2-t
OstO<*\cL
GIFT OF IRVING LEVY
THE
BIBLE OF NATURE ;
OR, THE
PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.
A Contribution to the Religion of the Future.
BY
FELIX L. OSWALD.
i — i j
"Light is help from Heaven. v — G. E. Lessing.
New York :
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,
28 LAFAYETTE PLACE.
PUBLIC
73345A
ASTC * v AND
Copyrighted,
By Felix L. Oswald,
1888.
TO
THE MEMORY OF
BENEDICT SPINOZA,
THIS WORK IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS.
PAGE.
Introduction, - - - - - 9
PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
CHAP.
I. Health, - - 18
II. Strength, - - = ... 33
III. Chastity, ----- 45
IV. Temperance, - 56
V. Skill, ... 73
MENTAL MAXIMS.
VI. Knowledge, - - - - - 85
VII. Independence, - 95
VIII. Prudence, ----- 106
IX. Perseverance, ... - 116
X. Freethought, .... 124
MORAL MAXIMS.
XL Justice, 137
XII. Truth, 148
XIII. Humanity, .... 160
XIV. Friendship, ----- 172
XV. Education, .... 182
CONTENTS.
OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.
XVI. Forest Culture, -" - - - 194
XVII. Recreation, - - 203
XVIII. Domestic Reform, - 212
XIX. Legislative Reform, - 221
XX. The Priesthood of Seculajbism, - . 231
GIFT OF IRVING LEVY
THE BIBLE OF NATURE ; OR, THE PRIN-
CIPLES OF SECULARISM.
INTRODUCTION.
From the dawn of authentic history to the second
century of our chronological era the nations of an-
tiquity were beguiled by the fancies of supernatural
religions. For fifteen hundred years the noblest
nations of the Middle Ages were tortured by the in-
sanities of an antinatural religion. The time has
come to found a Religion of Nature.
The principles of that religion are revealed in the
monitions of our normal instincts, and have never
been wholly effaced from the soul of man, but for
long ages the consciousness of their purpose has
been obscured by the mists of superstition and the
systematic inculcation of baneful delusions. The
first taste of alcohol revolts our normal instincts ;
nature protests against the incipience of a ruinous
poison- vice ; but the fables of the Bacchus priests for
centuries encouraged that vice and deified the genius
of intemperance. Vice itself blushed to mention the
immoralities of the pagan gods whose temples invited
the worship of the heavenly-minded. Altars were
erected to a goddess of lust, to a god of wantonness,
to a god of thieves.
10 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
That dynasty of scamp-gods was, at last, forced to
abdicate, but only to yield their throne to a celestial
Phalaris, a torture-god who cruelly punished the
gratification of the most natural instincts, and fore-
doomed a vast plurality of his children to an
eternity of horrid and hopeless torments. Every
natural enjoyment was denounced as sinful. Every
natural blessing was vilified as a curse in disguise.
Mirth is the sunshine of the human mind, the love-
liest impulse of life's truest children; yet the
apostle of Antinaturalism promised his heaven to the
gloomy world- despiser. " Blessed are they that
mourn." " If any man will come after me, let him
deny himself and take up his cross daily." " Be af-
flicted, and mourn and weep ; let your laughter be
turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness."
li Woe unto you that laugh." " If any man come
to me and hate not his father and mother, his wife
and children, his brothers and sisters, yea, and his
own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
The love of health is as natural as the dread of
pain and decrepitude. The religion of Antinatural-
ism revoked the health laws of the Mosaic code, and
denounced the care even for the preservation of life
itself. " Take no thought for your life, what ye shall
eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body,
what ye shall put on." " Bodily exercise profiteth but
little." " There is nothing from without a man that,
entering him, can defile him."
The love of knowledge awakens with the dawn of
reason ; a normal child is naturally inquisitive ; the
wonders of the visible creation invite the study of
INTRODUCTION. 11
every intelligent observer. The enemies of nature
suppressed the manifestations of that instinct, and
hoped to enter their paradise by the crawling trail of
blind faith. " Blessed are they that do not see and
yet believe." "He that belie veth and is baptized
shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be
damned." "He that believeth not is condemned
already."
The love of freedom, the most universal of the
protective instincts, was suppressed by the constant
inculcation of passive resignation to the yoke of " the
powers that be," of abject submission to oppression
and injustice. "Resist not evil." "Of him that
taketh away thy goods ask them not again." " Who-
soever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him
twain." " Submit yourselves to the powers that be."
The love of industry, the basis of social welfare,
that manifests itself even in social insects, was de-
nounced as unworthy of a true believer: "Take no
thought, saying, What shall we eat ? what shall we
drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed 1 ? For
after all these things do the gentiles seek." " Take
no thought of the morrow, for the morrow shall take
thought for the things of itself." " Ask and it shall
be given you," i.e., stop working and rely on miracles
and prayer.
The hope for the peace of the grave, the last solace
of the wretched and weary, was undermined by the
dogmas of eternal hell, and the preordained damna-
tion of all earth-loving children of nature : " He that
hateth not his own life cannot be my disciple."
" The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into
12 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
utter darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing
of teeth." " They shall be cast into a furnace of t fire,
there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." " They
shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the
presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of
the Lamb." " And the smoke of their torment as-
cendeth forever and ever, and they have no rest day
nor night."
For fifteen centuries the pilot of the church lured
our forefathers to a whirlpool of mental and physical
degeneration, till the storms of the Protestant revolt
enabled them to break the spell of the fatal eddies,
and, like a swimmer saving his naked life, mankind
has struggled back to the rescuing rocks of our
mother earth. Lured by the twinkle of reflected
stars, we have plunged into the maelstrom of Anti-
naturalism, and after regaining the shore, by utmost
efforts, it seems now time to estimate the expenses
of the adventure.
The suppression of science has retarded the prog-
ress of mankind by a full thousand years. For a
century or two the Mediterranean peninsulas still
lingered in the evening twilight of pagan civilization,
but with the confirmed rule of the church the gloom
of utter darkness overspread the homes of her slaves,
and the delusions of that dreadful night far exceeded
the worst superstitions of pagan barbarism. "The
cloud of universal ignorance," says Hallam, "was
broken only by a few glimmering lights, who owe
almost the whole of their distinction to the surround-
ing darkness. We cannot conceive of any state of
society more adverse to the intellectual improvement
INTRODUCTION. 13
of mankind than one which admitted no middle line
between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifications. No
original writer of any merit arose, and learning may
be said to have languished in a region of twilight for
the greater part of a thousand years. In 992 it was
asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found,
in Kome itself, who knew the first elements of letters.
Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, about the age
of Charlemagne, could address a common letter of
salutation to another." In that midnight hour of
unnatural superstitions every torch-bearer was per-
secuted as an enemy of the human race. Bruno,
Campanella, Kepler, Vanini, Galilei, Copernicus,
Descartes, and Spinoza had to force their way through
a snapping and howling pack of monkish fanatics
who beset the path of every reformer, and overcame
the heroism of all but the stoutest champions of light
and freedom. From the tenth to the end of the
sixteenth century not less than 3,000,000 " heretics,"
i.e., scholars and free inquirers, had to expiate their
love of truth in the flames of the stake.
The systematic suppression of freedom, in the very
instincts of the human mind, turned Christian Europe
into a universal slave-pen of bondage and tyranny;
there were only captives and jailors, abject serfs and
their inhuman masters. Freedom found a refuge
only in the fastnesses of the mountains ; in the wars
against the pagan Saxons the last freemen of the
plains were slain like wild beasts; a thousand of
their brave leaders were beheaded on the market
square of Quedlinburg, thousands were imprisoned
in Christian convents, or dragged away to the bond-
14 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
age of feudal and ecclesiastic slave farms where they
learned to envy the peace of the dead and the free-
dom of the lowest savages. " One sees certain dark,
livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female,
scattered over the country and attached to the soil,
which they root and turn over with indomitable per-
severance. They have, as it were, an articulate
voice ; and when they rise to their feet they show a
human face. They are, in fact, men ; they creep at
night into dens, where they live on black bread, water,
and roots. They spare other men the labor of plow-
ing, sowing, and harvesting, and, therefore, deserve
some small share of the bread they have grown. Yet
they were the fortunate peasants — those who had
bread and work — and they were then the few " (while
half the arable territory of France was in the hands
of the church). " Feudalism," says Blanqui, " was a
concentration of all scourges. The peasant, stripped
of the inheritance of his fathers, became the property
of ignorant, inexorable, indolent masters. He was
obliged to travel fifty leagues with their carts when-
ever they required it; he labored for them three
days in the week, and surrendered to them half the
product of his earnings during the other three ; with-
out their consent, he could not change his residence
or marry. And why, indeed, should he wish to
marry, if he could scarcely save enough to maintain
himself? The Abbot Alcuin had twenty thousand
slaves called serfs, who were forever attached to the
soil. This is the great cause of the rapid depopula-
tion observed in the Middle Ages, and of the pro-
digious multitude of convents which sprang up on
INTRODUCTION. 15
every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miser-
able men to find in the cloisters a retreat from op-
pression ; but the human race never suffered a more
cruel outrage,* industry never received a wound
better calculated to plunge the world again into the
darkness of the rudest antiquity. It suffices to say
that the prediction of the approaching end of the
world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks
at this time, was received without terror."
The joy-hating insanities of the unnatural creed
blighted the lives of thousands, and trampled the
flowers of earth even on the bleak soil of North
Britain, where the children of nature need every hour
of respite from cheerless toil. " All social pleasures,"
says Buckle, " all amusements and all the joyful in-
stincts of the human heart, were denounced as sinful.
The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in them-
selves, merely because they were comforts. The
great object of life was to be in a state of constant
affliction. "Whatever pleased the senses was to be
suspected. It mattered not what a man liked ; the
mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever
was natural was wrong."
The dogma of exclusive salvation by faith made
forcible conversion appear an act of mercy, and stim-
ulated those wars of aggression that have cost the
lives of more than thirty millions of our fellow-men.
In the Crusades alone five millions of victims were
sacrificed on the altar of fanaticism ; the extermination
of the Moriscos reduced the population of Spain by
seven millions ; the man-hunts of the Spanish- Ameri-
can priests almost annihilated the native population
16 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
of the West Indies and vast areas of Central and
South America, once as well-settled as the most
fertile regions of Southern Europe. The horrid
butcheries in the land of the Albigenses, in the
mountain homes of the Vaudois, and in the Spanish
provinces of the Netherlands exterminated the in-
habitants of whole cities and districts, and drenched
the fields of earth with the blood of her noblest
children.
The neglect of industry and the depreciation of
secular pursuits proved the death-blow of rational
agriculture. The garden-lands of the Old World be-
came sand- wastes, the soil of the neglected fields was
scorched by summer suns and torn by winter floods
till three million square miles of once fruitful lands
were turned into hopeless deserts. " The fairest and
fruitfulest provinces of the Eoman empire," says
Professor Marsh — " precisely that portion of terres-
trial surface, in short, which about the commence-
ment of the Christian era was endowed with the
greatest superiority of soil, climate, and position,
which had been carried to the highest pitch of
physical improvement — is now completely exhausted
of its fertility. A territory larger than all Europe,
the abundance of which sustained in bygone centuries
a population scarcely inferior to that of the whole
Christian world at the present day, has been entirely
withdrawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly
inhabited. . . . There are regions, where the
operation of causes, set in action by man, has brought
the face of the earth to a state of desolation almost
as complete as that of the moon ; and though within
INTRODUCTION. 17
that brief space of time which we call the historical
period, they are known to have been covered with
luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile mead-
ows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaim-
able by man, nor can they become again fitted for his
use except through great geological changes or other
agencies, over which we have no control. . . .
Another era of equal improvidence would reduce this
earth to such a condition of impoverished productive-
ness as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and,
perhaps, even the extinction of the human species "
(Man and Nature, pp. 4, 43).
The experience of the Middle Ages has, indeed,
been bought at a price which the world cannot afford
to pay a second time. The sacrifices of fifteen cent-
uries have failed to purchase the millennium of the
Galilean Messiah, and the time has come to seek
salvation by a different road.
The Religion of the Future will preach the Gospel
of Redemption by reason, by science, and by con-
formity to the laws of our health-protecting instincts.
Its teachings will reconcile instinct and precept, and
make Nature the ally of education. Its mission will
seek to achieve its triumphs, not by the suppression,
but by the encouragement of free inquiry; it will
dispense with the aid of pious frauds; its success
will be a victory of truth, of freedom, and humanity ;
it will reconquer our earthly paradise, and teach us
to renounce the Eden that has to be reached through
the gates of death.
L-PHYSICAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTER I.
HEALTH.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by
a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The
sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of
every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of dis-
comfort announces every injurious extreme of tem-
perature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a
state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious
substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found
that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of
the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In
times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian
mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an
unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the
poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions
a troop of half- tamed chamois forcing their way
through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in
the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.
Man in his primitive state had his full share of
those protective instincts, which still manifest them-
selves in children and Nature- guided savages. ^ It is
a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages
HEALTH. 19
are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers
Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville,
and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to
ruin is always taken in deference to the example of
the admired superior race, if not in compliance with
direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal high-
lands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from
a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors
hesitated to decline their invitations, which subse-
quently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The
children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the
hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poi-
sons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin,
the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had
endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns,
pathetically protested against the pest air of his
Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless
his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them
responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known,
country boys to step out into a shower of rain and
sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of
a city workshop, and after a week's work in a spin-
ning mill return to the penury of their mountain
homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense
of their lungs.
The word frugality ', in its original sense, referred
literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to car-
nivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still de-
cidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the
richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-
made clothes to the constraint of fashionable frip-
peries. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are
20 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-
civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bath-
ing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydro-
pathic school. They delight in exercise ; they laugh
at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the
perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They
would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit
of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather
than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages
of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of
arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest
pathologists of modern times ; avenues of shade trees
have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of
many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist,
Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a«shady
park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these
lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too
often suppressed, instinct of our young children:
their passionate love of woodland sports, their love
of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in
all its forms. Those who hold that " nature " is but
a synonym of "habit" should witness the rapture of
city children at first sight of forest glades and shady
meadow brooks, and compare it with the city- dread
of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods
boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large
manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and
abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the
physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path
of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her
laws unwarned.
HEALTH. 21
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined
to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts
of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive
avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of
success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives
are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before
the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit ; be-
fore their day's work is done our toilers are over-
taken by the shadows of approaching night. Sani-
tary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average
term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would
solve the most vexing riddles of existence : the ap-
parent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit
and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive prom-
ises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our
fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would
suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health
lejisjmj_the_temp^ vices. Perfect
health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheer-
fulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune
and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley
cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of
homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of
the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree
that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all
the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine
which sickness has banished from the life of the
dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed
by measure and weight, it would be found that her
richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but
22 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and
nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health
reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and
wins friends where the elegance of studied manners
gains only admirers. Health is also a primary con-
dition of that clearness of mind the absence of
which can be only partially compensated by the light
of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of
bodily vigor j country- bred boys have again and again
carried off the prizes of academical honors from the
pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of
all ages and countries have been men of the people ;
low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy
rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epic-
tetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther,
Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.
C. PERVERSION.
Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was
originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circum-
stances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospi-
table climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to
adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of
time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varie-
ties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the
tropics, and the diet of our earliest man-like ancestors
was, in all probability, frugal : tree-fruits, berries,
nuts, roots, arid edible herbs and gums. But the
first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke
out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-
creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the
HEALTH. . 23
habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive
diet of the nomadic inhabitants.
Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the
avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves
to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydro-
mel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the
at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to
prefer spoiled to fresh grape-juice. Sedentary oc-
cupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to en-
gender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and
even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere
may at last become a second nature, characterized
by a morbid dread of fresh air. -The slaves of the
Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-
like dungeons, and may have contracted the first
germ of that mental disease known as the night-air
superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the
vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is prefer-
able to the balm of the cooling night wind.
In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of
circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the
pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the
neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the
public festivals by which the potentates of the
pagan empires compensated their subjects for the
loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our
wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire
bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong
race toward ike goal of the promised land of ease
and independence — a goal reached only by a favored
few compared with the multitudes who daily drop
down wayworn and exhausted.
24 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was
struck by the anti- natural fanaticism of the Middle
Ages, the world- hating infatuation of the maniacs
who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in
disguise, and despised their own bodies as they de-
spised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the
world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease
as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude
and deformity, and promoted the work of degenera-
tion with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the
enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a
period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic his-
tory of Europe is the history of a systematic war
against the interests of the human body; the "morti-
fication of the flesh" was enjoined as a cardinal duty
of a true believer; health-giving recreations were
suppressed, while health-destroying vices were en-
couraged by the example of the clergy; domestic
hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of
some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in
the invention of new penances and systematic out-
rages, upon the health of the poor convent-slaves.
Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often
most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly
bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations;
their sleep was broken night after night ; fasting was
carried to a length which often avenged itself in per-
manent insanity ; and their only compensation for a
daily repetition of health- destroying afflictions was the
permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spir-
ituous poisons : the same bigots who grudged their
followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of
HEALTH. 25
digestible food indulged them in quantities of alco-
holic beverages that would have staggered the con-
science of a modern beer-swiller.
The bodily health of a community was held so
utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate
that every large city became a hotbed of contagious
diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic
disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged
Europe from end to end — nay, instead of trying to
remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims
were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture,
and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against
such illusions would have risked to have his tongue
torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the
flames of the stake.
Mankind has never wholly recovered from that
reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plain-
est health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our
so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the
golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no
time to expurgate the slums of their own cities ; our
missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the
natives of distant islands with the ceremony of bap-
tism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the estab-
lishment of free public baths for the benefit of their
poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged
like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom
of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of
the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in
the name of the miracle -monger who turned water
into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to
drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication ar©
26 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
deprived of every healthier pastime ; the magistrates
of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances
against the abettors of public amusements on the day
when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leis-
ure for recreation. Poor factory children who would
spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills
are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath- school and
bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew
ghost- siories or the records of fictitious genealogies;
but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our
public schools by the introduction of a health primer
would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert
the attention of the pupils from more important
topics.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with
impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has
never yet protected our ghost- mongers from the
consequences of their sins against the monitions of
their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness
avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert;
during the most filthful and prayerful period of the
Middle Ages, seven out of ten city- dwellers were
subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form
that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the
skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of
the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously un-
availing against that virulent affection that thousands
of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of
a kinrfs touch, as recorded by the unanimous testi-
mony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still
HEALTH. 27
current term of a sovereign remedy. A long foot-
journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise,
outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really
effected the desired result; but, on their return
to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced
a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the weari-
some journey or resign themselves to the " mysterious
dispensation" of a Providence which obstinately
refused to let miracles interfere with the normal
operation of the physiological laws recorded in the
protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-head-
aches might, indeed, have enforced those protests
upon the attention of the sufferers ; but the disciples
of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the
promptings of their natural desires, and to accept
discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme
cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of
the saints, rather than to the profane interference of
secular science.
The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the
abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric
impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of
pulmonary consumption ; the votaries of dungeon-
smells were taught the value of fresh air by the
tortures of an affliction from which only the removal
of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions
of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the
attainment of a life- term which a seemingly inscrut-
able dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelie?-
iug savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all
remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable
abundance, craving admission and offering them the
28 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her
creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had
no concern with such things, and was enjoined to
rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: "If any
man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of
the church, and let them pray over him, anointing
him with oil in the name of the Lord." "And the
prayer of faith shall cure the sick, and the Lord shall
raise him up."
Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for
"meekness of spirit" continued to gorge themselves
with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus in-
flamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorse-
less propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro,
the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no
uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his
century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats
at a single meal, and that, after invoking the bless-
ing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer
of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended
"like the hide of a drowned dog." The "Love of
Enemies," " forgiveness and meekness," were on their
lips ; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked
out their normal result; and among the carnivorous
saints of that age we accordingly find men whose
fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the rough-
est legionary of pagan Rome. Cscsar Borgia, the
son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of
a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the
church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning
of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four
times he made and broke the most solemn treaties,
HEALTH. 29
in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory
of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were
conducted with a truculence denounced even by his
own allies ; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen
of his boon companions, in order to possess himself
of their property; twenty- three of his political and
clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired
assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned
perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law,
Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his
design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated,
and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the
brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.
The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the
comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that
visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of
misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport
towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of
Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-
needing toilers of his community from leaving town
on St. Collection Day ; he may advocate the arrest of
bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue
love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female
tithe- payer who seek3 an opportunity of displaying
her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless ; he
may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of
the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tene-
ment streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra
Sabbatarian recreation — a privilege to be reserved
for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and
on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men's
labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such dis-
30 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
tinctions, and the vomit of yellow fever will force the
most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds
of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive
factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity
from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The
dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the
midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman,
whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led
to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to
barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thou-
sands of families who deny themselves every recrea-
tion, who linger out the summer in the sweltering
city, and toil and save "for the sake of our dear
children," have received Nature's verdict on the wis-
dom of their course in the premature death of those
children.
E. REDEMPTION.
It has often been said that the physical regenera-
tion of the human race could be achieved without the
aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were fol-
lowed with half the zeal which our stock-breeders
bestow upon the rearing of their cows and horses.
A general observance of the most clearly recognized
laws of health would, indeed, abundantly suffice for
that purpose. There is, for instance, no doubt that
the morbid tendency of our indoor modes of occupa-
tion could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the
trustees of our education fund should build a gym-
nasium near every town school. As a condition of
health, pure air is as essential as pure water and
food, and no house-owner should be permitted to sow
HEALTH. 31
the seeds of deadly diseases by crowding his tenants
into the back rooms of unaired and unairable slum-
prisons, New cities should be projected on the plan
of concentric rings of cottage suburbs (interspersed
with parks and gardens), instead of successive strata
of tenement flats.
