonging to an earnest Christian home, within which his manly virtues were nurtured and prepared.
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"My friends, we are beginning the soldier's life. Let us begin aright. Much depends on this. There is a tendency in the soldier's position, in the entire change of his mode of life, to make him drop to a lower moral level than that which he held at home. Camp life, with its novelties worn away, is often to be felt as a dull and hard routine. It is rest, drill, guard-duty, and then guard-duty, drill and rest. The checks and safe-guards of home are removed. Gambling, profanity and drinking are yielded to even by those who have never practiced them before and men fall who would have been safe else- where and who would be safe still if they felt any touch of the old •home life. Let us strive to be at once good citizens and good sol- diers, brave men and honest Christians — still guarding the old sanc- tities of home while we bear the sword, and sending a daily counter- acting influence into whatever temptation and sin may surround. Thus shall we gain the approving smile of heaven, and we shall be able to say, with David of old. It is the Lord who teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight."
It is by a peculiarly happy chance that we find preserved for us the story of this regiment in the early stages of its history, and the account affords an interesting glimpse of that life so new and unac- customed, into which our minister was now initiated. The report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New Hampshire for the year ending May 20, 1865, as contained in A^olume 2. page 447, of the Records of the Neiv Hampshire Historical Society, of Concord. New Hampshire, and presented by that Society to the Newbury Library at Chicago, describes the journey of the regiment to its destination and its preparation for actual service :
"On the morning of the 13th of November, Colonel Kingman having been ordered to proceed with his command to New York and report to Major-General N. P. Banks, the regiment broke camp, marched to the railroad depot, c)nd at 8 o'clock A. M. left on a spe- cial train for New York via Worchester and Norwich. Arriving at Allyn's Point about 7 P. M.. went on board the steamer 'City of New York' and reached New York early the next morning. Novem- ber 14th. Proceeded to Park P>arracks at 8:30 o'clock A. M. where rations were furnished. At 4 o'clock P. M. the line of march was taken up for Union Race Course, Jamaica. Long Island, distance nine miles. Arriving there at 8 :30 o'clock P. M. the officers and men were obliged to seek quarters for the night upon seats occupied by spectators at the races, as the tents which were to have been sent in advance of the regiment had not arrived. Next day, shelter tents
THE HERALD OF EMANCIPATION 241
were furnished and tliose, though better than no tents, afforded but a poor protection against the storm of this day and the resulting weather and the men suffering extremely. On the 17th their hearts were gladdened by the arrival of A-tents.
"This encampment was designated as Camp N. P. Banks and was under the command of Col. T. E. Chickering. 41st Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers. Here the regiment remained while the details of the secret expedition of which it was to form a part were completed. On December 3rd the portion of the regiment which had not already gone through struck their tents and marched to Brooklyn City Armory, where they remained during the night.
"The next day companies E, G, I, and the remainder of Com- pany H embarked on board the Propeller Prometheus. This detach- ment was commanded by Col. Kingman and was accompanied by the Adjutant, Quartermaster, Surgeon and Chaplain. Sailed Decem- ber 5th and reached Fortress Monroe, after a rough passage Decem- ber 8th at 2 o'clock A. M. Made Hilton Head where a supply of coal was taken December 13th. arriving at Ship Island December 21st, at 3 o'clock P. M. proceeded immediately to New Orleans, thence to Carrollton, w^here we disembarked December 22nd and encamped on Shell Road, joining the detachment already arrived.
"The location of the camp was low and near the swamps and the frequent rains soaked the ground so that often times the mud was very deep, rendering the situation very unpleasant. On the 22nd of the month, however, the condition of affairs was somewhat bet- tered by removing the camp a short distance to drier ground. On the 28th of January the regiment was assigned to the First Brigade, Second Division, 19th Army Corps and ordered to remove to Camp Parapet. Up to this time there had been considerable sickness in the regiment but the losses by death had been small.
"On February 2nd the Brigade was reviewed by Gen. Dow. On the 19th the Brigade marched to New Orleans and passed in review before General Sherman and on the 15th received orders to be ready at a moment's notice to embark for Baton Rouge. On the 20th Chaplain Wheelock was detailed as Deputy Superintendent of Negro Labor by special order No. 78 Headquarters Department of the Gulf."
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To the student familiar with what was to come the detail of Chaplain Wheelock as Deputy Superintendent of Negro Labor, not- withstanding its inconspicuous place in this recital, is full of mean- ing. His attitude toward the negro question was well known and it was altogether fitting that any task affecting the welfare of the blacks near the Union army posts should be entrusted to his hands. The story of that surpassingly interesting work, in the midst of an environment menacing to his very life, must be reserved for another section of this biography.
SCIENCE AND THE END
(Concluded)
J. K. SNOWDEN"
XXXVI
BUT. in the light of what has been said, it appears that our pres- ent woes, though unexampled and not ended, are proportionate to the aberration which induces them. They seem a doubtful and amazing episode of the human story ; but to think them dispropor- tionate would be to refuse a lesson of experience and to leave the story signifying nothing. A science that should have no such ex- planation of them would be incompetent. It must suffer an eclipse very naturally, and credit go to those teachers who explained them so, with whatever notions of the fault. A science that should say there was no fault, and refer such woes to a law of Nature suffi- ciently known and unqualifiable, would justly incur contempt and hatred. They condemn the existing civilization. In Europe the balance of Nature had been out for at least half a century, and in the greatest countries far out. When the crash came it was equiva- lent to that error.
Consider the actual manner in which it came. This should per- suade any mind still doubtful of the part which feeling plays, and of the balance. Germany, which launched the war, had given us formerly music and a literature attesting a beauty of feeling as great as any ; but it is not doubtful that a one-sided science and a philosophy based upon it engrossed her, and had misled her. The perversion from which we suffered, and suffer still, was in her case espoused and logically followed ; for she was not only, like other nations, intent upon material gains, she was steeped in that philoso- phy. Nietzsche, unnatural and keen-thinking, had found his inter- preter for war in Bernhardt, and his popularizers in the whole
244 THE OPEN COURT
pedantic system of intellectual Germany. This nation was prepared to carry out the philosophy with a horrid consistency. In peace her chosen diplomats had no true sense of human feeling, and when she welcomed war her leaders ignored it. She roused a less logical world against her. But only the logic of events could have sug- gested that, among mankind, the fittest are not the least humane.
Consider, then, the sequel. In the struggle human dignity had risen to great heights of instinctive promise as well as of action ; but the world, unaware of its secular authority, could make little of that promise wisely. The lesson of events is only glimpsed; there is no philosophy to confute that of Nietzsche, and a welter of other conflicts, loosed about us by material needs or notions, grows turbulent without new guidance from either science or religion. They are the quarrels of blind leaders of the blind on both sides, and some are bloody. What Nietsche was to the ruling class of Germany, Karl Marx is to unhappy millions with little difference; for, although he speaks for human dignity, it is to material means that he directs their thought. In the absence of true guidance, there is no reason why these conflicts should not continue to the point of exhaustion, sowing the seed of others to come, which in turn will ripen and seed as those of war do ; so that for wasted hopes and wasted life, tears and blood, the sole comfort is that ignorance finds when it feels.
In a sense, western civilization was always at stake. Time after time it has passed through crises. But it was never so tired, and between this and former crises there is no true resemblance. This crisis is unique as to cause, magnitude and possibilities, and it is without present remedy. No sure "touch of beauty moves away the pall from our dark spirits."
XXXVII
It is reasonable to think that the crisis will not end until the bal- ance of Nature shall have been redressed, instinctively or wisely.