In every large town all friends of humanity should
unite for the enforcement of Sunday freedom, and
spare no pains to brand the Sabbath bigots as ene-
mies of the human race. We should found Sunday
gardens, where our toil-worn fellow- citizens could
enjoy their holidays with outdoor sports and outdoor
dances, free museums, temperance drinks, healthy
refreshments, collections of botanical and zoological
curiosities. Country excursions on the only leisure
day of the laboring classes should be as free as air
and sunshine, and every civilized community should
have a Recreation League for the promotion of that-
purpose.
In the second century of our chronological era the
cities of the Roman empire vied in the establishment
of free public baths. Antioch alone had fourteen of
them; Alexandria not less than twelve, and Rome
itself at least twenty, some of them of such magnifi-
cence and extent that their foundations have with-
stood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of
those establishments were entirely free, and even the
Thermae, or luxurious Warm Baths, of Caracalla
admitted visitors for a gate- fee which all but the
poorest could afford. Our boasted civilization will
have to follow such examples before it can begin to
deserve its name; and even the free circus games
32 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
(by no means confined to the combats of armed prize-
fighters) were preferable to the fanatical suppression
of all popular sports which made the age of Puritan-
ism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as
the Roign of the Cross.
The preservation of health is at least not less
important than the preservation of Hebrew mythol-
ogy; and communities who force their children to
sacrifice a large portion of their time to the study of
Asiatic miracle legends might well permit them to
devote an occasional hour or two to the study of
modern physiology. We should have health primers
and teachers of hygiene, and the most primitive
district school should find time for a few weekly
lessons in the rudiments of sanitary science, such
as the importance of ventilation, the best modes of
exercise, the proper quality and quantity of our daily
food, the significance of the stimulant habit, the use
and abuse of dress, etc.
Such text-books would prepare the way for health
lectures, for health legislation and the reform of
municipal hygiene. The untruth that " a man can
not be defiled by things entering him from without "
has been thoroughly exploded by the lessons of
science, and should no longer excuse the neglect of
ti^sX frugality which in the times of the pagan repub-
lics formed the best safeguard of national vigor.
Milk, bread, and fruit, instead of greasy viands,
alcohol, and narcotic drinks, would soon modify the
mortality statistics of our large cities, and we should
not hesitate to recognize the truth that the remark-
STRENGTH. 33
able longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a
great deal to do with their dread of impure food.
CHAPTER II.
STRENGTH.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Bodily vigor io the basis of mental and physical
health. Strength is power, and the instinctive love of
invigorating exercise manifests itself in the young of
all but the lowest brutes.x The bigot who undermines
the health of his children by stinting their outdoor
sport as " worldly vanity," and " exercise that profit-
eth but little," is shamed by animals who lead their
young in races and trials of strength. Thus the
female fox will train her cubs ; the doe will race and
romp with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Mon-
keys (like the squirrels of our northern forests) can
be seen running up and down a tree and leaping from
branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose
but the enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run
races, young lions wrestle and paw each other in a
playful trial of prowess; even birds can be seen
sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of
the ocean. In nearly all classes of the vertebrate
animals the rivalry of the males is decided by a trial
of strength, and the female unhesitatingly accepts
the victor as the fittest representative of his species.
Normal children are passionately fond of athletic
sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb
34 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laugh-
ingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia
fig. The children of the South sea Islanders vie in
aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-
races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus
were not permitted to marry till they had attained a
prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of ath-
letic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the
favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undeg6n-
erate age of the republic ; and, in spite of all re-
straints, similar propensities still manifest themselves
in our school- boys. They pass the intervals of their
study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in
listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to
get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter.
They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as
if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further
every victory in the arena of life.
The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic
games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest
days in the springtime of the human race. The
million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of the
pentathlon have never been heard again on earth since
the manliest and noblest of all recreations were
suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture
of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate
the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile
tribes in the arena of pure manhood : as in Algiers,
where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-
games of their French foemen : the same foemen
whose banquets they would have refused to share even
at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once
STRENGTH. 35
witnessed a performance of the German athlete
Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthu-
siasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded
to the edge of the platform, and, with waving
kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised
spectators.
B. — REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The "survival of the fittest" means, in many
important respects, the survival of the strongest.
In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their
stronger rivals ; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger,
has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter
bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who
overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals;
the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the
pursuit of the hunter.
A state of civilization does only apparently equalize
such differences. The invention of gunpowder has
armed the weak with the power of a giant ; but the
issue of international wars will always be biased
by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness
of nerve of the men that handle those improved
weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the
French were favored by an undoubted superiority of
arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation
whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics.
The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest
description: hunting- spears and clumsy battle-axes ;
but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legion-
aries, with their polished swords and elaborate
tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars
36 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
that decided the international rivalries of Asia,
Europe, and North America nearly always ended
with the victory of a northern nation over its south-
ern neighbors. The men of the north could not
always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in
number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause;
but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort
in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even
of an otherwise inferior race. " Fortis Fortuna ad-
juvat" said a Roman proverb, which means literally
that Fortune favors the strong, and which has been
well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern trans-
lator: ''Force begets fortitude and conquers fort-
une." Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles
of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things
being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the
weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily
strength begets self-reliance. " Blest are the strong,
for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,"
would be an improved variation of the gospel text.
The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian
and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved
the once universal love of manly sports, have pre-
vailed against their rivals in the arena of industry
and. science, as well as of war.
An American manufacturer, who established a
branch of his business at Havre, France, hired
American and British workmen at double wages,
maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since
one of his expensive laborers could do the work
of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of
South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor
STRENGTH. 37
is always at a premium. American industry is stead-
ily forcing its way further south, and may yet come
to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the bound-
aries of the American continent. From the smallest
beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeat-
edly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two
hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in
France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Nor-
way were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen.
A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera,
the half- savage followers of Musa and Tarik had
founded high schools of science and industry. And,
as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn,
the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immor-
talized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than
of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried
the banners of freedom through the battle- storm of
Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the
sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the
masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.
Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longev-
ity. Nature exempts the children of the south from
many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher
latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home ; in
spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust
Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian. In spite
of a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length
of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the
not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and
the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from
that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from
Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease
38 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of
the wilderness; hospital- surgeons know how readily
the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover
from injuries that would send the effeminate city-
dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened
laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25 th
of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of
a number of laborers employed at the night-shaft of
the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a
distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in
a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own
blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York)
the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave
him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his
injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoul-
der, both thighs were fractured, his skull was hor-
ribly shattered about the left temple and frontal
region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters
driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope what-
ever for him, and, after the administration of an
anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die.
To the utter surpri&e cf the attending surgeon, the
next morning found the mass of broken bones still
breathing. His fever subsided ; he survived a series
of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal
hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day
to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his
complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and
answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever
increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the
last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent
sums up his case : " His strong constitution had
STRENGTH. 39
repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim
monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim."
And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens
the danger of such accidents : a trained gymnast will
preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would
break his neck.
According to the mythus of the Nature- worshiping
Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a
tailor or a hair- dresser), and the gift of beauty is,
indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving
sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion.
Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of
peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons,
have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court
belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed
proof against the charm of city gallants. " I have seen
many a handsome man in my time," says old Mrs.
Montague in Barry Cornwall's " Table Talk," " but
never such a pair of eyes as young Eobbie Burns
kept flashing from under his beautiful brow." " Wo-
men will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,"
says Arthur Schopenhauer ; " they will pardon rude-
ness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will
forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy.
Instinct seems to tell them that in the result of mar-
riage a mother's bifue?ice can neutralize any defect
but that. y '
C. PERVERSION.
The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a
persistent war against the manlier instincts of the
human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples
40 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
considered the body the enemy of the soul. Accord-
ing to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural
instincts are wholly evil ; the renunciation of earth
and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and
the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed
against the interests of the human body. The gospel
of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the " New
Testament " of the Galilean mes3iah, abound with the
ravings of an anti-physical fanaticism as unknown to
the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy
of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty
of physical education and health- culture was entirely
ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene.
" A healthy mind in a healthy body," was the ideal of
the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind
in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian
moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle
Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints,
hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers.
Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil
indispensable for such purposes of the militant church
as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mus-
sulman empires; but its essential importance was
vehemently disclaimed ; the superior merit of sacri-
ficing health to the interests of a body- despising soul
was constantly commended, and the founders of the
monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of
philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas
by aggressive measures ; the wretched convent slaves
had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-
reducing penances; their novices were barbarously
scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a linger-
STRENGTH. 41
ing love for health-giving sports— wrestling in the
vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies
on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic
festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian
emperor. The fathers of the church lost no oppor-
tunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against
the pagan culture of the manly powers, " so inimical
to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to
the yoke of the gospel." The followers of Origenes
actually practiced castration as the most effectual
means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregen-
erate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended
that plan for years, came at last to suspect the neces-
sity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own
mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by
emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of
European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the
fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against
the scant physical recreations of a people already
sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the
parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the
bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight
of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain
suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing chil-
dren. Manly pastimes were banished from the very
dreams of a world to come ; and while the heroes of
Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the
guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the
gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need
the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the pros-
pect of an everlasting Sabbath- school.
42 THE BIBLE OF NATUEE.
Trials of strength and of skill,
Rewarded by festive assemblies,
Feasts in the halls of gods, where the voice of the muses
Answered in songs to the ravishing lyre of Apollo,
quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, " when
suddenly," he adds, " a gaunt, blood- streaming Jew-
rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a
huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he
dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods,
who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away
into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began ;
the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods
had departed ; Olympus became a Golgatha, where
sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about
mournfully, nursing their wounds and chantiug dole-
ful hymns. Eeligion, once a worship of joy, became
a whining worship of sorrow."
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers
of their own bodies became so truly contemptible
that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity
seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical
exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the per-
verted instincts exploded in vices j the monkish self-
abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated,
whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the
laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and
disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and
morally, the earth- despising convent drone repre-
sented the vilest type of degeneration to which the
manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the
STKENGTH. 43
enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars
of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of
mankind to a degree for which our present genera-
tion is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The
love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the
stigma of the Middle Ages ; " respectability " is too
often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and con-
ventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the
health- giving sports of their children; vice still
sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-
renouncing aversion to physical recreations.
The degeneration of many once manful races has
reached an incurable phase : the listless resignation
to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has
spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in
southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their
fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots.
The arbitrament of war has made them taste the
lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long
worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the
God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the
feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships
of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus
of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous
protection of heaven ; and heaven's answer came in
the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in
the depths of the sea. The same nation once more
invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an
armament against the great naval powers of the
nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously
baptized with the most fulsomely pious names : "The
Holy Savior of the World," " Saint Maria," " Saint
44 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
Joseph," " The Most Holy Trinity," and sent forth
in full reliance on the protection of supernatural
agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson's self-
relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed.
St. Joseph's impotence howled in vain for the assist-
ance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World
could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the
Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus
of holes.
E REDEMPTION.
In the work of physical regeneration Nature meets
the reformer more than half-way. Our children need
but little encouragement to break the fetters of the
fatuous restraint that dooms them to a life of
physical apathy. They ask nothing but time and
opportunity to redeem the coming generation from
the stigma of unmanliness and debility. Physical
and intellectual education should again go hand in
hand if we would promote the happiness of a
redeemed race on the plan that made the age of Gre-
cian philosophy and gymnastics the brightest era in
the history of mankind. Physical reform should be
promoted by the systematic encouragement of
athletic sports; every township should have a free
gymnasium, every village a free foot-race park j by
prize-offers for supremacy in competitive gymnastics
wealthy philanthropists could turn thousands of boy
topers into young athletes. We should have athletic
county meetings, state field-days, and national or
international Olympiads.
Educational ethics should fully recognize the
CHASTITY. 45
rights of the body. We should admit the unorthodox,
but also undeniable, truth that an upright and
magnanimous disposition is a concomitant of bodily
strength, while fickleness, duplicity, and querulous
injustice are the characteristics of debility. We
should teach our children that a healthy mind can
dwell only in a healthy body, and that he who
pretends to find no time to take care of his health is
a workman who thinks it a waste of time to take care
of his tools.
CHAPTEE III.
CHASTITY.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided
by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical
conscience, developed partly with the primordial
evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary
experience transmitted during the social development
of our species. The guardians of our prevailing sys-
tem of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of
their added supervision with a zeal apparently justi-
fied by the importance of its purpose ; but an analy-
sis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils
of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow
the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The
Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time,
selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The con-
trol of our clerical moralists ignores the first and
second law of modification, while their recognition of
46 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the third involves a large number of irrelevant and
irrational precepts.
In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances
cooperate in the prevention of sexual precocity.
Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential
energies which physical sloth forces to explode in
sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of
vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments
of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials
to a period of life when the possession of property or
prestige enables them to undertake the adequate
support of a family. In countries where both sexes
spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occu-
pations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the
pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria,
Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only
at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements
apart, the girls in dances and singing- picnics; the
boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain
excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirta-
tions is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes,
while girls evenmbre jealously guard the exclusiveness
of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive
bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus
fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years,
of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths
thirty and twenty-five years were the respective
minima.
The importance of limiting the license of precocious
passion has never been directly denied, but the sig-
nificance of the instinct of sexual selection seems to
have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages
CHASTITY. 47
without the sanction, and even against the direct
protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged.
"Love matches," in the opinion of thousands of
Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the
characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of
the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion
which asserts its claims against all other claims
whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the impor-
tance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake
which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous
fancy.
And, in fact, only the universality of that passion
transcends the importance of its direction. ^For,
while the sexual instinct, per se, guarantees the per-
petuation of the species, the instinct of selection
refers to the composition of the next generation, of
which it thus determines the quality as the other
determines the quantity. And just as the vital
powers of the individual organism strive back from
disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to
reestablish the perfection of the type, and to neutral-
ize the effects of degenerating influences. We
accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek
the complement of their own defects. Small women
prefer tall men ; fickle men worship strong-minded
women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical
business men are attracted by romantic girls; city
belles admire a rustic Hercules, and vice versa.
Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes
exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or
rather the results of that union ; for, here as else-
where, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sac-
48 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
rifice the interests of individuals to the interests of
the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever
ready to attain its purpose at the price of the tem-
porary advantages of .life, nay, of life itself ; and the
voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore^
in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of
posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the
welfare of the species. In spile of the far-gone per-
version of our ethical standards, we accordingly find
an instinctive recognition of such truth in the pop-
ular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher
law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest
or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flat-
terers condemn the decision of a bride who has sac-
rificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental
mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged
moralists.
In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself,
however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim.
Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremedi-
able disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion
that would have defied time and torture. A lover
struck with a cureless malady will shrink from trans-
mitting his affliction ; a proud barbarian will refuse
to make a refined bride the witness of his humilia-
tions. The perils of consanguinity may reveal them-
selves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal)
instinct ; and the discovery of an unsuspected rela-
tionship has more than once deadened desire as if by
magic, and turned love into self-possessed friend-
ship.
CHASTITY. 49
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the oldest chronicle of the human race the his-
torian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical
record which seems to have been transmitted for the
special purpose of showing the casual connection of
continence and longevity. That record (the fifth
chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage
date of the progenitors of ten different generations,
with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in
both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both
increase in a single instance and then decrease to the
end of the list. The lessons of that record might be
read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle
from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In
all countries, among all nations of all times, prema-
ture courtship has courted premature death. Conti-
nence during the years of development rewards itself
in health and vigor, both of body and of mind.
Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of
reserved strength. That strength becomes available
in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of
that love of independence and impatience of tyranny
found only among manful and continent nations. The
love of the gentlest females is reserved for the man-
liest males of their species, while precocious coveters
of euch prizes meet with humiliations and disappoint-
ments. Those who forbear to anticipate the prompt-
ings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undimin-
ished aid ; and to such only is given the power of
that " love that spurs to exertions."
And if marriages are planned in heaven, that
50 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and
not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the
sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured
against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it
would be admitted that the course of true love is,
after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in
the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love
will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied
its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but
little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the
sanction of Nature.
C. PERVERSION.
The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert
an instinct which they could not wholly suppress.
That this suppression was actually attempted in the
first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly
proved by the history of the early Christian sects,
the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of
self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from
sexual intercourse was made the chief text of " un-
worldliness." • Novices were brought up in strict
seclusion j mutilation was the usual penalty of violated
vows, but was also practiced as an d-priori safeguard
against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St.
Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational
leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account
of the consequences of those crimes against Nature,
and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which
was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly
renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics
were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism
CHASTITY. 51
of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Anti-
naturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of
suppression in his allusions to "eunuchs for the king-
dom of heaven's sake," and the saints " who neither
marry nor are given in marriage," as well as in the
example of his personal asceticism; and Paul dis-
tinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil,
a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate,
which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: "It
is good for a man not to touch a xooman • neverthe-
less to avoid . . . ," etc. Such dogmas bore
their natural fruit in the society- shunning fanaticism
of hermits and anchorites ; in aberrations d la Or-
igenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice,
the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.
In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical
interests of mankind were of no moment whatever.
The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding
to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in mill-
ions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature
minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice
and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has
encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but
howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox
Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters.
Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesi-
tated to sacrifice the highest interests of their chil-
dren and children's children to considerations of
" expedience." In Spanish America thousands of
baby-brides — girls of twelve and thirteen ; nay, even
of ten years — are delivered to the marital tyranny of
wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Aus-
52 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
tria millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are
compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of
a business committee of relatives and panders. In
the cities of the northland nations marriages of
expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occur-
rence. " Whatever is natural is wrong," was the
shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the pro-
tests of instinct were suppressed in the name of
morality.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit mar-
riage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the
degeneration of the human species. The penalties of
Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid
in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by
parents and guardians of helpless children — perhaps
in the vague hope that the normal consequences
might be averted by the intercession of supernatural
agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the
operation of Nature's laws, and it would not be
an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Chris-
tians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical
sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of
their own or their parents' outrages against the laws
of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the
sexes stunts the further development of the organism
and entails physical defects on the offspring of a
series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and
scrofulous children people the cities of southern
Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mor-
tality has assumed proportions which partly counter-
CHASTITY. 53
act the evil by the sternest of Nature's remedies.
Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined
with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-
sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk)
systematically promote premature prurience. Our
school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they
know neither the name nor the physiological signifi-
cance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they
suffer the consequences —
Losing their beauty and their native grace,
with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by
healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern
Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices
— crimes against Nature, which in the slave- dens
of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the
most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Lay-
ton's report on the result of the " Royal Commission
of Investigation" (1538) describes the moral status of
the British convents as an absolute ne plus ultra of
imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini
and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that
would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic
era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains
forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted
in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the
secret of such aberrations :
Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.
(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abom-
inations.)
The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of
a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries
54 THE BIBLE OF NATUBE.
enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial
butcher-laws ; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca
was burnt at the stake, together with his bride ; even
clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour
was punished with barbarous severity ; and a similar
prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics
and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans,
and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encour-
aged custom of early marriages has filled the rural
districts with starving children; in thousands of
cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of
Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our
species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love,
avenges itself on several generations of innocent
offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and
years of unavailing regrets.
E. REFORM.
Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of
genetic abuses we must promote a more general
recognition of the truth that the organism of the
human body is subject to the same laws that govern
the organic functions of our fellow-creatures ; and
that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward
of prayer and theological conformity, but of con-
formity to the promptings of our sanitary intui-
tions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to
conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by
sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the
interests of a clerical dogma.
Like the seductions of Intemperance, the tempta-
tions of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted
CHASTITY. 55
by more abundant opportunities of diverting pas-
times. According to the significant allegory of a
Grecian myth,' Diana, the goddess of hunters and
forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and out-
door exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of
sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively con-
tinent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy,
active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and
backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone
would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of
premature marriages ; for, in the island of Corsica,
where the recognition of their baneful tendency is
based on purely economical considerations (the perils
of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has
proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and
starvation.
In a community of JReformants (as the German
philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of
reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be
accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and
the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity
to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations
of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion
should be trained to the recognition of the truth that
the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and
bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and
that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature,
cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest.
56 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
CHAPTEK IV.
TEMPERANCE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Instinct is hereditary experience. The lessons de-
rived from the repetition of pleasant or painful
impressions have been transmitted from an infinite
number of generations, till impending dangers have
come to proclaim themselves by instinctive dread,
opportune benefits by instinctive desire. The shud-
der that warns us to recede from the brink of a steep
cliff is felt even by persons who have never personally
experienced the peril of falling from the rocks of a
precipice. Mountain breezes are more attractive
than swamp odors; the fumes of a foul dungeon warn
off a child who has had as yet no opportunity to ascer-
tain the danger of breathing contaminated air. A
few years ago I bought a pet fox, with a litter of
cubs, who were soon after orphaned by the escape of
their mother. They had to be fed by hand ; and,
among other proceeds of a forage, my neighbor's boy
once brought them a bundle of lizards, and a dead
rattlesnake. For the possession of those lizards
there was at once an animated fight, but at sight of
the serpent the little gluttons turned tail and
retreated to the farther end of their kennel. They
were not a month old when I bought them, and
could not possibly have seen a rattlesnake before or
known the effects of its bite from personal experi-
ence; but instinct at once informed them that an
encounter with a reptile of that sort had brought
some of their forefathers to grief.
TEMPERANCE. 57
The vegetable kingdom, that provides food for
nine-tenths of all living creatures, abounds with an
endless variety of edible fruits, seeds, and herbs, but
also with injurious and even deadly products, often
closely resembling the favorite food- plants of animals ;
which in a state of Nature are nevertheless sure to
avoid mistake, and select their food by a faculty of
recognizing differences that might escape the atten-
tion even of a trained botanist. The chief medium
of that faculty is the sense of smell in the lower, and
the sense of taste in the higher animals. In mon-
keys, for instance, the olfactory organs are rather
imperfectly developed, and I have often seen them
peel an unknown fruit with their fingers and then
cautiously raise it to their lips and rub it to and fro
before venturing to bring their teeth into play. The
preliminary test, however, always sufficed to decide
the question in a couple of seconds. The Abyssinian
mountaineers who catch baboons by fuddling them
with plum brandy have to disguise the taste of the
liquor with a large admixture of syrup before they
can deceive the warning instincts of their victims.