What prolongs it is that material dispute is like jealousy, making the meat it feeds on. Following war, there is in most lands the mere struggle for existence, desperate as it cannot have been in early ages, when every man was face to face with Nature. A cheap out- cry against materialism is idle ; it mocks the victims. In any case
SCIENCE AND THE END 245
men will never cease to seek material gains, or at need to fight for them. and. when the need is great, considerations of human dignity are baffled or grow fierce. The struggle is lit with ideals formed by unassisted admiration, in the general ignorance of man's adven- ture; but they tend to be forgotten if gentle, and do but intensify the ordeal if not. They may even bear the fruit of horrors like those of the meanest war. as in Russia. War and social strife are alike in this, whatever happens, that it is only their inception and opening phase which excites any passion of sacrifice. Broils of in- stinct both, they must be spent and disappointed. It is only then that some attempt is made to find the normal balance, and in no material civilization will that be ever found.
We are in a vicious circle. It is a civilization which, ignoring half the law of life, provokes feeling to incessant revolts that are themselves ignorant ; and it must change. Natiiram cxpcllas fiirca tamcn usque recurrct.
XXXVIII
Apart from thought and a new spirit, what other means of redress can there be? X^one political, because the politics of such a civilization are always concerned with ways and means — with con- siderations in which any statesmanship is caught in a net. Xone religious, for lack of assurance, grasp and aim. X^one artistic, since art is always a mirror catching the tones of its time ; those artists who miss or reject them are neglected.
It is notable that another obsession, that of curiosity, perverts all kinds of concern for our spiritual plight. The conquests of science have prepossessed them. Religious or esthetic, they have no very valiant trust in old principles, but rather expect that some discovery may change these any day, and many pietists and artists go them- selves in search of discoveries, as if religion and art were branches of science. This is how it happens that, in an age singular for its exact knowledge, what used to be known as the black arts are in fashion, and one of them aspires again to religious value. But the case of art proper is a stranger instance.
Here is a domain that science did not and cannot infringe upon with any challenge of authority. Art had no beliefs to be recanted, or cryptic writings to be examined for their ill-known sense. Its
246 THE OPEN COURT
■quest is not truth, but visible beauty; it has developed, apart and purely, from another instinct than that of curiosity. Science could enrich art's resources, but had nothing to do with its spirit, which must remain constant in whatever new expressions might be given to beauty. But votaries of art have tried to use the scientific method ; expecting something new, they have attempted research. It is an age of much futility in this province of pleasure. Music and the graphic arts alike are kept in countenance by men who have for- gotten or have not known the authority of beauty, and are made ugly to please the public appetite for novelty.
Impulses of instinctive redress there are in plenty, but they have either little wisdom or no ascendency. The most popular and help- ful of new creeds, calling itself Christian Science, is one of reso- lute self-illusion, even as to death. Humanitarian effort, however noble, beats the air as truly as Mr. Ford's faith in all-sufificient pro- duction is a dream of Alnaschar. We owe sanity chiefly to the inextinguishable interests of love and play, which are as much mis- trusted by theorists as they are valued. The balance is not known.
XXXIX
The claim of art to a larger place in life is urged eloquently and well. It has been heard since hand craft began to perish as uses were found for steam, and does not now, as at first, deny value to machinery, but insists on beauty as a human concern and civiliz- ing agent. This claim is never denied. It is only heard like a counsel of perfection, with regret or indifference, by the busy mass of men. They do not suppose it vital. The assumption is that life as we know it is fairly normal, and that what is really pleaded con- cerns artists most ; who, after all, should be glad of many oppor- tunities to design and to advertise goods for sale, of new things like the cinema, and of more picture buyers than the world can ever have produced before. Art is a good thing, and beauty pleasant enough, but there is nothing to be done about this demand for more wages. There is, in fact, less and less to be done by good causes that cannot enter politics against material rivalries, or imitate the material tactics of strike and "ca' canny."
It occurs, in any case to few minds that, in order to be normal, all things men are conscious of, whether visible or not, must have
SCrENCE AND THE END 247
some tincture of beauty. What is the value allowed to a noble choir of poets? It is the poet to whom new thoughts capable of uplifting us come first. He is the only prophet. This may be known and felt in America, proud of a literature for the first time, as it was known and felt in England when the great \^ictorians wrote their masterpieces. But how many men in a thousand are touched with admiration more than to think there is some soul of meaning in things foolish ? There was issued, a year ago, the report of a Royal Commission on the teaching of English, the greatest report ever printed for an English government, and by common consent wise, practical and necessary. It is already dished. Some fragments only of its wisdom can take eflFect, whereas it should have done for all schools what Sir Arthur Ouiller-Couch is doing for a few for- tunate students at Oxford. Properly, one of the arts is education. In place of it there is widely used a training for the material strug- gle, which cannot be escaped. The importance of education for progress is above that of any art else, yet in England there has been no first-class IMinister of Education.
XL
The balance will redress itself, and, great as they are, the mis- eries of our time will pass. We are taught as never before ; but we shall not perish like one of Nature's temporary stocks, because we are shaped by factors stronger than the errors they permit, unfailing mentors of our ignorance. A gain proportioned to the stress we feel must follow.
To determine this subtle balance, kept eternally against error and for our advance, should be a task compensating men for any loss of old laws and prophets. For it is not a balance of scales in which we are austerely weighed. It is the propitious balance of a yacht that sweeps on her course, poised between wind and water, and there is this difference to make the metaphor poor, and our case better than a yachtsman's, that, the great factors of beauty and peril being constant, we may know them. We should be able with a teachable hand to feel the tiller. It indeed seems that, learn- ing to admire well the travelling poise, and furnished with the chart here asked for, we might avoid the most distressing errors. Is this not the cosmic use of man's intelligence, foolish until then?
248 THE OPEN COURT
It is not possible to doubt that the present hour is big in human history ; nor can one envisage without some awe the events of two brief generations, prior to which, for countless ages, the race had not as it were lived together however carelessly, and no man knew that it must have a future and a heritage. Those great events and the increment of knowledge suggest the moment, painful like any birth, when a long gestation ends in consciousness. What is to come must be unsure ; but unlike our fathers, who took creation to be an act accomplished and unfortunate, we may look forward boldly. One sighs to remember that a thousand years are as one day for this evolution, and how far off and like a mirage was Mil- ton's vision, in his time, of our own land and people. Yet there is more warrant now for writing of the whole western world what he wrote of England :
"Methinks I see her as an eagle, mewing her mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam ; purging and scaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radi- ance ; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about amazed at what she means."
XLI
Milton wrote nobly, praising liberty, but the eagle sight belongs only to wisdom. Three centuries have not served to scale our eyes. Therefore, if any glimmer of the mid-day beam now enters them, it is thankless to lament the means by which our liberty grows wiser. The case is that we are not gods but men. How is it likely that such a burst of knowledge could have come without such warning of new responsibility? Let us be glad that this appears adequate. It is conceivable that gods might have been skilled mari- ners ; but for men, who had neither learnt to read the chart, guessed its value nor at first known of it, the art of seamanship was all to learn. We are indeed so thrown out of balance that he ship might be foundering, but some panic is good to begin with. Intelligence has this inferiority to instinct, that it can be conceited.
There was no conceit, there was even a kind of mother-wisdom, in the mood of Milton's vision, splendid with optimism. This mood always will be wise. It has the courage of life itself, which
^ SCIENCE AXD THE FXD 249
we have seen to be strong^er than all destruction or dismay ; and it must be the spirit of lasting religions. For what has come to the world is a new Apocalypse. To say so is not to be a voice crying in the wilderness, but to be one of many voices in the populous republic of letters who now, with one thought or another, praise beauty and proclaim its authority ; and, as in Milton's day but far more universally, "there be pens and heads sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas, where- with to present as with their homage and fealty the approaching reformation." We are "to outlive these pangs and wax young again, destined to become great and honorable." It is not doubtful. We have only to know first the ways of prosperous virtue — ways till now divined but doubted, admired but not authenticated, and lately lost. They will be established against wandering and question.