Where copper mines discharge their drainage into a
water-course, deer and other wild animals have been
known to go in quest of distant springs rather than
quench their thirst with the polluted water.
That protective instincts of that sort are shared
even by the lowest animals is proved by the experi-
ment of the philosopher Ehrenberg, who put a drop
of alcohol into a bottle of pond water, and under the
lens of his microscope saw a swarm of infusoria
precipitate themselves to the bottom of the vessel.
58 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
Animals in a state of Nature rarely or never eat to
an injurious excess ; the apparent surfeits of wolves,
serpents, vultures, etc., alternate with long fasts, and
are digested as easily as a hunter, after missing his
breakfast and dinner, would be able to digest an
abundant supper. Instinct indicates even the most
propitious time for indulging in repletion. The
noon heat of a midsummer day seems to suspend the
promptings of appetite; cows can be seen resting
drowsily at the foot of a shade- tree; deer doze in
mountain glens and come out to browse in mooD-
light ; panthers cannot afford to miss an opportunity
to slay their game at noon, but are very apt to hide
the carcass and come back to devour it in the cool of
the evening.
The products of fermentation are so repulsive to
the higher animals that only the distress of actual
starvation would tempt a monkey to touch a rotten
apple or quench his thirst with acidulated grape-
juice. Poppy fields need no fence ; tobacco leaves
are in no danger of being nibbled by browsing cattle.
Nature seems to have had no occasion for providing
instinctive safeguards against such out-of-the-way
things as certain mineral poisons ; yet the taste of
arsenic, though not violently repulsive (like that of
the more common, and therefore more dangerous,
vegetable poisons), is certainly not attractive, but
rather insipid, and a short experience seems to sup-
plement the defects of instinct in that respect.
Trappers know that poisoned baits after a while lose
their seductiveness, and old rats have been seen
TEMPERANCE. 59
driving their young from a dish of arsenic-poisoned
gruel.
Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclina-
tion to seek arsenic or alcohol for its own sake,
and there is no reason to suppose that man, in that
respect, differs from every known species of his
fellow-creatures. Our clerical temperance lecturers
rant about " the lusts of the unregenerate heart," the
"weakness of the flesh," the "danger of yielding to
the promptings of appetite," as if Nature herself
would tempt us to our ruin, and the path of safety
could be learned only from preternatural revelation.
But the truth is that to the palate of a child, even
the child of a habitual Urunkard, the taste of alcohol
is as repulsive as that of turpentine or bitterwood.
Tobacco fumes and the stench of burning opium still
nauseate the children of the habitual smoker as they
would have nauseated the children of the patriarchs.
The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine
by vertigo and sick headaches ; the first glass of beer
is rejected by the revolt of the stomach ; the fauces
contract and writhe against the first dram of brandy.
Nature records her protest in the most unmistakable
language of instinct, and only the repeated and con-
tinued disregard of that protest at last begets the
abnormal craving of that poison-thirst which clerical
blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our natural
appetites. They might as well make us believe in a
natural passion for dungeon air, because the prison-
ers of the Holy Inquisition at last lost their love of
liberty and came to prefer the stench of their sub-
60 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
terranean black-holes to the breezes of the free moun-
tains.
The craving for hot spices, for strong meats, and
such abominations as fetid cheese and fermented
cabbage have all to be artificially acquired ; and in
regard to the selection of our proper food the
instincts of our young children could teach us more
than a whole library of ascetic twaddle. Not for the
sake of "mortifying the flesh," but on the plain
recommendation of the natural senses that prefer
palatable to disgusting food, the progeny of Adam
could be guided in the path of reform and learn to
avoid forbidden fruit by the symptoms of its forbid-
ding taste.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians
made it a rule that the guests of their banquets must
get drunk on pain of expulsion. To let anyone re-
main sober, they argued, would not be just to the
befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be
tempted to take all sorts of advantage. If the evils
of drunkenness were undeserved afflictions, it would
certainly be true that sobriety would give an individ-
ual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his
fellow-men. He would be an archer trying his skill
against hoodwinked rivals, a runner challenging the
speed of shackled competitors. There is not a
mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety
does not give a man the advantage which health and
freedom confer over crippling disease. For the bane-
ful effects of intemperance are by no means limited
TEMPERANCE. • 61
to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on
the half -lucid intervals, and even on the after years of
the reformed toper. Temperance, in the widest
sense, of abstinence from unfit food and drink, would
be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a
favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits in-
cludes almost all other blessings whatever. Spon-
taneous gayety, the sunshine of the unclouded soul,
is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit,
and the regretful retrospects to the " lost paradise of
childhood" are founded chiefly on the contrast of
poieon-engendered distempers with the moral and
physical health of earlier years. Temperance pro-
longs that sunshine to the evening of life. By tem-
perance alone the demon of life-weariness can be
kept at bay in times of fiercest tribulation.* Un-
dimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of
sunshine behind the cloudy. The prisoners of the
outlawed Circassian insurgents admitted that, in
spite of hunger, hardships, and constant danger,
their captors contrived to enjoy life better than their
enemies in the brandy-reeking abundance of their
headquarters. The myth of the Lotos- eaters de-
scribed a nation of vegetarians who passed life so
pleasantly that visitors refused to leave them, and
renounced their native lands. ^ The religion of Mo-
hammed makes abstinence from intoxicating drinks a
chief duty of a true believer, and that law alone has
prevented the physical degeneration of his followers.
With all their mental sloth and the enervating influence
of their harem* life, the Turks are still the finest rep-
resentatives of physical manhood. At the horse
62 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
fairs of Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-
shouldered, proud-eyed rustics, whose appearance
contrasted strangely with that of the sluggish boors
and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives.
After twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars,
alternating with periods of luxury and tempting
wealth, the descendants of the Arabian conquerors
are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far
superior to the rum- drinking foreigners of their coast
towns. For more than six hundred years the tem-
perate Moriscos held their own in war and peace
against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic
descent gave them no natural advantage over their
Caucasian rivals ; but they entered the arena of life
with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in an age
of universal superstition made their country a garden
of science and industry. Their cities offered a refuge
to the scholars and philosophers of three continents,
and in hundreds of pitched battles their indomitable
valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of
their adversaries.
Frugality has cured diseases which defied all
other remedies. For thousands of reformed glut-
tons it has made life worth living, after the shadows
of misery already threatened to darken into the
gloom of approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Vene-
tian nobleman of the sixteenth century, had impaired
his health by gastronomic excesses till his physicians
despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he
resolved to try a complete change of diet. His
father, his uncles, and two of his brothers had all
died before the attainment of their fiftieth year j but
TEMPERANCE. 63
Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon
of unnaturalism, and at once reduced his daily allow-
ance of meat to one-tenth of the usual quantity, and
his wine to a stint barely sufficient to flavor a cup of
Venetian cistern-water. After a month of his new
regimen he regained his appetite. After ten weeks
he found himself able to take long walks without
fatigue, and could sleep without being awakened by
nightmare horrors. At the end of a year all the
symptoms of chronic indigestion had left him, and he
resolved to make the plan of his cure the rule of his
life. That life was prolonged to a century — forty
years of racking disease followed by sixty years
of unbroken health, undimmed clearness of mind,
unclouded contents Habitual abstinence from unnat-
ural food and drink saves the trials of constant self-
control and the alternative pangs of repentance.
"Blessed are the pure, for they can follow their
inclinations with impunity."
C. PERVERSION.
The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for
the stimulus of unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and
in some of its forms has been practiced by almost
every nation known to history or tradition. Thou-
sands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made
wine, the ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with
soma-juice; Zoroaster enacts laws against habitual
intoxication; the art of turning grape-juice from
a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to
the nations of Iran, to the Parsees, and to the
64 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
first agricultural colonists of the lower Nile. Nunus,
the Arabian Noah, is said to have planted -vineyards
on the banks of the Orontes ; the worship of Bacchus
was introduced into Asia Minor several centuries
before the birth of Homer. The origin of the opium
habit antedates the earliest records of Chinese his-
tory; for immemorial ages the Tartars have been
addicted to the use of Koumis (fermented mare's
milk), the Germanic nations to beer, the natives
of Siam to tea and sago- wine. Intoxication and the
excessive use of animal food were prevalent vices,
especially in the larger cities, of pagan Greece and
Kerne.
Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open.
Their recognition of dietetic abuses was expressed in
the word// legality, which literally meant subsistence
on tree fruits — or, at least, vegetable products — in
distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The
advantages of temperate habits were never directly
denied; the law of Pythagoras enjoins total absti-
nence from wine and flesh, and the name of a
" Pythagorean " became almost a synonym of
" philosopher." In all but the most depraved cent-
uries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to chil-
dren and women. The festival of the Bona Dea
commemorated the fate of a Roman matron who had
yielded to the temptation of intoxicating drink, and
was slain by the hand of her stern husband. Lycur-
gus recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the
military training-schools witness the bestial conduct
of a drunken Helot, in order to inspire them with an
abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of public opin-
TEMPERANCE. 65
ion always respected the emulation of patriarchal
frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious
patricians.
But the triumph of an anti-physical religion re-
moved those safeguards. Mistrust in the competence
of our natural instincts formed the keystone of the
Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare
was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of
the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of
Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks
by his personal example — nay, by the association
of that practice with the rites of a religious sacra-
ment. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation —
even of a fever- dream — at the expense of the body,
agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-
despising fanaticism, and during the long night of
the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an
unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every
one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Port-
ugal had a vineyard and a wine-cellar of its own.
The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper Danube
operated the largest brewery of the German empire.
For centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license
went hand in hand, and as the church increased
in wealth, gluttony was added to the unnatural
habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty
of the lower classes prevented intemperance from
becoming a universal vice. As it was, the followers
of the Nature- despising messiah lost no opportunity
to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They
could plead the precedence of their moral exemplars,
and vied in sowing the seeds of bodily diseases
66 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
which their system of ethics welcomed as conducive
to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.
Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the
long-continued suppression of all healthier pastimes
contributed its share to the increase of intemperance.
On the day when the laboring classes found their
only chance* of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly
prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and
on the Sabbath almost an unpardonable, sin. The
tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to Mon-
day morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excur-
sions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields,
were not permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic
excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became
the general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving
for a diversion from the deadly monotony of drudgery
and church-penance. For "Nature will have her
revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless
recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek
compensation in indulgences which no moralist would
be willing to condone, . . . and the strictest
observance of all those minute and oppressive Sab-
batarian regulations was found compatible with
consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited
assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does
not cheer" (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879).
" Everyone," says Lecky, " who considers the world
as it really exists, must have convinced himself that
in great towns public amusements of an exciting
order are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress
them is simply to plunge an immense portion of the
population into the lowest depths of vice."
TEMPERANCE. 67
Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemper-
ance. In hundreds of British and North American
cities the dearth of better pastimes drives our work-
ingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk,
as the only available means of escaping tedium and
the consciousness of their misery. Nature craves
recreation, and the suppression of that instinct has
avenged itself by its perversion.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the
progress of human degeneration than all other causes
taken together. Our infants are sickened with
drastic drugs. The growth of young children is
stunted with narcotic beverages ; the suppression of
healthier pastimes drives our young men to the rum-
shop ; intemperance has become the Lethe in which
the victims of social abuses seek to drown then-
misery. The curse of the poison-habit haunts us
from the cradle to the grave, and for millions of our
fellow-men has made the burdens of life to outweigh
its blessings. There is a doubt if the " years " of
Genesis should be understood in the present meaning
of the word ; but historians and biologists agree that
the average longevity of our race has been enormously
reduced within the last twenty centuries, and in-
temperance is the chief cause of that decrease. Our
average stature has been reduced even below that of
the ancient natives of an enervating climate, like that
of the lower Nile, as proved by D'Arnaud's measure-
ments of the Egyptian mummy- skeletons. On our
own continent, outdoor life in the struggle with the
68 THB BIBLE OF NATURE.
perils of the wilderness has somewhat redeemed our
loss of physical manhood ; but what are the men of
modern Europe compared with their iron-fisted an-
cestors, the athletic Greeks, the world-conquering
Romans, the Scandinavian giants, the heroic Visi-
goths ? Like a building collapsing under the progress
of a devouring fire, the structure of the human body
has shrunk under the influence of the poison-habit ;
and there is no doubt that the moral vigor of our
race has undergone a corresponding impairment —
appreciable in spite of the recent revival of intellect-
ual activity and the constant increase of general in-
formation.
The tide is turning ; the victims of anti-physical
dogmas are awakening to the significance of their
delusion ; the power of public opinion has forced the
dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join the
crusade of the temperance movement ; diet-reform
has become a chief problem of civilization ; but the
upas-tree of the poison-habit is too deeply rooted to
be eradicated in a single generation, and the task of
redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet
the probing of the wound has only revealed the ap-
palling extent of the canker- sore. The statistics of
the liquor traffic have established the fact that the
value of the resources wasted on the gratification of
the poison-vice far exceeds the aggregate amount of
the yearly expenditure for educational, charitable, and
sanitary purposes — nay, that the abolition of that
traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms
needed to turn earth into a physical and social para-
dise. And yet that waste expresses only the indirect
TEMPERANCE. 69
and smaller part of the damage caused by the curse
of the poison- habit. The loss in health and happi-
ness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum
thus expended in the purchase of disease were de-
voted to the promotion of arson and robbery, the
utmost possible extent of the consequent mischief
would probably fall short of the present result. The
stimulant habit in all its forms clouds the sunshine
of life like an all-pervading poison- vapor. Alcohol
undermines the stamina of manhood ; narcotic drinks
foster a complication of nervous diseases ; opium and
tobacco impair the vigor of the cerebral functions.
The excessive use of animal food, too, avenges itself
in all sorts of moral and physical disorders. It in-
flames passions which no prayer can quench. " Alas !
what avails all theology against a diet of bull-beef 1 ?"
Father Smeth wrote from the Sioux missions ; and the
almost exclusive use of flesh food has, indeed, afflicted
our Indians with the truculence of carnivorous beasts.
The same cause has produced the same effects in
western Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval
Spain delighted in matanzds and heretic-hunts, as
their carnivorous ancestors in the butcher sports of
the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-
baits and Tyburn spectacles.
E. REFORM.'
The consequences of intemperance have at all times
provoked protests against the more ruinous forms of
the poison-habit, but the advance from special to
general principles is often amazingly slow ; and even
now the cause of temperance is hampered by the
70 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
shortsightedness of reformers who hope to eradicate
the Upas-tree by clipping and hacking its more
prominent branches. They would limit prohibition
to the more deadly stimulants, not dreaming that
the fatal habit is sure to reproduce its fruit from
the smallest germs ; that the poison-vice, in fact, is
infallibly progressive, ever tending to goad the mor-
bid craving of the toper to stronger and stronger
poisons or to a constant increase in the quantity of
the wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy, from
laudanum to morphine, from tonic bitters to rum,
from a glass of wine to a dozen bottles, from beer
and tobacco to the vilest tipples of the dram-shop.
" Principiis obsta " (Resist the beginnings) was a
Latin maxim of deep significance. The cumulative
tendency of the stimulant vice may be resisted, but
only by constant vigilance, constant self-denial, con-
stant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appe-
tency, all of which might be saved by the total
renunciation of all abnormal stimulants whatever, for
only in that sense is it true that " abstinence is easier
than temperance."
We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-
vice as a loathsome disease, rather than as a forbidden
luxury which could ever be indulged without paying
the penalty of Nature in a distressing reaction, far
outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and mo-
mentary exaltation. We must teach them that the
artifice by which the toper hopes to cheat Nature out
of an access of abnormal enjoyment is under all cir-
cumstances a losing game, which at last fails to pro-
duce, even for the moment of the fever-stimulus, a
TEMPERANCE. 71
glimpse of happiness at all comparable to the un-
clouded sunshine of temperance.
But before we can hope to redeem the victims of
the poison- vender, we must learn to make virtue more
attractive than vice. We must counteract the attrac-
tions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming topers,
not to the whining conventicles of a Sabbath- school,
but to temperance gardens, resounding with music
(dance music, if " sacred concerts " should pall) and
the jubilee of romping children, and shortening
summer days with free museums, picture galleries,
swings, ball grounds, and foot-race tracks. The
gods of the future will contrive to outbid the devil. ,
It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the ser-
vices of the Christian ministers who in a choice
between dogma and reform have bravely sided with
Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and
spirituous poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-
hunters, are trying their utmost to undo the mischief
of their antinatural creed, by frankly admitting that
a man can be defiled by "things that enter his mouth,"
and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should
be abandoned to the rites of devil-worshipers.
But the religion which pretends to inculcate a
peace-making spirit of meekness has been strangely
remiss in opposing the excessive use of a diet which
is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that
virtue. In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and
North American Redskins, a chiefly carnivorous diet
engenders the instincts of carnivorous beasts, and a
Peace Congress celebrating its banquets with sixteen
courses of flesh food might as well treat a vigilance
72 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
committee to sixteen courses of opium. "Frugality"
should again be promoted in the ancient sense of the
word; in a community of informants temperance and
vegetarianism should go hand in hand. Or rather,
the word "temperance" should be used iu the
extended sense that would make it a synonym of
Abstinence from all kinds of unnatural food and
drink; and Dr. Schrodt's rule should become the
canon of every dietetic reform league. "Avoid," he
says, "all drinks and stimulants repulsive to the
palate of an unseduced child, but also all comestibles
that need artificial preparation to make them palat-
able." The first part of that rule would exclude
opium, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee,
absinthe, fetid cheese, and caustic spices. The sec-
ond would abolish many kinds of animal food, but
sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other " semi-
animal" substances, condemned by the extreme
school of vegetarians. " From the egg to the apple,"
is an old Latin phrase which proves that the frugality
of the ancient Romans never went to such extremes.
Milk, eggs, and vegetable fats, in their combination
with farinaceous dishes, might amply replace the
flesh food of the northern nations, and, considering
the infinite variety of fruits and vegetables known to
modern horticulture, there seems no reason why a
vegetarian diet should necessarily be a monotonous
one. The Religion of Nature will require the renun-
ciation of several deep-rooted prejudices, but its path
of salvation will in no sense be a path of thorns.
SKILL. 73
CHAPTEE V.
SKILL.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The organic faculties of each species of animals are
marvelously adapted to its peculiar mode of life,
but only in the lower creatures the skilful exercise of
those faculties appears to be an inborn gift. The young
bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical pre-
cision. The young ant needs no instructor to aid
her choice of proper building-material, of proper food
to be stored for winter use or distributed in the
nurseries of the larvae. The young butterfly, an hour
after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use
its wings as well as at the end of the summer, and dis-
plays the same skill in steering its way through the
maze of a tangled forest.
Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire
such accomplishments by long practice. Instead of
driving them back to their nests, their parents en-
courage their attempts at longer and longer flights,
and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove
a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother
fox carries half-crippled game to her burrow and sets
her cubs a-scampering in pursuit, allowing the best
runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young kittens
practice mouse- catching by playing with balls ;
puppies run after grasshoppers, young squirrels play
at nest-building by gathering handfuls of leaves and
moss. A British naturalist, who had domesticated a
young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam
across the floor of his study. The little engineer
74 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
had dragged up a cartload of books, papers, sticks of
wood, etc., and piled them up to best advantage,
placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum
and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the
interspaces with letters and journals. Every now
and then he would " stand off" to scrutinize the
solidity of the structure and return to mend a mis-
arrangement here and there.
Children manifest early symptoms of a similar in-
stinct. Infants of two or three years can be seen
squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels, or building
prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the
privilege of breaking colts ; the youngsters of the
Bermuda Islanders straddle a plank and paddle around
with a piece of driftwood, if their parents are too
poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a
normal American boy a tool-box is a more welcome
present than a velvet copy of Dore's Illustrated Bible.
Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-shooting with self-
constructed cross bows. The old English law which
required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for
three hours a day was probably the most popular
statute of the British code. On new railroads,
bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in the open
air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young
rustics, who forego the pleasures of nutting and
nest-hunting for the sake of watching the manipula-
tions of a new handicraft. Even in after years
the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the
shackles of etiquette, and princes and prelates have
defied the gossip of their flunkeys by getting a set of
tools and passing whole days in the retirement of an
sitiiX. 75
amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I. invented a
number of ingenious hunting- nets and bird-traps.
Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople,
forged his own chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter
of Europe, preferred watchmaking to every other
pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in the con-
struction of automatons. Peter the Great was the
best ship-carpenter of his empire.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The English word king, like Danish kong and
German koe?iig, are derived from koennen (practical
knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful,
as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill,
whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechan-
ical cleverness, established the superiority of man
over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects
a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme
physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace
as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of
pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in
moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and
on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops.
Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of
self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In
a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I
once overheard a controversy on the comparative
value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos,
air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever
advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark
of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four
different continents. " There's a use for all that, no
76 THE BIBLE OF NATUBE.
doubt," said he, " but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close
row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick
fists." For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, de-
pends to a large degree on the expertness of the
handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofit-
able as the library of an idiot. " Presence of mind "
is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in
sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the
prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the
issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once
been decided by the superior co?istructive?iess of an
army that could bridge a river while their opponents
waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of
Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier
who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of
a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire
was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turk-
ish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and
greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war
ships. By the invention of the chain grappling- hook
Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean
from Carthage to Rome.
Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the de-
velopment of mechanical skill deserves more general
encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to
pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an
invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-
giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile develop-
ment of the muscular system reacts on the functions
of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust
health of active mechanics often laboring under the
disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet
SKILL. 77
Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy
rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opin-
ion that every brain- worker should have some mechan-
ical by- trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and
mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft
reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can
teach an inquirer; manual labor is a schoolof prac-
tical wisdom, and sound " common sense," as the
English language happily expresses the sum of that
wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics
far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.
Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from
which wealth could dispense its possessor. An am-
ateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the
chief bane of wealth : ennui, with its temptations to
folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate
the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every
leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical land-
scape gardening, and turned a large and once barren
lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern
Europe. "Heroum ftlii 7ioxae" " the sons of the
great are apt to be nuisances," would be less true if
Goethe's advice were heeded by our fashionable edu-
cators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to
emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments
afford only a dubious safeguard. "A mechanical
trade," says Jean Jacques Rousseau, " is the best basis
of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical
scholarship may go begging, where technical skill
finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may
recover his loss in the course of years ; a skilful me-
chanic need only enter the next workshop and show
78 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
a sample of his handiwork. ' Well, let's see you try/
the reply will be ; ' step this way and pitch in.' "
Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard
against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to
protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding
him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets
that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the
perils of after years ; and a better plan was that of
Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in
the midst of his manifold duties, found time to in-
struct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swim-
ming rapid rivers, in order to " teach them to over-
come danger that could not be permanently avoided."
C. PERVERSION.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplish-
ments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-
physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of
that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the an-
tagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brah-
mans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so im-
measurably superior to the children of toil that a Sudra
was not permitted to approach a priest without ample
precautions against the defilement of the worshipful
entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were
closed against low-caste believers. The very breath
of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to
such an extent that a Brahman had always to take
his meals alone.
The secret of such prejudices was probably the
supposed antagonism of body and soul and the
imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by
SKILL. 79
constant insults to the representatives of physical
interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the
propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand
in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular
work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional
manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in
India, found always means to enforce respect by
methods of their own. During the most orthodox
centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were
valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated
little better than beasts of burden — in many respects
decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an
inexorable master, the serf had often to work by
moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself
and his family. The proposition to join in any
manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps,
excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult
by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe.
Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French
nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in
botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting :
" Going to make a clown of him ? You had better
get an assistant- teacher with a manure cart." The
manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went
to the length of employing special chamberlains for
every detail of their toilet : a chief and assistant
shirt- warmer, a wig- adjuster, a hand- washer, a foot-
bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought me-
chanical labor an incomparable disgrace — more
shameful, in fact, than crime — for the same Hitter
who would have starved rather than put his hand to
a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by
80 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
highway robbery. The princes of the church thought
it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-
bearers to transport them to church and back. They
kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then
fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the
corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey
the impression that their spiritual duties left them
no time for secular concerns.
That sort of other-worldliness still seems to bias
our plans of education. Colleges that would fear to
lose prestige by devoting a few minutes a week
to technical work or horticulture, surrender dozens
of hours to the bullying propaganda of a clerical
miracle-monger. Mechanical mastership (after all,
the basis of all science) is denied a place among the
honorable " faculties " of our high- schools. Fashion-
able parents would be shocked at the vulgar taste of
a boy who should visit joiner-shops and smithies,
instead of following his aristocratic friends to the
club-house. They would bewail the profanation of
his social rank, if he should accept an invitation
to impart his skill to the pupils of a mechanical
training-school; but would connive at the mental
prostitution of a young sneak who should try to
reestablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteer-
ing his assistance to the managers of a mythology-
school.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Neglected development, either of physical or
mental faculties, avenges itself in ennui, modified, for
the benefit of the poor, by the less monotonous
SKILL. 81
afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feel-
ing of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of
passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal con-
dition, as unknown to the children of the wilderness,
who never feel the craving of unemployed faculties,
as to the truly civilized man, who finds means to
satisfy that craving. Unemployed muscles, like idle
talents, rebel against continued neglect and goad the
sluggard to seek relief in the morbid excitement of
vice, and the father who thinks it a waste of money
to invest a dollar in a tool-box may have to spend
hundreds for the settlement of rum bills and gam-
bling debts.
Both the effect and the cause of such excesses were
rather rare in the prime of the North American
republic, when nearly every colonist was a farmer,
and every farm a polytechnicum of home-taught
trades; but European luxuries introduced European
habits, and our cities now abound with plutocrats who
are ashamed of the toil by which their forefathers laid
the foundation of their wealth. Our cities have bred
the vices faster than the refinements of wealth, and
have become acquainted with ennai —
We lack the word but have the thing ;
and thousands who would fail to find relief on the
classical hunting-grounds of Peter Bayle might
imitate his landlord, who practiced sharp- shooting
with a medieval hunting-bow till he could challenge
the best pistol shots of the neighboring garrison.
In a choice of evils the most puerile game of skill is,
indeed, clearly preferable to games of chance ; but
82 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
to that last resort of inanity the traditional aversion
to manual employments has actually driven thousands
of city idlers. Yet our American towns have never
sunk to the abject effeminacy of European cities,
where physical apathy has become a test of good
breeding and a taste for mechanical accomplishments
a stigma of eccentricity, and where, consequently,
social prestige has to be purchased at the price of
practical helplessness, of dependence in all mechan-
ical questions of life on the aid and the judgment of
hirelings.
Life-endangering accident may now and then
illustrate the disadvantages of physical incapacity;
a drowning bather may be inclined to admit that the
saving influence of a swimming- school might com-
pare favorably with that of the baptismal miracle
tank ; but the survivors will persist in relying on the
vicarious omnipotence of coin, ignoring the clearest
illustrations of the truth that physical incapacity
avenges itself in every waking hour, even of the
wealthiest weakling, while the guardian- spirit of
Skill accompanies its wards from the workshop to
the playground and follows them over mountains and
E. REFORM.
The growing impatience with the dead-language
system of our monkish school- plan will soon lead to a
radical reform of college education, and a fair portion
of the time gained should be devoted to the culture
of mechanical arts. For boys in their teens the " in-
stinct of constructiveness " would still prove to re-
tain enough of its native energy to make the change
SKILL. 83
a decidedly popular one, as demonstrated by the
success of the mechanical training schools that have
attracted many pupils who have to find the requisite
leisure by stinting themselves in their recreations.
"Applied gymnastics" (riding, swimming, etc.)
would be still more popular, and greatly lessen the
yearly list of accidents from the neglect of such
training.
The bias of fashion would soon be modified by the
precedence of its leaders, as in Prussia, where the
royal family set a good example by educating their
princes (in addition to the inevitable military train-
ing) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplish-
ment (carpentry, sculpture, bookbinding, etc.), the
choice of handicraft being optional with the pupil.
No model residence should be deemed complete
without a polytechnic workshop, furnished with a
panoply of apparatus for the practice of all sorts of
amateur chemical and mechanical pursuits — a plan
by which the Hungarian statesman- author, Maurus
Jockar, has banished the specter of ennui from his
hospitable country seat. His private hobby is Black
Art, as he calls his experiments in recondite chemis-
try, but any one of his guests is welcome to try his
hand at wood- carving, glass-painting, metallurgy, or
any of the more primitive crafts, for which the lab-
oratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus
Private taste might, of course, modify the details of
that plan, and even without regard to eventual re-
sults, its proximate benefits if once known would
alone insure its general adoption in the homes of tho
ennui- stricken classes. The educational advantages
84 THE BIBLE OF NATUEE.
of mechanical training, though, can, indeed, hardly
be overrated. A scholar with nerveless arms and
undextrous hands is as far from being a complete
man as a nimble savage with an undeveloped brain.
IL-MENTAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTEE VI.
KNOWLEDGE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the arena of life animal instinct triumphs over
the elemental forces of Nature, as human intelligence
triumphs over instinct, and the secret of that superi-
ority is knowledge. Skill is well-directed force.
Prudence is well-applied reason. The efficiency of
that directing faculty depends on experience, as we
call the accumulation of recollected facts. Knowl-
edge is stored light, as helpful in the narrowest as in
the widest sphere of conscious activity, and the in-
stinctive appreciation of that advantage manifests
itself in the lowest species of vertebrate animals, nay,
perhaps even in the winged insects that swarm in
from near and far to explore the mystery of a flicker-
ing torch. Curiosity, rather than the supposed love
of rhythm, tempts the serpent to leave its den at the
sound of the conjurer's flute. Dolphins are thus at-
tracted by the din of a kettledrum, river-fish by the
glare of a moving light. Where deer abound, a
pitchwood fire, kindled in a moonless night, is sure
to allure them from all parts of the forest. Antelope
hunters can entice their game within rifle-shot by
86 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
fastening a red kerchief to a bush and letting it
nutter in the breeze. When the first telegraph lines
crossed the plateau of the Rocky Mountains, herds
of bighorn sheep were often seen trotting along the
singing wires as if anxious to ascertain the meaning
of the curious innovation. Every abnormal change
in the features of a primitive landscape — the erection
of a lookout-tower, a clearing in the midst of a
primeval forest — attracts swarms of inquisitive birds,
even crows and shy hawks, who seem to recognize
the advantage of reconnoitering the topography of
their hunting grounds. In some of the higher an-
imals inquisitiveness becomes too marked to mistake
its motive, as when a troop of colts gathers about a
new dog., or a pet monkey pokes his head into a
cellar-hole, and wears out his finger-nails to ascertain
the contents of a brass rattle.
For the intelligence of children, too, inquisitiveness
is a pretty sure test. Infants of ten months may be
seen turning their eyes toward a new piece of furni-
ture in their nursery. Kindergarten pets of three
years have been known to pick up a gilded pebble from
the gravel road and call their teacher's attention to
the color of the abnormal specimen. With a little en-
couragement that faculty of observation may develop
surprising results. The wife of a Mexican missionary
of my acquaintance, who had taken charge of an
Indian orphan boy, and made a point of answering
every pertinent question of the bright-eyed youngster,
was one day surprised to hear him usher in a stranger
and invite him to a seat in the parlor. u How could
you know it was not a tramp ? " she asked her little
KNOWLEDGE. 87
chamberlain after the visitor had left. " Oh, I could
tell by his clean finger-nails," said Master Five-years,
" and also by his straight shoes. Tramps always get
their heels crooked ! "
The shrewd remarks of boy naturalists and girl
satirists often almost confirm the opinion of Goethe
that every child has the innate gifts of genius, and
that subsequent differences are only the result of
more or less propitious educational influences. And
in spite of most discouraging circumstances, the love
of knowledge sometimes revives in after years with
the energy almost of a passionate instinct. On the
veranda of a new hotel in a railroad town of southern
Texas, I once noticed the expression of rapt interest
on the face of a young hunter, a lad of eighteen or
nineteen, who here for the first time came in contact
with the representatives of a higher civilization and
with breathless attention drank in the conversation
of two far-traveled strangers. " If they would hire
me for a dog-robber (a low menial), I would do it for
a dime a day," he muttered, " just for the chance to
hear them talk."
" But if they should take you to some smoky,
crowded, big city ? "
" I don't care," said he, with an oath, " I would
let them lock me up in a jail, if I could get an educa-
tion like theirs."
It would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that the
thirst for mental development is the exclusive
product of advanced culture. In the thinly settled
highlands of our western territories, miners and
herders have been known to travel ten miles a day
88 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
over rough mountain roads to get the rudiments of a
school education. Missionaries who have mastered
the language of a barbarous tribe have more than
once been followed by converts whom the charm of
general knowledge (far more than any special theo-
logical motive) impelled to forsake the home of their
fathers and follow the white stranger to the land of
his omniscient countrymen.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Knowledge is power, even in the contests of
brutes. Superior topographical knowledge enables
the chasing wolf to intercept the flight of his game ;
a well-chosen ambush makes the tiger the master of
his would-be slayer. Familiarity with the habits of
enemies and rivals decides success in the struggle for
existence.
The advantage of superior knowledge is not limited
to the prestige of superlative scholarship, but asserts
itself in the chances of every competitive pursuit, so
infallibly, indeed, as to justify Diderot's paradox that
there is no need of any such thing as love of science
for its own sake, since all knowledge repays its ac-
quisition by collateral benefits. A farmer's boy
studying statute law, a lawyer collecting market re
ports, will sooner or later find a chance to profit by
their study. Tbo infinite interaction of human affairs
connects the interests of all branches of human
knowledge, and makes the humblest handicraft ame-
nable to scientific improvement. Knowledge has
never hindered the successful pursuit of any manual
vocation. Fifty years ago several states of the
KNOWLEDGE. 89
American Union made it a penal offense to teach a
slave reading and writing ; and if the planter valued his
laborers in proportion to their canine submissiveness,
he was perhaps right that " education spoils a nigger."
It qualified his servility, and by making him a better
man, made him perhaps a less available dog. But
with that single exception, ignorance is a disad-
vantage, and knowledge an advantage, both to its
possessor and his employers. In the solitudes of the
Australian bush-land, Frederick Jerstaecker found a
herdsman reading Aristophanes in the original.
Neither the sheep nor their owners were any the
worse for that incidental accomplishment of the poor
shepherd, who found his study a sufficient source of
pastime, while his comrades were apt to drown their
ennui in bad rum. James Cook, the greatest of
modern maritime discoverers, served his apprentice-
ship on board of a coal-barge and employed his
leisure in studying works on geography and general
history. The knowledge thus acquired might seem
of no direct advantage, but three years after, on
board of the Eagle frigate, the erudition of the
brawny young sailor soon attracted the attention of
two intelligent officers whose recommendations proved
the stepping-stones of his successful career. Mo-
hammed Baber Khan, the emperor of the Mogul
empire, owed his triumphs to his topographical
studies of a region which afterward became the
battleground of his great campaigns. Mohammed
the Prophet gained the confidence of his first em-
ployer by his familiarity with the commercial cus-
toms of neighboring nations. Superior knowledge
90 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
compels even an unwilling recognition of its prestige.
In the Middle Ages, when Moslems and Trinitarians
were at daggers drawn, Christian kings sent respect-
ful embassies to solicit the professional advice of
Ibn Khus (" Averroes "), the Moorish physician.
During the progress of the life-and-death struggle of
France and Great Britain, the discoveries of Sir
Humphrey Davy impelled the Academie Francaise to
send their chief prize to England. The benefits of
great inventions are too international to leave room
for that envy that pursues the glory of military
heroes, and the triumphs of science have often united
nations whom a unity of religion had failed to recon-
cile.
C PERVERSION.
There is a tradition that a year before the con-
version of Constantine the son of the prophetess
Sospitra was praying in the temple of Serapis, when
the spirit of his mother came over him and the veil
of the future was withdrawn. "Woe to our chil-
dren !" he exclaimed, when he awakened from his
trance, " I see a cloud approaching, a great darkness
is going to spread over the face of the world." That
darkness proved a thirteen hundred years' eclipse of
common sense and reason. There is a doubt if the
total destruction of all cities of the civilized world
could have struck a more cruel blow to Science than
the dogma of salvation by faith and abstinence from
the pursuit of free inquiry. The ethics of the world-
renouncing fanatic condemned the love of secular
knowledge as they condemned the love of health and
the pursuit of physical prosperity, and the children
KNOWLEDGE. 91
of the next fifty generations were systematically
trained to despise the highest attribute of the human
spirit. Spiritual poverty became a test of moral
worth ; philosophers and free inquirers were ban-
ished, while mental castrates were fattened at the
expense of toiling rustics and mechanics; science
was dreaded as an ally of skepticism, if not of the
arch-fiend in person; the suspicion of sorcery at-
tached to the cultivation of almost any intellectual
pursuit, and the Emperor Justinian actually passed a
law for the " suppression of mathematicians."
"When the tyranny of the church reached the zenith
of its power, natural science became almost a tradi-
tion of the past. The pedants of the convent schools
divided their time between the forgery of miracle
legends and the elaboration of insane dogmas. The
most e xtravagant a bsurdities were propagated u nder
the name of historical records ; medleys of nursery-
tales and ghostTstories which the poorest village
school-teacher of pagan Eome would have rejected
with disgust were gravely discussed by so-called
scholars. Buckle, in his " History of Civilization,"
quotes samples of such chronicles which might be
mistaken for products of satire, if abundant evidence
of contemporary writers did not prove them to have
been the current ftaple of medieval science.
When the gloom of the dreadful night was broken
by the first gleam of modern science, every torch-
bearer was persecuted as an incendiary. Astronomers
were forced to recant their heresies on their bended
knees. Philosophers were caged like wild beasts.
Religious skeptics were burnt at the stake, as
92 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
enemies of God and the human race. It was, in-
deed, almost impossible to enunciate any scientific
axiom that did not conflict with the dogmas of the
revelation-mongers who had for centuries subordi-
nated the evidence of their own senses to the rant
of epileptic monks and maniacs. And when the sun
of Reason rose visibly above the horizon of the in-
tellectual world, its rays struggled distorted through
the dense mist of superstition which continued to
brood over the face of the earth, and was only par-
tially dispersed even by the storms of the Protestant
revolt.
The light of modern science has brought its bless-
ings only to the habitants of the social highlands ;
the valley dwellers still grope their way through the
gloom of inveterate superstitions and prejudices, and
centuries may pass before the world has entirely
emerged from the shadow of the life-blighting cloud
which the son of Sospitra recognized in the rise of
the Galilean delusion.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Of all the sins of Antinaturalism, the suppression
of human reason has brought down the curse of the
direst retribution. It is the unpardonable sin against
the Holy Spirit. The actual extinction of their local
sunshine could hardly have entailed greater misery
upon the slaves of the Christian church. The victims
of a permanent Egyptian darkness might have taken
refuge in the Goshen of their neighbors, in the sunny
garden-homes of the Parsees and Spanish Moriscos,
but the jealousy of the clerical tyrants closed every
KNOWLEDGE. 93
gate of escape, and for thirteen centuries the nations
of Christian Europe suffered all the horrors of
enforced ignorance and superstition. The history of
that dismal night is, indeed, the darkest page in the
records of the human race, and its horrors bind the
duties of every sane survivor to a war of extermina-
tion upon the dogmas of the insane fanatic whose
priests turned the paradise of southern Europe into
a hell of misery and barbarism.
The battle against the demon of darkness became
a struggle for existence, in which the powers of
Nature at last prevailed, but for millions of our
fellow-men the day of deliverance has dawned too
late; spring-time and morning returned in vain for
many a once fertile land where the soil itself had lost
its reproductive power, where the outrages of Anti-
naturalism had turned gardens into deserts and free-
men into callous slaves. The storm that awakened
the nations of northern Europe from the dreams of
their poison-fever could not break the spell of a
deeper slumber, and the moral desert of the Mediter-
ranean coast-lands remains to warn the nations of
the future, as the bleaching bones of a perished
caravan remain to warn the traveler from the track of
the simoom.
The religion of Mohammed, with its health-laws
and encouragements to martial prowess, has pro-
duced no ruinous results of physical degeneration,
but the entire neglect of mental culture has not
failed to avenge itself in the loss of national prestige.
For after the northern nations of Christendom had
broken the yoke of their spiritual tyrants, the chil-
94 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
dren of Islam remained faithful to the task-masters
of their less grievous bondage, but also to its total
indifference to secular science, and from that day the
crescent of the prophet became a waning moon.
E. REFOKM.
The experience of the Middle Ages has made the
separation of church and state the watchword of all
true Liberals. But the divorce of church and school
is a duty of hardly less urgent importance. While
many of our best Freethinkers waste their time in
hair-splitting metaphysics, Catholic and Protestant
Jesuits cooperate for a purpose which they have
shrewdly recognized as the main hope of obscurant-
ism: The perversion of primary education by its
re- subjection to the control of the clergy. The
definite defeat of those intrigues should be con-
sidered the only permanent guarantee against the
revival of spiritual feudalism. A perhaps less immi-
nent, but hardly less serious, danger to the cause of
Science is the stealthy revival of mysticism. Under
all sorts of nomenclatural modifications, the specter-
creed of the ancient Gnostics is again rearing its
head, and menacing reason by an appeal to the
hysterical and sensational proclivities of ignorance.
In the third place, there is no doubt that under
the present circumstances of educational limitations
the adoption of female suffrage would prove a death-
blow to intellectual progress and re-doom mankind
to the tutelage of a clerical Inquisition j but rather
than perpetuate a twofold system of oppression, we
should complete the work of emancipation by ad-
INDEPENDENCE. 95
mitting our sisters to all available social and educa-
tional advantages, as well as to the privilege of the
polls. From the suffrage of educated women we
have nothing to fear and much to hope.
It has long been a mooted question if the progress
of knowledge can be promoted by arbitrary encour-
agement, such as prize offers and sinecures, but the
preponderance of logic seems on the side of those
who hold that science should be left to its normal
rewards, and that the proper sphere of legislation
does not extend beyond the duty of securing the full
benefit of those rewards by the removal of absurd
disabilities and unfair discriminations in support of
worm-eaten dogmas. Reason may be safely left to
fight its own battle, if the arms of Un-reason cease
to be strengthened by statutes which enable every
village ghost-monger to silence the exponents of
science by an appeal to medieval heretic-laws.
CHAPTER VII.
INDEPENDENCE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
If the scale of precedence in the mental develop-
ment of our fellow-creatures can be determined by
any single test, that test is the instinctive love of
Independence. Many of the lower animals may sur-
prise us by constructive achievements that rival the
products of human science, but their instinct of free-
dom is quite imperfectly developed. The caterpillar
96 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
of the silk-moth will spin its satin winter-gown in a
box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the free-
dom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their cap-
tor a swarm of wild bees will continue to build hexa-
gons and store up honey as diligently as in the rocks
or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive river-fish
will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fish-
pond. Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost
liberty for weeks. During the first half -month of its
captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any food ; sea-
birds and eagles starve with a persistenoe as if they
were thus trying to end an affliction from which they
see no other way of escape. Wild cows can be do-
mesticated in a month ; wild elephants hardly in a
year. Several species of the larger carnivora can
be trained only if caught in their cub-hood, as in after
years they become almost wholly untamable. The
lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian capu-
chin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem al-
most to invite capture by the frequency of their visits
to the neighborhood of human dwellings, while the
apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest
creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so
rarely seen in the vicinity of human settlements that
its very existence was long considered doubtful.
Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant sound
of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its
favorite haunts in the coast jangles. On the west
coast of Borneo a large orang was once surprised by
the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought
with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors
to riddle it with rifle-balls, though they knew that a
INDEPENDENCE. 97
living specimen of that size would be worth its
weight in silver.