It is not without wonder at the prophecy that one sees how this must follow from the argument of the Areopagitica, making its faith in freedom good ; nor without reverence for that order of the universe which Milton saw. as through a glass darkly.
XLII
Why should it be feared that any true doctrine or good thought may be lost in such a reformation? As before, the law and the prophets are not destroyed but fulfilled, and with this knowledge, that fulfillment is itself the greatest of laws. The wonder is that a poet should have argued for liberty, the proved agent of that knowledge, as if he were aware of it ; for to say that truth needs no policies and in saying so to expect a prosperous virtue implied this. But it is a far greater wonder that all men should presently know virtue to be part of the natural order, whereupon it must be the business of states no less than that of individual men, and govern- ments be judged by their concern with it. We might be well con- tent that such a meagre admiration as that of brute force cannot then mislead men. or ever again shake the faith of noble minds in a cataclysm. It is more than what they themselves admired as con- trary to Nature will be valid, like the aims of a Ministry of Health.
Fear of such knowledge can only, indeed, trouble those who believe in an exclusive revelation. Instead of such a temporal and precarious light, there is something infinitely greater. There are
250 THE OPEN COURT
natural conceptions of goodness and of the mysterious Cause of things, such conceptions as every people and time must form ; and it should be sufficient for good men to know that conception which responds best to the great abiding factors will best endure. As the new faith spreads and gains discretion, it must try them out.
But with this prospect no hierarchy, for plain reasons, can be satisfied. To welcome it would admit a misgiving where something is taught as exclusive truth, a test of that which claims to be above question, and an authority not that of the church itself. Ex hypothesi a church's authority is the highest, and has in one strong case avowed itself infallible. How is any test of it to be allowed? Here is a bold heresy bringing gifts, the gifts of a correcting and sup- planting patronage, and every priest who is typical must murmur Timeo Danaos. Doubtless the "noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight," will be heard still.
There is one European people in whom the love of liberty is not lively, and there are others who let superstition choke it, though restive otherwise. These may be subservient to Rome. There are peoples outside Europe to whom the notion that life is anything worthy will appear too strange to let them accept the knowledge readily. But, although it is knowledge that will not be destroyed, and does not resemble in this the books of the Cumaean Sibyl, those rulers who may reject it will stand in the place of Tarquin, and their sway can only be beneficent as they grow humbler.
XLHI
An older prescience than Milton's excites admiration. The supreme merit of Greek thought, which could not dream of prog- ress, shone in its perception that esthetic sense is as much a part of wisdom as reason is. We have to return to this, retrieving the Renaissance, and with that return, the Renaissance is found to be an inexpugnable movement. It was correctly called a humanism. Confused, and not without grave error, it surged in the true line of our advance, and now, with a larger thought of beauty than even great Athenians knew, we see its consummation coming.
Alas! The thought may be larger, and better grounded: it is not, as in their day it was, a common heritage. A mind as subtle as Lord Balfour's could fail some twenty years ago, no more, to
SCIENCE AND THE END 251
seize this hope ; because there is no standard of beauty and never can be one, he missed it. Lord Balfour made instead an ingenious plea for "authority." Man, he said, can be sure of nothing but that, and, undermining for it a true foundation of belief, he did not ask, Oiiis custodiet ipsos cusfodcsf Yet the answer to that question brushed him like an angel's wing. There is a pathetic passage that shows it. He had seen that esthetic faculty is not evolved to aid the struggle for existence, or by it, and to say so helped his plea against naturalism. But mark : beauty's miracle abashed him as much as any man.
"We must believe," he wrote, though baffled, "that somewhere and for some Being there shines an unchanging splendor of beauty, of which in nature and in art we see (each of us from his own standpoint) only passing gleams and stray reflections, whose dif- ferent aspects we cannot now co-ordinate, whose import we cannot fully comprehend, but which at least is something other than the chance play of subjective sensibility or the far-off echo of ancestral lusts."
Strange oversight! By man's mere gift of admiration, which beauty fosters, the nicest errors of authority — and some that were gross and ugly — have been directly judged. Because of this gift morals are more than mere utilities. It is also the heart of worship.
XLIV
There is no necessity to review the successive philosophies by which esthetics have been kept in a narrow field since the liberal thought of Athens defined itself imperfectly. Their scholastic hold is complete, of course, but will be loosed as it has been from time to time by new glosses. Schoolmen can only follow and do not pretend to lead the thought of their age. It is sufificient to see, for the present purpose, that the lore of philosophy, with that of theol- ogy and metaphysics, must undergo a sharp revaluation and much of it be written off. Whatever zeal may atone for the negligence of science, urgent to repair this and to claim ascendancy, the schol- astic delay must be reckoned with. Happily, there is no authority left so strong as that which science wields.
There is less need than there was thought to be of such intel- lectual glosses. The simplest facts of life, ascertained, have more than their value, which was never such as to influence men's be-
252 THE Oi'EN COURT
iiavior. and it is certain that a distinction between what is moral and what esthetic has nowhere been kept by the common sense of a people. In all languages, one may be sure, men have spoken of beautiful thoughts and fine deeds. It is not a Renaissance idiom. The ancient Hebrews praised the beauty of holiness and of wisdom, and even "the beauty of the Lord." This distinction, convenient but a false boundary, will not make the larger thought difficult for men in general, nor for the free churches. Now that these latter have cast behind them the fear of torture after death, or think of it vaguely, they will readily understand that it is beauty which most engages them — the beauty of heroism in many spiritual and moral aspects that dignify the life of man, and above all in that martyred teacher who, for Christians, was its divine incarnation.
It is among these churches and the fortunate peoples whom they serve that the verification of progress will have its first welcome. The free churches are steeped i'-- humanism, and have not opposed to science the stiffest incredulity. Humanism may be said to have found in them, or even to have devised, a mysticism ; and, however embarrassed still with outworn dogmas, they are a soil broken for new seed. The belief in progress took root here quickly. They had adapted to it much of their teaching when, in the heat of war. it withered, and the proof of its integrity and great worth is their justification. More : as against the popedom from which they broke away, this proof is the warrant of their liberty, their tolerant out- look and their bold reforms. It illuminates history. Reforms and a toleration bolder still must be its natural consequences among them, as liberty prospers.
But, all obstacles notwithstanding, I am persuaded that this revelation must take effect upon the world's life more rapidly, if yet unequally, than any new concept of past ages could have hoped to do. Not only is the effect made possible, obviously, by an organiza- tion for the wide diffusion of thought and knowledge, but it was the sun in a wise fable, not the wind, that stripped the traveler of his cloak. This revelation is genial. There must come a time, per- haps not distant, when the physical masteries and sleights that now beguile men will be commonplace, and there will then be natures quickened by them but not satisfied, more than there now are, ready to take a view of life which allows it lustre.
SCIENCE AND THE END 253
XLV
This. then, is the darkest hour before a dawn. But one remem- bers how. even in the nijjhtmare of war, a war not glorious but abominable, it was as if men instinctively knew what we are and shall be. such was the lustre shining on a race of heroes abused. For the choice of good rather than evil is a heroism. It calls but rarely for complete self-sacrifice, and only then can we glimpse again, for a moment, the splendor of that instinctive knowledge. However clear the revelation may be, it is not in cold blood that men aware of peril and beauty will ever see themselves as they are.
It is in cold blood that men have asked, but will not ask in time to come, why there is a contradiction between the bidding of plain self-interest and all that thrills and ennobles us, the conditions of survival and what makes life worth living; or that they have doubted that right must come before might and is the stronger force, so that it will not do to calculate, forgetting the contradiction or puzzled by it, but we have to use our strength liberally, as Nature uses hers. It was in cold blood that pathetic Jews tried long to think that godliness must prosper ; and, in a bewilderment like theirs, we ourselves allege sometimes that honesty is the best policy. The truth rather seems to be packed in what was for most minds a dark saying: "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it."