That same resolution in defense of their liberties
has always distinguished the nobler from the baser
tribes of the human race. The natives of the Gam-
bia Valley have no hesitation in selling their rela-
tives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the
liberation of a single countryman (whom the enemy
had determined to hold as a hostage) impelled the
Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of
desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Kussian
frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of
their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes
of Thermopylae to make a stand against six-thousand-
fold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-des-
pots found no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon
the former vassals of the Roman empire, but when
they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon
Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid
wolves; and when the neighboring ruffian-counts,
and at last Charlemagne in person, marched to the
support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a
resistance the record of which will forever remain the
proudest page in the chronicle of the Germanic races.
Cornfields were burnt, villages were leveled with
the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of
human subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the
council of the Saxon chieftains refused to submit
and when the homes of their forefathers were devas-
tated, they carried their children to the inaccessible
wilds of the Hartz highlands, where they grimly wel-
comed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost
98 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
and starvation, rather than crawl to cross {zu kreuze
kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the coward-
ice of their crucifix kissing neighbors. And when
the Frankish autocrat had shackled their land with a
chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with persistent
disregard of consequences ; nay, after the loss of the
last murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to
accept the ultimatum of the conqueror, and rather
than crawl to cross four thousand of their captive
noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on
the market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of
the heroes were thrown to the birds of the wilder-
ness ; but their deathless spirits revived in the philip-
pics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Luetzen
and Oudenarde, and will yet ride the storm destined
to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Ger-
manic nations.
B. EEWAKDS OF CONFORMITY.
Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom
have produced fruits and flowers that refused to
thrive on any other soil. For several centuries civili-
zation was confined to a small country of republics :
Attic and Theban Greece. "Study the wonders of
that age," says Byron to his friend Trelawney, " and
compare them with the best ever done under masters."
Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for cent-
uries been the happiest, as well as the freest, country
of Europe. The prosperity of the United States of
America, since the establishment of their independence,
stands unparalleled in the history of the last eighteen
hundred years ; and, moreover, the degree of that
INDEPENDENCE. 99
prosperity has been locally proportioned to the de-
gree of social freedom, and has begun to become
general only since the general abolition of slavery.
Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism
blights the most fertile, and it is only an apparent
exception from that rule that Italy continued to
flourish during the first two centuries of the empire.
The change in the form of government was at first
nominal, rather than real, and under the rule of
Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, Rome-
enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called re-
public of modern times. When despotism became a
systematic and chronic actuality, the sun of fortune
was soon eclipsed, and the social climate became as
unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and
patriotism.
Personal independence is a not less essential con-
dition of individual happiness. Bondage in any
form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of iron,
fetters, is incompatible with the development of the
highest mental and moral faculties. The genius of
Poland and modern Italy has produced its best fruit
in exile. The progress of modern civilization dates
only from the time when knowledge once more
flourished in a Republic of Letters; and for a
thousand years the monastery system of medieval
literature produced hardly a single work of genius.
Within the period of the last three or four genera-
tions the sun of freedom has ripened better and
more abundant fruit in any single decade than the
dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries.
All foreign travelers agree in admiring (or condemn-
100 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
ing) the early mental development of American chil-
dren, who have a chance to exercise their intellectual
faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of
caste divisions and social restraints. They may yield
to the pupils of the best European colleges in cpecial
branches of scholarship, but in common sense, gen-
eral intelligence, general information, in self-respect,
in practical versatility and self-dependence, an
American boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a
match for a continental-European boy of sixteen;
and the same holds good of the average intelligence
and self-dependence of our country population.
With the rarest exceptions the political economists
of our Southern states agree that the agricultural
negro as a freeman is a more valuable laborer than as
a slave, and that emancipation, in the long run, has
benefited the planter as well as his serf. I venture
even to add the verdict of Professor Hagenbeck, the
founder of the great zoological supply depot, that
menagerie-trainers of the least despotic methods are
the most successful. Turf-men know that the best
horses do not come from the unequaled perennial
pastures of the lower Danube, but from England and
Araby, where pet colts enjoy almost the freedom of
a pet child.
C PERVERSION.
The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddh-
istic doctrine of self-abasement, as an indispensable
condition of salvation. That salvation meant ex-
tinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and
desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, in-
INDEPENDENCE. 101
eluding the instinct of freedom. Abject submission
to injustice, the subordination of reason to dogma,
the sinfulness of rebellion against the M powers that
be," were inculcated with a zeal that made the
church an invaluable ally of despotism. For cent-
uries a scepter combining the form of a cross and a
bludgeon was the significant emblem of tyranny.
With the aid, nay, in the name, of the Christian
hierarchy, the despots of the Middle Ages elaborated
a system of subordination of personal freedom to
autocratic caprices, which, by comparison, makes the
tyranny of the Caesars a model of liberalism. Every
important function of social and domestic life was
subjected to the control of arbitrary functionaries,
armed with irresponsible power or with a system of
oppressive penal by-laws. Censors suppressed every
symptom of visible or audible protest. Every school
was a prison, every judgment-seat a star-chamber.
Peasants and mechanics had no voice in the coun-
cils of their rulers. The merit of official employees
was measured by the degree of their flunkeyism. But
the ne-plus-ultras of physical and moral despotism
were combined in the slavery of the monastic con-
vents. The attempt of reviving the outrages which
abbots for centuries practiced on the unfortunates
whom a rash vow (or often the mandate of a bigoted
parent) had submitted to their power, would cer-
tainly expose the manager of a modern convent to
the risk of being mobbed and torn limb from limb.
Novices were subjected to all sorts of wanton tort-
ures and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges ;
they were compelled to perform shameful and ridic-
102 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
ulous acts of self-abasement, all merely to " break
their wordly spirit," i. e., crush out the last vestige of
self-respect and life-love, in order to prepare them
for the consolations of other- worldliness. The moral
emasculation of the human race seems, indeed, to
have been the main purpose of the educational policy
which the priests of the Nature-hating Galilean pur-
sued wherever the union of Church and State put
children and devotees at the mercy of their dogma-
tists.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Voluntary slavery means voluntary renunciation
of the chief privilege of human reason : the privilege
of self-control. The spendthrift divests himself of
external advantages; the miser yields up his life-
blood for gold ; but he who surrenders his personal
liberty has sold his soul, as well as his body. Bond-
age circumscribes every sphere of activity. Political
despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling
fetters impede the circulation of the blood. Enter-
prising autocrats of the Frederic and Peter type
have as utterly failed in the attempt of enforcing a
flourishing state of commerce, as they would have
failed in the attempt of enforcing the growth of a
stunted tree by the tension of iron chains. In free
America a voluntary pledge of abstinence has accom-
plished what in medieval Europe the most Draconic
temperance and anti-tobacco laws failed to achieve.
The educational despotism of moral pedants has
ever defeated its own purpose, and succeeded only in
turning frank, merry-souled children into hypocrites
INDEPENDENCE. 103
and sneaks. The idea that a barbarous system of
military discipline could develop model warriors has
been refuted on hundreds of battle-fields, where the
machine- soldiers of despotic kings were routed by
the onset of enthusiastic patriots, half-trained, per-
haps, and ill-armed, but assembled by an enlistment
of souls as well as of bodies. The unparalleled
intellectual barrenness of the Middle Ages was well
explained by the indictment of a modern English
poet. " The bondage of the Christian doctrine,"
says Percy Shelley, " is fatal to the development of
originality and genius." The curse of mediocrity
has, indeed, for ages rested upon every literary prod-
uct devoted to the promotion of clerical interests.
The Muses refuse to assemble on Golgotha. Pegasus
declines to be yoked with the ass of the Galilean
ascetic. Outspoken skepticism is almost as rare
as true genius, and it is not possible to mistake the
significance of the fact that the great poets and
philosophers of the last seven generations were,
almost without an exception, persistent and out-
spoken skeptics. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alem-
bert, Holbach, Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Hegel,
Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Humboldt, Pope,
Hume, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gibbon, Buckle, and
Darwin have all inscribed their names in the temple
of Liberalism ; and Wolfgang Goethe, the primate of
European literature, was at once the most consistent
and the most anti-Christian of modern thinkers.
"His personal appearance," says Heinrich Heine,
" was as harmonious as his mind. A proudly erect
body, never yet bent by Christian worm-humility;
104 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
classic features, never distorted by Christian con-
trition; eyes that had never been dimmed by
Christian sinner-tears or the apathy of monkish
resignation."
That resignation was for centuries enforced as the
first of moral duties; but Nature has had her revenge,
and even the fallen hierarchy would hesitate to
recover the loss of their prestige by a return to the
moral desert which for ages marked the empire of a
mind-enslaving dogma.
E. REFORM.
Not all slaves can be freed by breaking their
shackles; the habit of servitude may become a
hereditary vice, too inveterate for immediate rem-
edies. The pupils of Freedom's school may be re-
quired to unlearn, as well as to learn, many lessons ;
the temples of the future will have to remove several
aphoristic tablets to make room for such mottoes as
" Self-Reliance," " Liberty," " Independence." Victor
Jacquemont tells a memorable story of a Hindoo
village, almost depopulated by a famine caused by
the depredations of sacred monkeys, that made con-
stant raids on the fields and gardens of the super-
stitious peasants, who would see their children starve
to death rather than lift a hand against the long-
tailed saints. At last the British stadtholder saw a
way to relieve their distress. He called a meeting
of their sirdars and offered them free transportation
to a monkeyless island of the Malay archipelago.
Learning that the land of the proposed colony was
fertile and thinly settled, the survivors accepted the
INDEPENDENCE. 105
proposal with tears of gratitude ; but when the band
of gaunt refugees embarked at the mouth of the
Hooglyn, the stadtholder's agent was grieved to
learn that their cargo of household goods included a
large cageful of sacred monkeys. " They are be-
yond human help," says the official memorandum,
" and their children can be redeemed only by curing
them of the superstition that has ruined their mon-
key-ridden ancestors."
At the end of the fifteenth century, when southern
Europe was in danger of a similar fate from the
rapacity of esurient priests and monks, Providence,
by means of an agent called Christoval Columbus,
offered the victims the chance of a free land of refuge ;
but when the host of emigrants embarked at the
harbor of Palos, philosophers must have been grieved
to perceive that their cargo of household-pets com-
prised a large assortment of ecclesiastics. "They
are beyond human help," Experience might sigh in
the words of the British commissioner, "and their
children can be redeemed only by curing them of the
superstition that has proved the ruin of their priest-
ridden ancestors."
In regions of our continent where colonists might live
as independent as the birds of their primeval forests,
bondage has been imported in the form of an in-
triguing hierarchy, working its restless bellows to
forge the chains of their pupils — of the rising genera-
tion, who as yet seem to hesitate at the way-fork of
Feudalism and Keform. A timely word may decide
their choice, and, by all the remaining hopes of
106 THE BIBLE OP NATUKE.
Earth and Mankind ! that word shall not remain un-
spoken.
CHAPTER VIII.
PRUDENCE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The first germs of animal life have been traced to
the soil of the tropics, and in the abundance of a
perennial summer the instincts of pleasure and pain
may long have sufficed for the protection of mere
existence. But when the progress of organic devel-
opment advanced toward the latitude of the winter-
lands, the vicissitudes of the struggle for existence
gradually evolved a third instinct: The faculty of
anticipating the menace of evil and providing the
means of defense. The word Prudence is derived
from a verb which literally means fore-seeing, and
that faculty of Foresight manifests itself already in
that curious thrift which enables several species of
insects to survive the long winter of the higher lati-
tudes. Hibernating mammals show a similar sagac-
ity in the selection of their winter quarters. Squir-
rels and marmots gather armfuls of dry moss; bears
excavate a den under the shelter of a fallen tree; and
it has been noticed that cave-loving bats generally
select a cavern on the south side of a mountain or
rock. Beavers anticipate floods by elaborate dams.
Several species of birds baffle the attacks of their
enemies by fastening a bag- shaped nest to the ex-
PRUDENCE. 107
tremity of a projecting branch. Foxes, minks, rac-
coons, and other carnivora generally undertake their
forages during the darkest hour of the night.
Prowling wolves carefully avoid the neighborhood of
human dwellings and have been known to leap a
hundred fences rather than cross or approach a high-
way.
Young birds, clamoring for food, suddenly become
silent at the approach of a hunter; and Dr. Moffat
noticed with surprise that a similar instinct seemed
to influence the nurslings of the Griqua Hottentots.
Ten or twelve of them, deposited by their mothers
in the shade of a tree, all clawing each other and
crowing or bawling at the top of their voices, would
abruptly turn silent at the approach of a stranger,
and huddle together behind the roots of the tree —
babies of ten months as quietly cowering and as cau-
tiously peeping as their elders of two or three years.
Young savages, and often the children of our rustics,
show an extreme caution in accepting an offer of un-
known delicacies. I have seen a toddling farmer's
boy smelling and nibbling an orange for hours before
yielding to the temptation of its prepossessing ap-
pearance. Only the distress of protracted starvation
will induce the Esquimaux to touch their winter
stores before the end of the hunting season; and
the supposed improvidence of savages is often due to
the influence of a hereditary disposition once justified
by the abundance which their forefathers enjoyed
for ages before the advent of their Caucasian de-
spoilers.
108 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
B. — REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Civilization has partially healed the wounds of that
Millennium of Madness called the Kule of the Cross,
and of all the insanities of the Middle Ages the Im-
promdence Dogma has perhaps been most effectually
eradicated from the mental constitution — at least, of
the North-Caucasian nations. Instead of relying on
the efficacy of prayers and ceremonies, the dupes of
the Galilean miracle-monger at last returned to the
pagan plan of self-help, and it would not be too much
to say that the progress thus achieved in the course
of the last fourteen decades far exceeds that of the
preceding fourteen centuries. Earth has once more
become a fit .dwelling-place for her noblest children.
Pestilential swamps have been drained. Domestic
hotbeds of disease have been expurgated. Airy,
weather-proof buildings have taken the place of the
reeking hovels that housed the laborers of the Middle
Ages. Farmers no longer live from hand to mouth.
The price of the necessities and many luxuries of life
has been brought within the resources of the hum-
blest mechanic. Affluence is no longer confined to
the palaces of kings. There is no doubt that the
cottage of the average modern city tradesman con-
tains more comforts than could be found in the castle
of a medieval nobleman. Prudence, in the sense of
economic foresight, has become almost a second nat-
ure with the industrial classes of the higher latitudes,
and the benefits of such habits can be best appreci-
ated by comparing the homes of the thrifty North-
landers — Scotch and Yankees — with those of the
PRUDENCE. 109
Spanish- American priest-dupes: here deserts tilled
into gardens, there gardens wasted into deserts. In
natural resources, South America, for instance, excels
New England as New England excels the snow-
wastes of Hudson's Bay Territory; yet industrial
statistics demonstrate the fact that the financial
resources of Massachusetts alone not only equal but
far surpass those of the entire Brazilian empire.
The contrast between Prussia and Spain is not less
striking, and that climatic causes are insufficient to ex-
plain that contrast is proved by the curious fact that
within less than five centuries Spain and North Ger-
many have exchanged places. Two hundred years be-
fore the conquest of Granada the field s # of Moorish
Spain had been brought to a degree of productiveness
never surpassed in the most favored regions of our
own continent, while Catholic Prussia was a bleak
heather. Since the expulsion of the Moors from
Spain, and the monks from northern Germany,
Prussia has become a garden and Spain a desert;
the contrasting results of prudence and superstition.
While the Prussians were at work the Spaniards were
whining to their saints, or embroidering petticoats
for an image of the holy Virgin. While the country-
men of Humboldt studied chemistry, physiology, and
rational agriculture, the countrymen of Loyola conned
oriental ghost stories ; while the former placed their
trust in the promises of nature, the latter trusted in
the promises of the New Testament. Prudence,
rather than military prowess, has transferred the
hegemony of Europe from the Ebro to the Elbe, and
prudence alone has smoothened even the path of exile
110 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
which ill-fated Israel has pursued now for more than
a thousand years. For, with all the Spiritualistic
tendency of their ethics, the children of Jacob have
long ceased to deal in miracles, and train their chil-
dren in lessons of secular realism which effectually
counteract the influence of their school-training in
the lessons of the past, and as a result famine has
been banished from the tents of the exiles. Like the
Corsicans and the prudent Scots, they rarely marry
before the acquisition of a competency, but the ten-
dency of that habit does not prevent their numerical
increase. Their children do not perish in squalor
and hunger ; their patriarchs do not burden our alms-
houses.
0. PERVERSION.
There is a story of an enterprising Italian who in-
creased the patronage of an unpopular mountain
resort by effecting an inundation of the lowlands;
and if the apostles of other-worldliness had tried to
enhance the attractions of their hereafter on the same
plan, they could certainly not have adopted a more
effective method for depreciating the value of tem-
poral existence. The vanity of work, of thrift, of
economy, and the superior merit of reliance on the
aid of preternatural agencies, were a favorite text of
the Galilean messiah. "Take no thought of the
morrow, for the morrow shall take thougnt for the
things of itself." " Take no thought, saying, What
shall we eat ? what shall we drink ? or wherewithal
shall we be clothed ! For after all these do the
gentiles seek." "Ask and it shall be given you."
PRUDENCE. Ill
Secular foresight was depreciated even in the form
of a prudent care for the preservation of physical
health; the selection of clean in preference to un-
clean food was denounced as a relic of worldliness ;
and in mitigating the consequences of such insults
to nature, prayer and mystic ceremonies were rec-
ommended as superior to secular remedies. " If any
man is sick among you, let him call for the elders of
the church, and let them pray over him, anointing
him with oil in the name of the Lord." " And the
prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall
raise him up." " And when he had called unto him
his twelve disciples, he gave them power against un-
clean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner
of disease."
If such instructions had been followed to the
letter, the human race would have perished in a hell
of madness and disease. As it was, a thousand years'
purgatory of half insanity cured the world of its de-
lusion ; and the sinners against the laws of common
sense escaped with the penalty of a millennium of
barbarism, a barbarism which, in the most orthodox
countries of the fourteenth century, had sunk deep be-
low the lowest ebb of pagan savagery. The un-
tutored hunters of the primeval German forest were
at least left to the resources of their animal instincts ;
they were illiterate, but manly and generous, braving
danger, and prizing health and liberty above all
earthly blessings. Their children were dragged off
to the bondage of the Christian convents and doomed
to all the misery of physical restraint, not for the
sake of their intellectual culture, not with a view of
112 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
purchasing the comforts of after years by temporal
self-denial, but to educate them in habits of physical
apathy and supine reliance on the aid of interposing
saints — a habit which at last revenged itself by its
transfer to the principles of ethics, and encouraged
malefactors to trust their eternal welfare to the same
expedient to which indolence had been taught to con-
fide its temporal interests. Where was the need of
rectitude if iniquity could be compromised by prayer?
Where was the need of industry if its fruits could be
obtained by faith ? Where was the need of sanitary
precautions if the consequences of their neglect could
be averted by ceremonies ?
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The consequences of that dogma refuted its claims
by lessons which mankind is not apt to forget for
the next hundred generations. From the day when
the doctrine of Antinaturalism succeeded in super-
seding the lingering influence of pagan philosophy,
progressive industry waned, and at last almost ceased
to supply even a reduced demand; commerce lin-
gered, and the sources of subsistence were wholly
confined to the produce of a more and more impover-
ished soil. With the exception of (still half pagan)
Italy, not one of the many once prosperous countries
of Christian Europe had anything like a profitable
export trade. On the international markets of the
Byzantine empire the products of skilled labor — fine
clothes, fine fruits, perfume, and jewelry — were sold
by oriental merchants, while the Christian buyers
had little to offer in exchange but the spontaneous
PRUDENCE. 113
products of Nature : timber, salt, amber, and per-
haps hides and wool. Medical science had become
such a medley of vagaries and barbarisms that even
the princes of Christendom could not boast of a
competent family physician, and in critical cases had
to trust their lives to the skill of Moorish or Persian
doctors. Abderaman el Hakim, a king of Moorish
Spain, had so many applications for the services
of his court- doctor that he often jestingly called him
the " Savior of Christian Europe." The prevalence of
the militant type should certainly have encouraged
the manufacture of warlike implements ; yet not one
of the twelve heavy-armed countries of Trinitarian
Europe had preserved the art of tempering a first-
class sword, and proof- steel had to be imported from
Damascus. The traditions of architecture were lim-
ited to the fantastic elaboration of religious edifices ;
peasants dwelt in hovels, and citizens in dingy stone
prisons, crowded into crooked and cobble-paved
alleys.
The unspeakable filth of such alleys produced
epidemics that almost depopulated the most orthodox
countries of medieval Europe. Under the stimulus
of clerical theories, those epidemics in their turn
produced outbreaks of fanatical superstition, which
in pagan Eome would certainly have been ascribed
to the influence of a contagious mental disease.
Diseases, according to a doctrine which it was
deemed blasphemy to doubt, could be averted by
prayer and self-humiliation. In spite of a diligent
appMcation of such prophylactics, diseases of the
most virulent kind became more prevalent. The
114 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
logical inference seemed that prayer had not been
fervent and self-abasement not abject enough.
Hordes of religious maniacs roamed the streets of
the plague- stricken cities, howling like hyenas and
lacerating their bodies in a manner too shocking
to describe. After exhausting the available means of
subsistence, the blood-smeared wretches would in-
vade the open country, and by frantic appeals
frighten thousands of peasants into joining their
ranks, and in carrying the seeds of mental and
physical contagion to a neighboring country. In
Germany and Holland the total number of " Flagel-
lants " were at one time estimated at three hundred
and fifty thousand; on another occasion at more
than half a million. If the disease had exhausted its
fury, the self-torturers would claim the reward of
their services by falling like hungry wolves upon
the homes of the sane survivors. If the plague
refused to abate, the leading fanatics would ascribe
the failure to their followers' want of zeal, and
enforce their theory by an indiscriminate application
of a rawhide knout, till the dispute was referred
to the arbitrament of cold steel, and the ranks of the
howling maniacs were thinned by mutual slaughter.