One sees preparing among free peoples high-minded and laud- able a happier civilization, rid of servile fancies, endowed with subtle knowledge and great powers, not abusing these gifts but enamored of a noble and manifest destiny. The peoples do not agree, in imagi- nation, to worship in one church, or own one code of morals, or enrich one school of art, or practise one form of government, since Nature loves variety in all things; but, in a willing subjection to this destiny, they admire the variety and have one motive. It is a motive that should make men modest.
254 THE OPEN COURT
XLVI
For what are we, beneath the Pleiades? We are a race that, after all, must vanish utterly away within a period, as Lord Bal- four had reflected, trifling beside those tracts of time with which astronomers, and even geologists, "lightly deal in the course of their habitual speculations." We live and die, and our greatening race lives and dies : to what purpose ? Mystery, and stupendous question !
I do not think that science will tell us the answer to this last question, or that all men will ever guess it alike. There are two guesses. Either the miracle of our conscious life, with all its achieve- ment and dignity, has no purpose but itself, and this may satisfy our heroisms ; or it portends an end unknown to us. I reflect, and it appears that to know the answer is not needful to men's right behavior under the miracle. Is the mystery? They are humbled by it more certainly than by any understanding of a sublime environ- ment.
It is indiflferent to the purpose of this writing whether one guess or the other be preferred. Here, however, is something greater than our minds and spirits, and everywhere men have thought it rational to worship this greatness as intelligent, rather than to think all due to the play of unconscious forces. It seems rational because, otherwise, these forces in all the universe would be inferior to a passing show, and we, so noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, should exceed what we come of and obey what is not sensible. We must regard the miracle, in that case, as not only an ancient but a lusus naturae; the less contains the greater. This I see. but not to dread with mind or spirit the God of such an evolution.
To whatever purpose one may submit quietly and gladly. We cease as single beings from the earth so that the race may know love and progress, and it may be that no life's excellence warrants a confident thought beyond death ; yet, because our race itself is to cease at an unknown climax of development, the thought is tenable. Who, if he could, would annul the comfort of it? I only think that men have been too much concerned: God's beauty here and now shines clearlv.
THE CALIPH'S DREAM
(From the Arabic of El lomal) BY T. G. LA MOILLE
The city slumbered while the heat Drove men and camels from the street. In wakeful drowsing Ibrahim The Caliph dreamed this warning dream :
Carried on carpet Fancy wrought
Of scenes from Farther Dreamland brought.
The Caliph rested many a mile
To Somewheie-Happy-All-the-\Miile.
Gone were his cares of Realm and State. Vanished his fears of Death and Fate. Full to the brim his cup of bliss. And love ne'er wearied of Love's kiss.
In maze of roses wandering.
He found veiled shape, with folded wing.
Who to the startled Caliph said :
"Here dwell the dead and thou art dead."
That glimpse of death, like knife toward heart. Made Ibrahim from slumber start. And Allah praise that he just dreamed. And life even sweeter than had seemed.
Siesta ended and that day Awoke, saw crowds at work and play. The Caliph now was glad to write : Enjoy Today — Too Soon Comes Night.
256 THE OPEN COURT
IMMORTAL
BY ROBERT LOUIS BUR(iESS
Man's life, though short, is longer Than I reckoned it in youth
When eternal death seemed stronger Than the living moment's truth.
For now I feel maturing
Impulses in my heart That prove life is enduring
Enough to play its part.
Which is but to set moving
Immortal tendencies Without minute disproving
Of small mortalities
5 *^-"'
By Ernst Cassirer
Translated by \\'iLLiAM Curtis Swabev, Ph.D., and Marie Collins Swabey, Ph.D.
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The First of the PAUL CARUS MEMORIAL LECTURES will be ready February 1st. It is entitled
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
By Professor John Dewey of the Columbia University
Chapter CONTENTS
I. Experience and Philosophic Method.
II. Existence as Precarious and Stable.
III. Nature, Ends and Histories.
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Sacctieri's Eiiciides Vindicatus
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