E. REWARDS.
The world has trusted in the doctrine of miracle-
mongers till skepticism became a condition of self-
preservation, and the benefits of open revolt are now
conspicuous enough to impress even the non-insur-
rected slaves of the church. With all their hereditary
bias of prejudice the victims of the miracle dogma
PRUDENCE. 115
cannot help contrasting their lot with that of the in-
dustrial skeptic. They cannot help seeing self-
reliant science succeeds where prayer-relying ortho-
doxy fails. The prosperity of Protestantism, its
physical, intellectual, political, and financial superior-
ity to Conservatism, with the aid of all its saints, are
facts too glaringly evident to ignore their significance,
and our ethical text-books might as well plainly ad-
mit that this universe of ours is governed by uniform
laws and not by the caprice of ghosts — at all events
not of ghosts that can be influenced by rant and
ceremonies. Whatever may be the established sys-
tem of other worlds, in this planet of ours Nature
has not trusted our welfare to the whims of tricksy
spooks, but has endowed our own minds with the
faculty of ascertaining and improving the conditions
of that welfare ; and the time cannot come too soon
when well-directed labor shall be recognized as the
only prayer ever answered to the inhabitants of this
earth.
The philosophic author of the " History of Morals "
remarks that the medieval miracle-creed still lurks in
the popular explanation of the more occult phenom-
ena. While the natural sequence of cause and effect
is, for instance, freely admitted in such plain cases as
the stability of a well-built house and the collapse of
a rickety structure, the phenomena of health and dis-
ease, of atmospheric changes or of the (apparent)
caprices of fortune in war or games of chance are
still ascribed to the interference of preternatural
agencies. That bias is undoubtedly at the bottom of
the still prevalent mania for hazardous speculation
116 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
and the reckless disregard of the laws governing the
condition of our physical health.
Unconfessed, and perhaps unknown, to themselves
the grandchildren of orthodox parents are still influ-
enced by the hope that in such cases the event of an
imprudent venture might be modified by the inter-
ceding favor of " providence."
Secularism should teach its converts that the most
complex as well as the simplest effect is the necessary
consequence of a natural cause ; that the " power
behind phenomena " acts by consistent laws, and that
the study and practical application of those laws is
the only way to bias the favor of fortune.
" Pray and you shall receive," says Superstition.
" Sow if you would reap," says Science. The Ke-
ligion of Nature will teach every man to answer his
own prayers, and Prudence will be the Providence of
the Future.
CHAPTEE IX.
PERSEVERANCE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the course of evolution from brute to man some
of our organs have been highly developed by constant
use, while others have been stunted by habitual dis-
use. In special adaptations of the sense of touch and
sight, for instance, man surpasses all his fellow- creat-
ures, most of whom, in turn, surpass him in the
acuteness of their olfactory organs. An analogous
result seems to have been produced by the exercise or
PERSEVERANCE. 117
neglect of certain mental faculties and dispositions.
The instinct of enterprise, for instance, has been de-
veloped from rather feeble germs of the animal soul,
while the instinct of perseverance appears to have lost
something of its pristine energy. The African ter-
mite ant rears structures which, in proportion to the
size of the builders, surpass the pyramids as a moun-
tain surpasses the monuments of the mound-builders.
By the persistent cooperation of countless genera-
tions the tiny architect of the coral reefs has girt a
continent with a rampart of sea-walls. The prairie
wolf will follow a trail for half a week. The teeth of
a mouse are thinner and more brittle than a darning
needle, yet by dint of perseverance gnawing mice
manage to perforate the stoutest planks. Captive
prairie dogs have been known to tunnel their way
through forty feet of compact loam.
An instinct, which one might be tempted to call a
love of perseverance for its own sake, seems some-
times to influence the actions of young children.
There are boys whose energies seem to be roused by
the resistance of inanimate things. I have seen lads
of eight or nine years hew away for hours at knotty
logs which even a veteran woodcutter would have
been pardoned for flinging aside. There are school
boys, not otherwise distinguished for love of books,
who will forego their recess sports to puzzle out an
arithmetical problem of special intricacy.
Our desultory mode of education hardly tends to
encourage that disposition which, nevertheless, is now
and then apt to develop into a permanent character
trait. There are young men who will act out a self/
118 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
determined programme of study or business with per-
sistent disregard of temporary hardships, and pursue
even minor details of their plan with a resolution only
strengthened by difficulties. The moral ideals of
antiquity seem to have been more favorable to the
development of that type of character, which also
manifests itself in the national policy of several
ancient republics, and the inflexible consistency of
their legal institutions.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The advantages of perseverance are not too readily
admitted by the numberless victims of that facile dis-
position that loves to ascribe its foibles to the " ver-
satility of genius," or a high-minded " aversion to
pedantic routine f yet now, as in the days of yore,
life reserves its best rewards for che most persistent
competitors. Singleness of purpose, like a sharp
wedge, forces its way through obstacles that resist
many-sided endeavors. The versatile poets and phi
losophers of Athens have wreathed her memory with
unrivaled laurels, yet in the affairs of practical life
her merchants were out- traded, her politicians out-
witted, and her generals beaten by men whose na-
tions had steadfastly followed a narrower but con
sistent policy. "Aid non tentarls aut perjice"
11 either try not, or persevere," was a Koman proverb
that made Rome the mistress of three continents.
In the Middle Ages the dynasty of the Abbassides,
as in modern times the house of the Hohenzollerc,
attained supremacy by persistent adherence to an
established system of political tactics. Even question-
PEKSEVEKANCE. 119
able enterprises have thus been crowned with triumph,
as the ambitions of the Roman pontiffs, and the pro-
jects of Ignatius Loyola. The chronicles of war, of
industry, and of commerce abound with analogous
lessons. Patient perseverance succeeds where fitful
vehemence fails. In countless battles the steadiness
of British and North German troops has prevailed
against the enthusiasm of their bravest opponents.
The quiet perseverance of British colonists has pre-
vailed against the bustling activity of their Gallic
rivals, on the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, as well
as on the Ganges and Indus. Steady-going business
firms, consistently-edited journals, hold their own,
and ultimately absorb their vacillating competitors.
Dr. Winship, the Boston Hercules, held that the
chances of an athlete " depend on doggedness of pur-
pose far more than on hereditary physique." Even
the apparent caprices of Fortune are biased by the
habit of perseverance. "In the Stanislaus mining-
camp," says Frederic Gerstaecker, " we had a number
of experts who seemed to find gold by a sort of sixth
sense, and came across 'indications' wherever they
stirred the gravel of the rocky ravines. We called
them ' prospectors/ and the brilliancy of their pros-
pects was, indeed, demonstrated by daily proofs.
But at the first frown of Fortune they would get dis-
couraged, and remove their exploring outfit to an-
other ravine. Most of the actual work was done by
the ' squatters,' as we called the steady diggers, who
would take up an abandoned claim and stick to it for
weeks. Bragging was not their forte, but at the end
of the season the squatter could squat down on a
120 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
sackful of nuggets, while the prospector had nothing
but prospects."
C. PERVERSION.
The ambition of the ancients was encouraged by
the conviction that life is worth living, and that
all its social and intellectual summits can be reached
by the persistent pursuit of a well-chosen road. But
the basis of that confidence was undermined by
a doctrine which dented the value of earthly exist-
ence, and made the renunciation of worldly blessings
the chief purpose of moral education. The pilgrim
of life who had been taught to spurn earth as a vale
of tears, and turn his hopes to the promises of
another world, was not apt to trouble himself about
a consistent plan of secular pursuits, which, more-
over, he had been distinctly instructed to trust to
the chances of the current day : " Take no thought
for the morrow;" "Take no thought for your life,
nor yet for your body ... for after all these
things do the gentiles seek."
Indecision, inconsistency, fickleness of purpose,
vitiated the politics of the Christian nations through-
out the long chaos of the Middle Ages, and in their
features of individual character there is a strange
want of that moral unity and harmony which the
consciousness of an attainable purpose gave to the
national exemplars of an earlier age.
The Rationalistic reaction of the last two centuries
has greatly modified the moral ideals of the Caucasian
nations ; the legitimacy of secular pursuits is more
generally recognized, but still only in a furtive, hesi-
PERSEVERANCE. 121
tating manner, and the glaring contrast of our daily
practice with the theories of a still prevalent system
of ethics cannot fail to involve contradictions incom-
patible with true consistency of principles and action.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
For thirteen hundred years the importance of per-
severance in the pursuit of earthly aims was depre-
ciated by the ethics of Antinaturalism, and the word
Failure is written in glaring letters over the record
of the physical, mental, and moral enterprises of all
that period. The nations of northern Europe, whom
the prestige of Rome surrendered to the power
of popish priests, were giants in stature and strength,
and the love of physical health was too deeply rooted
in the hereditary constitution of those athletes to be
at once eradicated by the machinations of spiritual
poison-mongers. Yet the poison did not fail to assert
its virulence. Athletic sports were still a favorite
pastime of all freemen ; but the gospel of the Nature-
hating Galilean insisted on the antagonism of physi-
cal and moral welfare; penances and the worship of
cadaverous saints perverted the manlier ideals of the
masses, the encouragement of ascetic habits and the
enforced inactivity of convent life undermined the
stamina of the noblest nations, and in the course of
a few orthodox generations the descendants of the
herculean hunter- tribes of northern Eurcpe became a
prey to a multitude of malignant diseases.
The love of knowledge still fed on the literary
treasures of antiquity; the flame of philosophy was
now and then rekindled at the still glowing embers
122 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
of pagan civilization; but the doctrine of other-
worldliness denounced the pursuit of worldly lore,
and science degenerated into a medley of nursery-
legends and monkish fever- dreams. Men walked
through life as Sindbad walked through the perils of
the spirit-vale, in constant dread of spectral mani-
festations, in constant anticipation of ghostly inter-
ference with their earthly concerns, the pursuit of
which all but the wisest undertook only in a desul-
tory, tentative way, haunted by the idea that success
in worldly enterprises could be bought only at the
expense of the immortal soul.
And how many thousand wanderers of our latter-
day world have thus been diverted from the path of
manful perseverance, and almost directly encouraged
in the habit of palliating inconstancy of purpose with
that " dissatisfaction and weariness of worldly vani-
ties," which the ethics of their spiritual educators
commend as a symptom of regeneration ! The voices
of re-awakened Nature protest, but only with inter-
mittent success, and the penalty of vacillation is that
discord of modern life that will not cease till our
system of ethics has been thoroughly purged from
the poison of Antinaturalism.
E. — REFORM.
That work of redemption should include an em-
phatic repudiation of the natural depravity dogma.
Our children should be taught that steadfast loyalty
to the counsels of their natural reason is sufficient to
insure the promotion of their welfare in the only
world thus far revealed to our knowledge. The
PERSEVERANCE. 123
traditional concomitance of perseverance and medi-
ocrity should be refuted by the explanation of its
cause. For a long series of centuries the predomi-
nance of insane dogmas had actually made science a
mere mockery, and application to the prescribed
curriculum of the monastic colleges a clear waste of
time — clear to all but the dullest minds. The
neglect of such studies, of the disgusting sophistry
of the patristic and scholastic era, was, indeed, a
proof of common sense, since only dunces and
hypocrites could muster the patience required to
wade through the dismal swamp of cant, pedantry,
and superstition which for thirteen centuries formed
the mental pabulum of the priest-ridden academics.
During that era of pseudo- science and pseudo-moral-
ity, of fulsome rant centered on a monstrous de-
lusion, the eccentricity of genius was more than
pardonable, being, in fact, the only alternative of
mental prostitution. The ideas of waywardness and
mental superiority became thus associated in a way
which in its results has wrought almost as much mis-
chief as in its cause. The delusions of that idea
have wrecked as many promising talents as indolence
and intemperence.
The pupils of Secularism should be instructed to
observe the benefits of perseverance in the pursuit
of minor projects, and encouraged to apply that ex-
perience to the higher problems of life. Persever-
ance should be recognized as the indispensable ally
of loftiest genius as well as of the lowliest talent.
Failure in secular enterprises should cease to be
regarded as a symptom of divine favor ; and for
124 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
those who insist on claiming the protection of super-
natural agencies, Goethe's grand apostrophe to the
Genius of Manhood* should be condensed in the
motto that " Heroic perseverance invokes the aid of
the gods."
CHAPTER X.
FREETHOUGHT.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The Brahmans have a legend that the first children
of man ascended Mount Gunganoor, to visit the
castle of Indra and inquire into the secret of their
origin. Speculations on the source of life, on the
mystery of creation, the cause of good and evil, and
similar problems which we might sum up under the
name of religious inquiries, seem, indeed, to have
occupied the attention of our ancestors at a very
early period. An irrepressible instinct appears to
prompt the free discussion of such questions, and in
a normal state of social relations the attempt to sup-
press that instinct would have appeared as prepos-
terous as the attempt to enforce silence upon the
inquirers into the problems of health or astronomy.
A thousand years before the birth of Buddha, the
* Weibischcs Klagen, banglicb.es Zagen
Wendet kein Ungliick, macht dicb nicht frei :
Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sioh esbalten,
Nimmer sich beugen, kriiftig sicb zeigen
Rufet die Arme der Gutter berbei.
FREETHOUGHT. 125
Sakyas, or ethic philosophers, of northern Hindostan
visited the mountain-passes of Himalaya to converse
with travelers and seek information on the religious
customs and traditions of foreign nations. The book
of Job, probably the oldest literary product of the
Semitic nations, records a series of free and often,
indeed, absolutely agnostic discussions of ethical
and cosmological problems.
"Canst thou by searching find out God?" says
Zophar. " It is as high as heaven : what canst thou
do? It is deeper than hell: what canst thou
know ?"
" Is it good unto thee that thou shouldst oppress
the work of thy own hand ?" Job asks his creator ;
" thine hands have made me ; why dost thou destroy
me? Thou huntest me like a fierce lion. Where-
fore, then, hast thou brought me forth out of the
womb ? Oh, that I had given up the ghost and no
eye had seen me ! I should have been as though
I had not been ; I should have been carried from the
womb to the grave. Are not my days few ? Cease,
then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort
a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even
to the land of darkness and the shadow of death."
And again: "Man dieth and wasteth away; man
giveth up the ghost, and where is he ? As the waters
fall from the sea and the flood dryeth up : so man
lieth down and riseth not; till the heavens be no
more he shall not awake nor be raised out of his
sleep." . . . " If a man die, shall he live again ?"
"Wherefore is light given unto them that are in
misery, and life unto the bitter in soul ? who long
126 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
for death, but it cometh not ; who rejoice exceedingly
and are glad when they can find the grave V
Or Elihu's interpellation: "Look up to heaven
and see the clouds which are higher than thou : If
thou sinnest, what doest thou against him ? If thou
be righteous, what givest thou to him, or what can
he receive of thine hand V*
Could a committee of modern skeptics and philos-
ophers discuss the problems of existence with greater
freedom ?
For a series of centuries the monkish custodians of
the literary treasures of Greece and Eome expurgated
the writings of the bolder Freethinkers, and for the
sake of its mere parchment destroyed more than one
work that would have been worth whole libraries of
their own lucubrations ; yet even the scant relics of
pagan literature furnish abundant proofs of the
ethical and metaphysical liberty which the philos-
ophers of the Mediterranean nations enjoyed for
nearly a thousand years. The marvelous develop-
ment of Grecian civilization in art, science, politics,
literature, and general prosperity coincided with a
period of almost unlimited religious freedom. Spec-
ulations on the origin of religious myths were pro-
pounded with an impunity which our latter-day
Freethinkers have still cause to envy. The pos-
sibility of all definite knowledge of the attributes of
the deity was boldly denied two thousand years
before the birth of Emmanuel Kant. The Free-
thinker Diagoras traveled from city to city, propa-
gating his system of Agnosticism with a publicity
which seems to imply a degree of tolerance never
FEEETHOUGHT. 127
yet re-attained in the progress of the most intel-
lectual modern nations. The skeptic Pyrrho ridi-
culed the absurdity of all our modern Secularists
would include under the name of other-worldliness.
A Roman actor was applauded with cheers and
laughter for quoting a passage to the effect that " if
the gods exist, they seem to conduct their adminis-
tration on the principle of strict neutrality in the
affairs of mankind !"
Democritus, Euhemerus, Anaxagoras, Epicurus,
Aristotle, Libanius, Pliny, Lucretius, and the latter
Pythagoreans, almost entirely ignored the doctrines
of Polytheism, which, indeed, never assumed an ag-
gressive form, the attempted suppression of the
Christian dogmatists being an only apparent excep-
tion, dictated by motives of political apprehensions,
rather than by religious zeal ; for at the very time
when the followers of the life-hating Galilean were
persecuted as " enemies of mankind," a large number
of other oriental religions enjoyed privileges border-
ing on license. The Grecian colonists of Asia Minor
never interfered with the religious customs of their
new neighbors. They studied and discussed them as
they would study the curiosities of other social
phenomena; and a purely naturalistic system of
education would undoubtedly lead to analogous re-
sults. Intelligent children often evince a remarkable
tact in avoiding certain topics of conversation, such
as allusions to personal or national defects, scandals,
the arcana of sexual relations, private affairs, etc.,
and the experience of after years may confirm such
habits of discretion : but no conceivable motive but
128 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
deference to an arbitrary precept could dictate a
similar reticence in the discussion of purely meta-
physical topics, or of dogmas which by their very
pretense to a mission of extreme importance should
justify an extreme frankness in debating the basis of
their claims.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Religious liberty guarantees every other kind of
freedom, as every form of slavery walks in the train
of priestly despotism. In America religious emanci-
pation led the way to the Declaration of Indepen-
dence, and still continues to make this continent the
chosen home of thousands of Liberals whom the
material prosperity of the New World would have
failed to attract. It is possible that a policy of in-
tolerance would have averted or postponed the fate
of the Moorish empire, which was ultimately over-
thrown by the fanatics of a creed which the followers
of a more rational faith had permitted to survive in
their midst ; yet it is not less certain that for nearly
five hundred years religious tolerance made the
realm of the Spanish caliphs the one bright Goshen
in a world of intellectual darkness. In northern
Europe the history of civilization begins only with
the triumph of Rationalism. Protestantism, in that
wider sense which made the revolt of the Germanic
nations an insurrection against the powers of super-
stition, has laid the foundation of national prosperity
in Great Britain, in the Netherlands, and in the ris-
ing empire of northern Germany. The real founder
of that empire was at once the greatest statesman
FREETHOUGHT. 129
and the boldest Freethinker of the last fourteen
centuries. His capital became a city of refuge for
the philosophers of Christian Europe. The eastern
provinces of his kingdom were colonized by refugees
from the tyranny of clerical autocrats. His absolute
tolerance protected even the Jesuits, expelled by the
Catholic rulers of France and Spain. During the
reign of that crowned philosopher the religious and
political dissenters of Prussia expressed their views
with a freedom which in semi-republican England
would have involved them in a maze of endless law-
suits. Among the fruits of that freedom were
products of science and philosophy which have made
that period the classic age of German literature.
" Before the appearance of Kant's * Critique of Pure
Reason/" says Schopenhauer, "the works of duly
installed government professors of philosophy were
mostly medleys of sophisms, pretending to reconcile
science and dogma, or reason and despotism. Here,
at last, a state university could boast of a man who
lived at once by and for the service of Truth — a
phenomenon made possible only by the circumstance
that, for the first time since the days of the great
Aurelius and the greater Julian, a Freethinker had
mounted the throne of an independent monarchy."
The protection of Freethought is likewise the best
safeguard against that virus of hypocrisy that has
undermined the moral health of so many modern
nations.
"What an incalculable advantage to a nation as
well as to its ruler," says a modern philosopher,
" to know that the pillars of state are founded on
130 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the eternal verities, on natural science, logic, and
arithmetic, instead of casuistry and immaculate con-
ceptions !"
The consciousness of that advantage has more than
once upheld the birthland of Protestantism in its
struggles against the allied powers of despotism, and
should uphold our republic in the inevitable struggle
against the allied despots of the twentieth century.
C. PERVERSION.
The experience of the last sixteen centuries has
made priestcraft almost a synonym of intolerance;
and yet it would be a mistake to suppose that the
interests of Freethought are incompatible with the
survival of any system of supernatural religion.
The myths of polytheism were for ages accepted as
the basis of a creed enjoying all the prerogatives and
emoluments of an established religion, but the priests
of that religion had no need of protecting their pres-
tige by the butchery of heretics. With all their ab-
surdities, the rites of their creed were essentially a
worship of Nature, naturally attractive to all lovers t
of earth and life, and by their harmlessness conciliat-
ing the favor of philosophers who might have studied
the baneful tendencies of a different creed — a creed
which could propagate its dogmas only by an unre-
mitting war against the natural instincts of the human
race, and by constant intrigues against the protests
of human reason. "The Nature- worshiping Greeks
repeated the harmless myths and practiced the merry
rites of their creed for centuries without troubling
themselves about the myths and rites of their neigh-
FREETHOUGHT. 131
bors. Their superstition differed from that of the
church as the inspired love of Nature differs from
the ecstatic fury of her enemies, as the day-dream of
a happy child differs from the fever-dream of a
gloomy fanatic. ' Procul Prof anil* was the cry of
the Eleusinian priests. They had more followers
than they wanted. Their joy-loving creed could dis-
pense with autos-da-fe. The Hebrews, in stress of
famine, conquered a little strip of territory between
Arabia and the Syrian desert, and then tried their
best to live in peace with heaven and earth, and their
sects contented themselves with metaphorical rib-
roastings. The Saracens spread their conquests from
Spain to the Ganges, but their wars had a physical,
rather than metaphysical, purpose. They needed
land, and made a better use of it than the former oc-
cupants. They contented themselves with assessing
dissenters, and did not deem it necessary to assas-
sinate them. But the Galilean pessimists could not
afford to tolerate an unconverted neighbor. To the
enemies of Nature the happiness of an earth-loving,
garden-planting, and science-promoting nation was
an intolerable offense : reason had to be sacrificed to
faith, health and happiness to the cross, and earth to
heaven" (The Secret of the East, p. 62).
And even in the modified form of Protestant Chris-
tianity, that creed remains the rancorous enemy of
Freethought. The doctrine of the Galilean Buddh-
ist is essentially a doctrine of pessimism, of other-
worldliness and Nature-hating renunciation of human
reason and earthly prosperity, and therefore wholly
irreconcilable with the promotion of progressive
132 THE BIBLE OF NATUKE.
science and secular happiness. Philosophers have
for centuries assembled their scholars undisturbed
by the songs and dances of pagan festivals ; the ex-
ponents of secular science have enjoyed the good-
will of health-loving Hebrews and Mohammedans,
and will find a modus vivendi with the Spiritualists
and Theosophists of the future; but Secularism,.
" the Science of Happiness on Earth," can never hope
to conciliate the dogmatists of a creed that denies
the value of life itself, and wages war against Nature
as well as against the claims of natural science.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Wherever Reason surrenders to Dogma, the expo-
nents of that dogma will claim unreasonable prerog-
atives. Irresponsible dogmatists have never failed
to pursue the interests of their creed at the expense
of the interests of mankind. The lessons of Science
could not be reconciled with the doctrines of Anti-
naturalism, and in the interest of that doctrine the
spiritual taskmasters of medieval Europe suppressed
Science by methods that have retarded the progress
of mankind for thirteen hundred years. The sup-
pression of Freethought enabled the enemies of Nat-
ure to complete their triumph by the suppression of
social and political liberty; and for ages the church
has been the faithful ally of Despotism. The priest-
ridden rulers of the expiring Roman empire and the
priest-ridden rabble of the Roman provinces assisted
in the persecution of Freethought, and that crime
against reason was avenged by the development of a
system of spiritual tyranny which at last forced even
FREETHOUGHT. 133
princes to kiss the dust of Canossa and degraded the
lot of peasants beneath that of savages and wild
beasts. The war against natural science avenged itself
in the neglect of agriculture, and the enormous spread
of deserts, which the priests of the Galilean miracle-
monger proposed to reclaim by prayer-meetings.
The surrender of Freethought to faith sealed the
fate of millions of heretics and " sorcerers," who ex-
piated an imaginary crime in the agonies of the
stake. Not the abrogation of civil rights, not the
intimidation of princes and commoners, but the erad-
ication of Freethought, enabled the priests of an un-
natural creed to enforce their hideous superstitions
upon the prisoners of the numberless monasteries
which for a series of centuries combined all the con-
ditions for the systematic suppression of moral,
intellectual, and personal freedom.
" I am not come to bring peace but the sword,"
said the ingenuous founder of a creed which could
not fail to produce an irrepressible conflict between
the delusions of its doctrines and the inspirations of
nature and science — and, of course, also between the
would-be followers of its own preposterous precepts
— and neither the lust of conquest nor the jealousy
of rival nations has ever stained this earth with the
torrents of blood shed by the bigots of that creed
after its triumph over the protests of Freethought.
The fatuous attempt to crush out dissent by substi-
tuting a roll of parchment for the book of Nature
avenged itself by murderous wars about the interpre-
tation of those same parchments. The dogmatists
who had tried to perpetuate their power by the mur-
134 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
der of modest rationalists, were assailed by hordes of
their own irrationalists, raging about the ceremonial
details of the wafer-rite m and the immersion rite.
The bigots who had refused to heed the pleadings of
Bruno and Campanella were forced to acknowledge
the battle-axe logic of the Hussites.
E. REFORM.
Truth that prevails against error also prevails
against half truths, and the recognition of just claims
cannot be furthered by unjust concessions. Uncom-
promising right is mightiest, and Freethinkers would
have served their cause more effectually if they had
contended, not for the favor to enjoy a privilege, but
the right to fulfil a duty. The ministry of reason
imposes obligations to posterity, and to the memory
of its bygone martyrs, as well as to our help-needing
contemporaries; and the defense of its rights is a
truer religion than submission to the yoke of a mind-
enslaving dogma. The Kishis, or sainted hermits of
Brahmanism, used to devote themselves to the service
of a forest temple, and guard its sanctuary against
vermin and reptiles ; and the believers in a personal
God cannot devote their lives to a nobler task than by
guarding his temples against the serpent of priestly
despotism.
The disciples of Secularism should learn to value
the right of Freethought as the palladium of their
faith, as the basis of all other blessings — moral and
material, as well as intellectual. They should learn
to revere the memory of the martyrs of their faith,
and recognize the importance of their services to the
FREETHOUGHT. 135
cause of modern civilization and its sacred principles ;
but they should also learn to recognize the magni-
tude of the remaining task. It is no trifle that the
prevalent system of ethics and the temporal and
eternal hopes of millions of our brethren are still
based on a lie. It is no trifle that the health and
happiness of millions of our fellow-men are still sac-
rificed on the altar of that untruth by the suppres-
sion of public recreations on the only day when a
large plurality of our working-men find their only
chance of leisure. It is no trifle that honest men are
still branded as "Infidels," "renegades," and "scoff-
ers," for refusing to kneel in the temple of a nature-
hating fanatic. The struggle against the spirits of
darkness is by no means yet decided in Italy, where
the arch-hierarch is spinning restless intrigues to re-
gain the power which for ages made Europe a Ge-
henna of misery and despotism. Nor in Spain, where
a ewarm of clerical vampires is still sucking the life-
blood of an impoverished nation. Nor in Austria and
southern Germany, where the alliance of church and
state remains a constant menace to the scant liberties
of the people.
Freethinkers need not underrate the influence of
individual efforts to recognize the superior advantage
of organized cooperation, so urgently needed for the
reform of Sabbath laws, of press laws, and the
educational system of the numerous colleges still
intrusted to the control of the Jesuitical enemies of
science. The strength-in-union principle should
encourage the oft- debated projects for the establish-
ment of Freethought colleges (as well as Freethought
136 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
communities); but still more decisive results could
be hoped from that union of the powers of knowl-
edge and oi moral courage which has never yet
failed to insure the triumph of social reforms. We
should cease to plead for favors where we can claim
an indisputable right. We should cease to admit
the right of mental prostitutes to enforce the penal-
ties of social ostracism against the champions of
science; but we, in our turn, should deserve the
prestige of that championship by scorning the
expedients of the moral cowardice which strains
at gnats and connives at beams, attacking super-
stition in the harmless absurdities of its ceremonial
institutions, and sparirg the ruinous dogmas that
have drenched the face of earth with the blood of
her noblest children, and turned vast areas of garden-
lands into hopeless deserts. The skeptics who scoff
at the inconsistencies of a poor clergyman who tries
in vain to reconcile the instincts of his better nature
with the demands of an anti-natural creed, should
themselves be consistent enough to repudiate the
worship of the fatal founder of that creed, and not
let the hoary age of the Galilean doctrine palliate
the tendencies of its life-blighting delusions.
IIT-MORAL MAXIMS.
CHAPTER XI.
JUSTICE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Moral philosophers have long conjectured the dis-
tinction between natural and conventional duties;
and only the full recognition of that distinction can
reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of
ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the
theory of " Intuitive Morality " claim the existence of
an innate moral conscience, common to all nations
and all stages of social development, while, on the
other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that
the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedi-
ence, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary
with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for
instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort
of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere
idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to
physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-
loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to
celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Mar-
riage between persons of adventitious relationship
(such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law)
is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not
only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of
138 -THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply
shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in
Constantinople and venerated in Rome.
But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear,
as we turn our attention from conventional to essen-
tial duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his
son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary
god, would agree with the worshipers of that god
that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The
innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite
heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March:
The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and
honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not
in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell
only salt meat, imported from China, and spite
Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circum-
stances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would
agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite
a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic.
Nations that totally disagree in their notions of pro-
priety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of
religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to
agree on the essential standards of humanity and
justice. The " instinct of equity," as Leibnitz calls
the sense of natural justice, has been still better
defined as the " instinct of keeping contracts." A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights.
Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage
of superior power in the form of manifold privileges,
but the expediency of " keeping contracts " naturally
recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be
JUSTICE. 139
specified by written laws. They need not even be
formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations
are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social cooperation, of any sort of social concomitance.
"Give every man his due;" "Pay your debts;"
" Give if you would receive," are international
maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science
or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers
of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of
sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest
burlesques of French fiction ; but they were almost
equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of
commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent
children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to
pay three bagfuls'of yam-roots for a common pocket-
knife, delivered two bagf uls (all his canoe would hold)
before the evening of the next day, and received his
knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they
could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave
the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were
overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-row-
ing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The
traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fisher-
men who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon
which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-
camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of
their Koman adversaries, was almost unknown among
the hunting-tribes of the primitive German wood-
lands. The natives of San Salvador received their
Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and
scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even
140 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a
similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and
San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable
to conceive the idea that their guests could repay
good with evil. " Fair play " is the motto of boyish
sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than
on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary
sense of justice manifests itself even among social
animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an in-
offensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the
whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an
immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked
by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his
victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman
methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of
gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to
a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit
to evident injustice.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls j the
most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who
would defy the power of superior strength, or envy
and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do
unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice.
" Mars is a tyrant," says Plutarch, in the epilogue of
" Demetrius," " but justice is the rightful sovereign of
the world." " The things which kings receive from
heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships
with brazen beaks, but law and justice ; these they
are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most
warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the
JUSTICE. 141
justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of
Jupiter." History has more than once confirmed
that test of supremacy. The reputation of incor-
ruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and
even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the dis-
putes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion,
Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag)
settled international quarrels which the sword had
failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has
made honor almost a synonyme of an " honorable,"
*. e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of
Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealoi&sies and
religious prejudices, and in America the worship of
wealth does not prevent an upright judge from rank-
ing high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous,
attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage
which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous
disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the
fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi ; it
enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the
veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to
rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just
cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, sur-
passes the value of common interests, which a slight
change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflict-
ing interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to
the principles of political equity has preserved small
states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose
greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to
incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,
142 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their
national independence in Europe, as Japan and
Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty
and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has
proved a match for the cunning of the predatory
Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as
constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils,
and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again
and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of
the despised " heathen."
The practical advantages of integrity have been
recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations,
but are not confined to the affairs of commercial in-
tercourse. In the long run, honesty is the " best
policy," even in avocations where the perversion of
justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage.
A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave
against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and
ultimately also in professional reputation, more than
he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who
refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of
a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige
sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
C. PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word,
was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much
favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism.
The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed
in the sarcasm that "an honest god is the noblest
work of man," was recognized already by the ancient
historian who observed that " every nation makes its
JUSTICE. 143
gods the embodiments of its own ideals," though,
happily, it is not always true that " no worshiper is
better than the object of his worship." To some de-
gree, however, the moral standards of the Mediter-
ranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the
lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally
certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian
fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned,
by the moral characteristics of their dogma- God.
According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle
Ages, the administrative principles of that God
seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which
even the poetic license of a saner age would have hes-
itated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom
the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient
creator of all the physical and moral instincts of
human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish
with endless torture nearly every free gratification of
those instincts,and demand a voluntary renunciation
of a world which his own bounty had filled with every
blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness.
The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of
which a moderate share is suflicient to perceive the
absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless
avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an " un-
pardonable sin against the authority of his sacred
word." The most natural action, the eating of an
apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of
man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower pro-
ducts of organic Nature; while the greatest of all
imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a
144 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doc-
trine of salvation by grace made the distribution of
punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice.
The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught
that the " elect" were not saved by their own merits,
but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous
act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably
foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone,
or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt
of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the
eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony
doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the
abyss of hellfire. " There is no doubt," the Solomon
of the Patristic Age assures us, " that infants, only a
few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of
hell," a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism
justly stigmatizes as "so atrocious, and at the same
time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply
impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity."
Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians
were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refus-
ing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed
believed in the merit of passive submission to the
caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals
of justice in their dealings with pagans and Free-
thinkers * Why should men try to be better than
their God ? The worshiper of a God who doomed
the souls of unbaptized children and honest dis-
senters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the
JUSTICE. 145
bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes
who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which
they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the
sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty " sov-
ereign of six faithful square miles" accordingly
became a law to himself. A man's might was the
only measure of his right ; the Faust-Mecht, the
"first law" of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme
from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges
of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined
their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect
in the payment of tithes, and the performance of
socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the
divine right of potentates, and passive submission to
even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were
assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Chris-
tian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the
laws of humanity had no place in that code of re-
vealed ethics.
Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of
insurrection. In the Peasants' War thousands of
convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of
a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the in-
convenience of having to submit to the powers that
happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or
flayed and roasted alive.
" Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se
pierde," is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian
proverb: "If justice is disregarded, it is just that
everything perish " — a doom which the intolerable
outrages against human rights and humanity at last
experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolu-
146 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
tion. There, too, the despisers of natural justice had
to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of abso-
lutism that had withstood the tears of so many gen-
erations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and
the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned
their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of
their mistake when their own throats were mangled
by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted
favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice,
and for a series of centuries the consequences of its
teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every
benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the
fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless
convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the
discoverer of a New World with chains. His suc-
cessors who lavished the treasures of their vast em-
pire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes
perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a
thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last
distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought
it a grievance that the church should be denied the
right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no
pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had
made those lands blossom like the gardens of para-
dise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime
of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the
trinitary gods of the New Testament.
E. REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the
dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evi-
JUSTICE. 147
dent in the prevailing notions of natural justice and
the precedence of social duties. The modern Croe-
sus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen
and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to
the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesita-
tion in swelling his already bloated income by reduc-
ing the wages of a hundred starving factory children
and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain
from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants.
The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neigh-
bors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by
depriving them of every chance for healthful recrea-
tion, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on
the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renounc-
ing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting
about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank
cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the
hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily ab-
solved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as
embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and
orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for
the interests of departed souls, we should learn to
practice a little more common honesty in our dealings
with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural
justice would be less frequently outraged if our
moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doc-
trines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith,
and hold every man responsible for his own actions,
irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of
an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the ex-
ponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not
148 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual
submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue,
and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his
unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights en-
courages oppression and fraud and endangers the
rights of his honest fellow-men.
CHAPTER XII.
TRUTH.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the
favorite arguments of their creed on the doctrine of
Natural Depravity. According to the theories of
that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart
are wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due
to the redeeming influence of theological education.
The baseness of the " unregenerate soul" is their
favorite antithesis of "holiness by grace;" and the
best test of that dogma would be a comparison of
the moral characteristics of a young child of Nature
with the moral results of theological training. We
need not adduce the extreme case of a child like
Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of
Baroda, whose propensities had been modeled in
communion with solitude or the dumb denizens of
the wilderness. For, even in the midst of " Chris-
tian civilization," thousands of peasants and mechan-
ics are practically pure Agnostics, and ignore the ab-
surdities of the New Testament as persistently as
their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities
TRUTH. 149
of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or
seventh year the offspring of such parents would
still represent a fair specimen-child of unregenerate
Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is re-
vealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the
purity, and the cheerfulness of the young Agnostic,
and the absence of every appreciable germ of the
secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the joy-hating
bigotries of the representative Christian convent-
slave.
But the most characteristic features of that con-
trast would perhaps be the double-tongued hypoc-
risy of the old Jesuit and the artless candor of the
young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young
children antedates all moral instruction. Its motives
are wholly independent of theological, or even ab-
stract-ethical, influences, and are based merely on a
natural preference for the simplest way of dealing
with the problems of intellectual communication.
Truth is uniform, falsehood is complex. Truth is
persistent and safe; falsehood is unstable, fragile,
and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the
difficulties of plausibly maintaining the fictions of
deceit, and dread the risk of incurring the suspicion
of habitual insincerity. Hence their uncompromis-
ing loyalty to facts ; their innocence of artifice and
mental reservation ; hence also their extreme re-
luctance in conforming to the conventional customs
of social hypocrisy and polite prevarication.
"ire you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?" Master
Frank once asked his mother in my presence. " Well,
yes, I am." " Then what's the use asking her to call
150 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
again and stay for supper ? She could not help see-
ing that we were tired of her gabble." " Well, it
wouldn't do to insult her, you know." " Oh, no, but
what's the use telling her something she cannot be-
lieve?"
That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory
whenever the expedience of hypocrisy is defended by
the conventional sophisms of Christian civilization.
That prevarications are unprofitable as well as un-
pardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded
with a veil of its choicest cant, but the clear vision
of childhood * penetrates that cant, and the "natural
depravity" of unregenerate souls may reach the de-
gree of doubting the merit of simulation even in the
interest of an orthodox creed, as the reverend
dogmatist might ascertain by happening to overhear
the recess comments of our American Sabbath- school
youngsters.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened
self-interest would be sufficient to make a man per-
fectly virtuous. With the conventional definition of
" virtue," that tenet might require certain qualifica-
tions; but it is more than probable that perfect
prudence would insure a voluntary devotion to per-
fect truthfulness. In its most aggressive form the
hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary inter-
ests of the aggressor, but in every other sense the
path of truth is the path of safety. All the ultimate
tendencies of the moral and physical universe con-
spire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud.
TRUTH. 151
Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by
the evidence of experience as an upright building by
the law of gravity ; deception, with all its props of
plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out of
plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports
which in their turn must yield to the test of time.
Even from a standpoint of purely secular consid-
erations, truth, like honesty, is in the long run the
best policy. Abstinence from insidious poisons is
easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience
have at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of
our fellow-men that consistent abstinence from the
vice of hypocrisy is preferable to any compromise
with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical,
and almost Agnostic, education of the American
wilderness seems to favor that type of moral teeto-
talism, and among the hardy hill-farmers of our New
England highlands, and Southern mountain states,
one may find men almost constitutionally incapable
of conscious deceit in deed or word, and practicing
veracity without the least pretense to superior saint-
liness, in a quite untheological and often, indeed, de-
cidedly profane medium of speech. They stick to
truth from habit, rather than from moral principles,
yet among their simple-hearted neighbors they enjoy
a respect withheld from unctuous hypocrisy, and in
emergencies can always rely on the practical value of
a life-long reputation for candor. Their word is
sufficient security ; their denial of slanderous impu-
tations is accepted without the aid of compurgators.
The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the
development of a similar disposition, and on the
152 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
Austrian-Turkish frontier the word of a Mussulman
generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On
the Indian ocean, too, the verdict of international
opinion favors a preference for Unitarian testimony.
" Wish to heaven we could fall in with some Acheen
fishermen," Captain Baudissin heard his pilot mutter
among the reefs of the Sunda Islands, " it's no use
asking such d liars as those Hindoos and
Chinese."
The love of truth compels the respect even of im-
postors and of professional hypocrits, as in the case
of that curate mentioned by the German Freethinker,
Weber (author of the philosophical cyclopedia, "Dem-
ocritus"). Professor Weber passed his last years
in the retirement of a small south- German mountain
village, where his undisguised skepticism made him
the bugbear of the local pharisees ; yet on moonless
evenings he was more than once honored by the visits
of a neighboring village priest, who risked censure,
and, perhaps, excommunication, for the sake of en-
joying the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant
of his colleagues, and devoting a few hours to intel-
lectual communion with a champion of Secular
science.
Lessing's allegory of "Nathan" is founded on
something more than fiction, and there is no doubt
that even in the midnight of the Middle Ages the
gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often
cheered by the secret visits of some intelligent Chris-
tian whom the thirst for truth impelled to defy the
vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an intel-
lectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum
TRUTH. 153
alley to a feast in the banquet hall of a Christian
prelate.
" It is lucky for you that your opponents have not
learned to utilize the advantage of truth," Mirabeau
replied to the taunt of an insolent Jesuit ; and in logic
that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
" They find believers who themselves believe," and, as
the philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct
often enables the simplest countryman to distinguish
the language of honest conviction from the language
of artful sophistry. " Our jurymen seem to appre-
ciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,"
confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, " for some of
them privately hinted that they could tell it every
time."
Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but
first-class orators, as well as first-class authors, have
always recognized the wisdom of not relying on such
mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin's works,
for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition
and their grace of style, hardly more than to the ab-
solute candor of the author, who reviews the evidence
for and against his theories with the fairness of a
conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has
succeeded in prevailing against the partisan argu-
ments of his adversaries. For similar reasons our
"Christian" temperance societies can date their
triumphs only from the time when they frankly re-
pudiated the sophisms of their predecessors, who
hoped to reconcile the lessons of science with the
teachings of the alcohol-brewing Galilean. For truth
154 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
prevails against half-truth, as well as against abso-
lute untruth.
C. PERVERSION.
Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other
literary product of Freethought has provoked the
enemies of Nature to that degree of rancorous fury
excited by the appearance of Moliere's " Tartuffe."
The hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee
whose resolve to renounce the " vanities of earth " is
constantly tripped by the promptings of his physical
instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of ludicrous
sophisms to palliate the antagonism of two ever
irreconcilable principles :
Le ciel defend, de vrai, certain contentements,
Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements—
and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant au-
dience; but the French priesthood moved heaven
and earth to stop the performance, and can, indeed,
hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author's friench; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules
the shams, not only of the Catholic clergy, but of
their creed and the creed of their Protestant col-
leagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the ab-
surdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossi-
bility of reconciling the demands of Nature with the
precepts of a world-renouncing fanatic has, indeed,
made the worship of that fanatic a systematic school
of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of
convent life subverted the basis of physical health.
TBUTH.
155
God is paid when man receiveth ;
To enjoy is to obey;
says Nature with the poet of reason. " God delights
in the self- torture of his creatures — crucify your
flesh, despise your body, disown the world; re-
nounce ! renounce !" croaks the chorus of Christian
dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning
health into disease or candor into hypocrisy.
The dogma of salvation by faith offers an addi-
tional premium on mental prostitution. By punish-
ing honest doubt as a crime and inculcating the merit
of blind submission to the authority of reason-
insulting doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines
struck a deadly blow at the instinct of free inquiry,
and for a series of generations actually succeeded in
eradicating that instinct from the mental constitution
of their victims.
" The persecutor," says W. H. Lecky, " can never
be certain that he is not persecuting truth rather
than error, but he may be quite certain that he is
suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have
reviewed represent the most skilful and at the same
time most successful conspiracy against that spirit
that has ever existed among mankind. Until the
seventeenth century, every mental disposition which
philosophy pronounces to be essential to a legitimate
research was almost uniformly branded as a sin, and
a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual
vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues. . . .
In a word, there is scarcely a disposition that marks
the love of abstract truth and scarcely a rule which
156 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
reason teaches as essential for its attainment that
theologians did not for ages stigmatize as offensive
to the Almighty."
And those perversions culminated in the miracle-
mongery of the wretched superstition. If the mate-
rial universe was at the mercy of witches and tricksy
demons, no man could for a moment trust the evi-
dence of his own senses and was naturally driven to
complete his mental degradation by an absolute sur-
render of common sense to dogma. The history of
Christian dogmatism is the history of an eighteen
hundred years' war against Nature and Truth.
D. — PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of
once fertile empires still attests the physical con-
sequences of a thousand years' reign of Antinatural-
ism, but, happily, the time has already come when
many of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the
degree of mental abasement realized during the most
orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be no
overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred
years the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger per-
suaded a plurality of the Caucasian nations to risk
their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession
of which would start a modern Christian on a gallop-
ing trip to the next luDatic asylum.
Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged
from their tombs and paid their respects to a newly
appointed bishop; rlyiDg dragons descended through
the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and dis-
appeared with screams that frightened orthodox
TRUTH. 157
neighbors to take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms
of angels carried bones, crosses, and whole buildings
from Bethlehem to Loretto ; King Philip the Second
paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St. Lau-
rentius, and having been informed that a complete
skeleton of the same saint was for sale in the south
of Italy, he at once ratified the bargain and blessed
heaven for having favored him with a duplicate of
the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were
tried and executed on a charge of having taken an
aerial excursion on a broomstick or a black he-goat;
of having caused a gale by churning a potful of
froth and water; of having turned themselves into
foxes, wolves, and tomcats.
The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even
the most glaring superstitions seems to have become
wholly extinct in the minds of the forty generations
from the middle of the tenth to the end of the four-
teenth century ; and during that millennium of mad-
ness the suppression of free inquiry encouraged
thousands of pious tract-mongers to devote their
lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly biographies
and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name
of historical records insanities too extravagant even
for the readers of a modern nursery-tale.
The war against Truth was carried to the length
of suppressing not only the skeptical inferences of
science, but science itself; chemists, astronomers,
physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide his-
torians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk
of an inquisitorial indictment ; and a cloud of igno-
rance, which in the days of Horace and Pliny would
158 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
have been thought disgraceful to the obscurest ham-
let of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the
face of the entire Christian world.
For a series of centuries the encouragement of
credulity and imposture almost annulled the value of
contemporary records. Travelers and chroniclers, as
well as biographers, accommodated the popular taste
by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles;
witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections,
prodigies of skill and physical prowess, giants,
dragons, were-wolves, and no end of spectral mani-
festations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a
period of more than nine hundred years the dogma
of the Galilean antinaturalist systematically favored
the survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on
mental prostitution and making common sense a
capital crime.
E. — BEFORM.
The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered
in a dawn which, in comparison with the preceding
night, may justly vaunt its era as an Age of Reason ;
but the thousand years' perversion of our moral in-
stincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educa-
tional influences of a short century. For even
eighty years ago the educational reforms of the
Protestant nations attempted little more than a
compromise between reason and dogma, while their
southern neighbors revolted against the political in-
fluence, rather than against the dogmatical arrogance,
of their priesthood. Nay, even at present the fal-
lacies of the compromise plan still hamper the
TRUTH. 159
progress of reform in manifold directions. As an
American Freethinker aptly expresses it : " Truth is no
longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly turned
loose to roam at large — after being chained to a cer-
tain number of theological cannon-balls." Evolution
may pursue its inquiries into specific phases of or-
ganic development, but must not question the cor-
rectness of the Mosaic traditions ; rationalists may
inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but
must pretend to overlook the fact that the doctrine
of the New Testament contains the germs of all those
insanities; the science of health may denounce
modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the
anti-physical precepts of the body-despising Galilean ;
Materialists must attack the hobgoblins of the Daven-
port brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of Gadara;
historical critics may call attention to the inconsist-
encies of Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention
the self-contradictions of the New Testament.
Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a
farce till the axiom of a great biologist can be ap-
plied to the pursuit of every human science. " In-
quiries of that sort" (the " Descent of Man"), he says,
" have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes
or vested interests, but only with facts. We should
not ask : ' Will it be popular V ' Will it seem or-
thodox V but simply, ' Is it true V "
And in just as much as the theory of moral duties
deserves the name of a science, the exponents of that
science would gain, rather than lose, by the adoption
of the same maxim. "Religion," in the traditional
sense of the word, needs to be purged from an enor-
160 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
mous percentage of spurious elements, before its
ministers can be acquitted from the guilt of tempting
their disciples to associate the ideas of Ethics and
Imposture, and thus reject the basis of morality
together with the basis of an Asiatic myth. " Truth
is the beginning of Wisdom," " Justice is Truth,"
"Mendacity is the Mother of Discord," would be fit
mottoes for the ethical Sunday-schools of the Future.
"What is Truth 1" asks Pilate; yet even in religious
controversies the fury of sectarian strife could be
obviated if we would truthfully admit the uselessness
of disputes about the unknowable mysteries of super-
natural problems. Still, we cannot hope to eradicate
the roots of discord unless we resolve with equal
frankness to reject the interference of Supernatural-
ism with the knowable problems of secular science.
Evident Truth can dispense with the indorsement of
miracle-mongers, and "evident Untruth," in the
words of Ulrich Hutten, "should be exposed whether
its teachers come in the name of God or of the devil."
CHAPTER XIII.
HUMANITY.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The wanton disposition of young children, like the
michievousness of our next relatives, the tree climb-
iug half-men of the tropical forests, has often been
mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due
to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking
a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolic-
HUMANITY. 161
some child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become
destructive, merely because destruction is easier than
construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of
cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no
means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or
normal boys. The most wayward of all known
species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African
baboons ; yet a long study of their natural disposi-
tion, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced
me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short
of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably
intended as a protest against acts of injustice or
violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number
of babuinos hasten to the aid of a shrieking child,
who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and
whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality
of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-
creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying
rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon
into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within
reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of
compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her
playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The
fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that
would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless
so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength
that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not
protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives,
as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young
dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco
Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imi-
tating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young
162 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-
monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from
all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity
than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-
creature.
That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in
the disposition of children and primitive nations. I
have seen youngsters of five or six years ga3p in
anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror
from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir
Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of
a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of
buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy
is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human
species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener
of a British resident was pursued with howls and
execrations for having killed a young Roussette — some
sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly
cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indig-
nation shook the mangled creature before his face.
The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish
hamlet where a Christian boy came near being
mobbed for " gagging a long-billed fowl."
" Man's inhumanity to man," as practiced by their
foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders
with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship
Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for
some act of rudeness toward the natives of the So-
ciety Islands, the natives themselves interceded with
loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle
their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-
fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and
HUMANITY. 163
then shaking hands again. A similar scene was wit-
nessed in Prince Baryatinski's camp in the eastern
Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to re-
nounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather
than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penal-
ties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land
Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-
trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condi-
tion gradually overcame the hostility of the natives ;
so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his
wants by joint contributions from their own rather
scanty store of comestibles. Even among the
bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of
the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insur-
rection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India
and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-
men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-
shed that in time of famine they have frequently
preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their
hunger by the slaughter of a fellow- creature.
A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence
in developing those truculent propensities which our
moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the
promptings of a normal instinct. In our North
American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively
carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities
of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of
those sanguinary nomads, the agricultural Indios of
Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-
natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while
Science and tradition agree in c^ lasting the cus-
toms of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the
164 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive
instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to
cruelty.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently
insisted on the distinction between naturally advan-
tageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the
former head they would, for instance, include Tem-
perance and Perseverance ; under the latter, charity
and the love of enemies — thus arguing for the neces-
sity of assuming an other-worldly chance of recom-
pense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.
But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite
natural enough to dispense with the promise of pre-
ternatural rewards. Good-will begets good- will;
benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice
begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite
of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.
A humane master is better served than a merciless
despot; his dependants identify his interests with
their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle,
thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while
habitual unkindness blights every blessing and can-
cels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to
aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on
the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the
mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted
man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled
the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot.
Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial mon-
sters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian,
HUMANITY. 165
mentally perhaps the most gifted of Csesar's suc-
cessors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as
well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century,
but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him
from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the
Eighth's services to the cause of Protestantism did
not save him from the execrations of his Protestant
subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most
enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in
an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews
and Moriscoes in an age of universal bigotry. But
his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so
hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian
and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the
tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the
most liberal reforms.
Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but com-
mon humanity, applied to the settlement of religious
controversies ; the essential principle of civilization
is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neigh-
bors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity
alone has founded the prestige of more than one
potentially inferior nation.
A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own
reward in the fact that the order of the visible uni-
verse is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan.
The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity
of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to
insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest
possible number, and the natural inclination of the
benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,
166 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
with the current of cosmic tendencies ; his mind is in
tune with the harmony of Nature.
C. PERVERSION.
The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval
bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the
alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet,
but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of
a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural
instincts of the human soul. " Whatever is pleasant
is wrong," was the shibboleth of a creed that has
been justly denned as a " worship of sorrow," and
the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued
chiefly in proportion to their afflictiveness. Herbert
Spencer, in his " Data of Ethica," has demonstrated
with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal
practice of altruism {i.e., the subordination of per-
sonal to alien interest s) would lead to social bank-
ruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would
have been only an additional motive in recommend-
ing its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism
of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were
more than foreign to the purposes of his reform.
" Divest yourself of your earthly possessions/' was
the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers.
" Renounce ! renounce !" — not in order to benefit
your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your
own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly hap-
piness — not in order to make room for the crowding
multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into
the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in
the Christian sense, meaut the renunciation of all
HUMANITY. 167
earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist
who commands his disciple to love his enemies also
bids him hate his father, mother, sister, brother, and
friends.
" Seek everything that can alienate you from the
love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle
that love," would be at once the rationale and the
summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure,
welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your ene-
mies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were
in no danger of being followed too literally. We can
love only lovely things. We cannot help finding
h at ef illness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness.
We might as well be told to still our hunger with
icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its
ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism
was anything but a religion of love. The suppres-
sion of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom,
against health and reason, was not apt to increase
the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of
tolerance — nay, the instinct of common humanity
and justice — was systematically blunted by the wor-
ship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty
generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach
justly calls " a monstrous system of favoritism : arbi-
trary grace for a few children of luck, and millions
foredoomed to eternal damnation." " The exponents
of that dogma," says Lecky, " attributed to the
creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it
would be absolutely impossible for the imagination
to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous
excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance,
168 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any
that theologians have attributed to the devil."
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Free-
thinker calls the thousand years' reign of the
Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be
called the Age of Inhumanity. " The greatest pos-
sible misery of the greatest possible number " seems
to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists,
and, short of any plan involving the total destruction
of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to
imagine a more effective system for crowding the
greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given
space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras
fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the hap-
piness of their fellow-men ; class interests have made
patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and
revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the
party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means
for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoy-
ment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages in-
humanity seems to have become an end as well as a
means. They inflicted misery for its own sake ; they
waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and
their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sym-
pathy with every natural instinct of the human
heart. " If any sect," says Ludwig Boerne, " should
ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in
his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to
the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the
HUMANITY. 169
catechism of such a religion could be found ready-
made in the code of several monastic colleges."
Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under
the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were
doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by
wearing out their lives with penance and renun-
ciation.
"According to that code," says Henry Buckle,
"all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all
amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the
human heart were sinful. . . . The clergy looked
on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely be-
cause they were comforts. The great object of life
was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever
pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered
not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it
made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong."
The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make
the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty,
and soon drenched the face of the earth with the
blood of pagans and dissenters ; the worship of sor-
row drove thousands to devote themselves and their
children to a life of perpetual penance ; and the in-
sanities of the hideous superstition culminated in
that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its
converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the
last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.
E. REFORM.
The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosoph-
ical friends, directed the keenest shafts of their logic
against the doctrine of eternal punishment, and never
170 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
wearied of repeating that the belief in a merciless
God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless
bigots. "How insignificant," they argued, "the oc-
casional sufferings of a transient life on earth must
appear to the converts of John Calvin, who held that
about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed
to an eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures.
How absurd they must deem the complaints of a life-
weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look back to
the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness
of a lost Eden." The Universalists are fond of en-
larging on the moral of that theme, yet from a wider
point of view their objections might be extended to
the entire doctrine of other-worldliness, since Hol-
bach's argument might find its exact analogue in the
dogma of post mortem compensation. " His soul will
be the gainer," thought the Crusader who had dem-
onstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a
Moorish skull, " and if he should die his spirit will
enter the gates of the New Jerusalem." "Oh, the
ingratitude," actually said a priest of the Spanish-
American land robbers, "the ingratitude of the
wretches who grudge us the territories of their base
earthly kingdoms and forget that our gospel offers
them a passport to the glorious kingdom of heaven !"
" The ingratitude !" repeats the modern pharisee,
" the base ingratitude of those factory children who
grudge me the privileges of my position, and clamor
for an increase of wages to gratify their worldly de-
sires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should
not the rich promises of the gospel compensate such
temporal inconveniences, and have I not founded a
HUMANITY. 171
Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of their
unregenerate souls f '
Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher ac-
quainted us with the verdict of his countrymen on
the "gospel of love" that sends its missionaries on
ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by
armadas for the demolition of seaports that might
refuse to admit the cargo of spirituous and spiritual
poisons.
Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach
our brethren that their highest physical and their
highest moral welfare can be only conjointly attained,
and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well as
the body of its victim. It should preach the solidar-
ity of human interests which prevents the oppressor
from enjoying the fruits of his inhumanity, and
makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the
mute misery of his starving cattle, react on the hap-
piness of a cruel master. It should expose the busi-
ness methods of the humanitarians who propose to
silence the clamors of their famished brethren with
consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the
New Jerusalem.
The Christian duty of transferring our love from
our friends to our enemies may be one of those vir-
tues that have to await their recompense in a myste-
rious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find
its reward on this side of the grave.
172 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
CHAPTER XIV.
FRIENDSHIP.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Philosophers of the utilitarian school have begun
to reestablish the long-forgotten truth that Material-
ism is the indispensable root of the plant which
bears its flowers in spiritual aspirations. The con-
sequence of universal practice is the best test of a
dogma, and if all men were to divest themselves of
their earthly possessions and devote their lives to the
hyperphysical vagaries of the Galilean messiah, there
would soon be neither crops to harvest nor bread to
eat, and unworldly saints would starve as surely as
ungodly sinners. " Ideality " may be the crown of
the brain, as the brain is of the body, but the organs
of the mind cannot dispense with the aid of the
alimentary organs ; the pinnacle of the social fabric
needs intermediate supports. Education has lo
secure the welfare of the body before it can success-
fully cultivate the faculties of the mind ; and it is not
less certain that a man has to be a good patriot before
he can be a worthy cosmopolitan, and a good friend
before he can be a good patriot.
In the progress of individual development the in-
stinct of friendship asserts itself at a very early
period. Its recollection hallows the memory of the
poorest childhood. The shepherd-boys of the upper
Alps travel dozens of miles over cliffs and rocks to
meet their friends at a salt-spring ; on the shores of
the Baltic the boys of the lonely fishermen's cabins
FEIENDSHIP. 173
frequent their trysting-places in spite of wind and
weather. Early friendships throw the charm of their
poetry even over the dreary prosa of grammar-school
life ; the fellowship of school-friends forever endears
the scenes of their sports and rambles, and for many
a poor office-drudge the recollection of such hours
"holds all the light that shone on the earth for him."
True friendship smoothens the rough path of pov-
erty, while friendlessness, even in the gilded halls of
wealth, is almost a synonyme of cheerlessness :
Ich wiisste mir keine groessre Pein,
Als war' ich im Paradies allein,
says Goethe. " To be alone in paradise would be the
height of misery." Friendship will assert itself
athwart the barriers of social inequality, and its
germs are so deeply rooted in the instincts of primi-
tive nature that, in default of a communion of
kindred souls, the bonds of sympathy have often
united saints and sinners, nay, even men and brutes.
The traditions of Grecian antiquity have preserved
the possibly apocryphal legend of a dolphin that
became attached to the company of a young fisher-
man, and after his death left the sea in search of its
friend, and thus perished ; but the story of Androcles
was confirmed by the experience of Chevalier
Geoffroy de la Tour, a crusader of the thirteenth
century, who was charmed, but finally distressed, by
the affection of a pet lion that followed him like his
shadow, and at last fell a victim to his attachment by
trying to swim after the ship that conveyed his
master from Damascus to Genoa. The traveler Bus-
174 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
bequius mentions a lynx that set his heart on escort-
ing a camp-follower of a Turkish pasha; and Sir
Walter Scott vouches for the touching episode of the
Grampian Highlands, where a young hunter met his
death by falling from a steep cliff, and was found,
months after, half covered by the body of his favorite
deerhound, who had followed his friend to the happy
hunting-grounds by starving to death at the feet of
a corpse.
Among the ancestors of the Mediterranean nations
the betrayal of a friend was deemed an act of almost
inconceivable iufamy; friends and friends engaged
in a pledge of mutual hospitality, which was held
sacred even in times of war ; and among the natives
of the South Sea Islands a similar brotherhood of
elective affinities existed in the society of the Aroyi,
or oath- friends, who held all property in common,
and in times of danger unhesitatingly risked their
own lives in defense of their ally's. Professor
Letourneau has collected many curious anecdotes of
that devotion, which should leave no doubt that
altruism in its noblest form can dispense with the
hope of post-mortem compensation, and, indeed, with
all theological motives whatever.
B. — REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Unselfishness is the soul of true friendship, yet it
nevertheless remains true that all instincts are
founded on the experience of benefits or injuries.
During the rough transition period from beasthood
to manhood, when our uncivilized ancestors roamed
the forests of the foreworld, it must have been an
FRIENDSHIP. 175
incalculable advantage to the individual hunter or
herder to secure the cooperation of a trusty compan-
ion, whose watchful eye would double his chance of
finding food or avoiding danger, whose stout arm
might parry a blow which unaided strength would
have failed to avert. As in other circumstances of
natural selection, those who most successfully availed
themselves of such advantages had a superior chance
of survival and consequently of transmitting their
disposition to subsequent generations, and the habit
of friendship thus became a hereditary instinct.
The social system of civilized life has since devised
manifold substitutes for the cooperation of elective
affinities, but various unalienable advantages of the
primitive plan have been more or less clearly recog-
nized by all nations, especially by the manful and
nature-abiding nations of pagan antiquity. The
benefits secured by the mutual aid of sympathizing
friends are not limited to the guarantee of civil rights,
but extend to the realization of individual hopes and
the indulgence of personal inclination and predilec-
tions, as well as to the higher privileges of a mental
communion for which the panders of selfish wealth
have as yet devised no- equivalent. The power of
approbativeness, the main stimulus of ambition, is in-
finitely intensified by the emulation of noble friend-
ship, which, in the words of an ancient philosopher,
"inspires to deeds heroic, and makes labor worth the
toils that lead to success." Such friendship inspired
the heroism of Theseus and Pyrithous, of Harmodius
and Aristogiton, of Nisus and Euryalus, and recorded
its experience in proverbs which have few parallels in
176 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the languages of the Christianized nations: " Solem
e mundo qui amicitiam e vita tollunt " — " They de-
prive the world of sunshine who deprive life of friend-
ship." " Amicum perdere damnorum est maxi-
mum" — "To lose a friend is the greatest of losses."
11 Amicus magis necessarius quam ignis aut aqua"
— "A friend is more needful than fire or water."
In times of tribulation, when the fury of party-
strife overrode all other restraints, friendship has
more than once proved its saving power by averting
otherwise hopeless perils. Diagoras was thus saved
from the rage of allied bigots, Demetrius from the
dagger of a wily assassin, the elder Cato from the
rancor of political rivals. Without the aid of a friend
Cicero would never have survived the intrigues of
Catiline. Epaminondas made the approval of friends
the sole reward of his heroic life, and vanquished the
enemies of his country by the enthusiasm of the
" sacred legion " of mutually devoted and mutually
inspiring friends. Mohammed the Second yielded to
the prayer of a humble companion what he refused
to the united threats of foreign embassadors, and
Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America, often
confessed that he owed his triumphs to the counsel
of private friends rather than to the suggestions of
his official advisers.
0. — PERVERSION.
The blessing of friendship, " doubling the joys of
life and lessening its sorrows," could not fail to be
specially obnoxious to the moralists of a creed that
seeks to lure its converts from earth to ghostland,
FRIENDSHIP. 17V
and depreciates the natural affections of the human
heart. The gloomy antinaturalism of the Galilean
prophet has been glossed over by the whitewashing
committee of the revised Bible, but is too shockingly
evident in the less sophisticated -version of the origi-
nal text to mistake its identity with the moral nihil-
ism of the world-renouncing Buddha. The phiVadel-
phia, or "brother-love," of the New Testament, is, in
fact, merely a " fellowship in Christ " — the spiritual
communion and mutual indoctrination of earth-re-
nouncing bigots. With the joys and sorrows of
natural friendship their prophet evinces no sympathy
whatever. "I am come," says he, "to set a man at
variance against his father, and the daughter against
her mother, . . . and a man's foes shall be those
of his own household." "He who hates not his
father and mother, his brothers and sisters, cannot
be my disciple." " And the brother shall betray the
brother to death, and the father the son."
By that test of moral merit the obligation of
natural affection counted as nothing compared with
the duty of theological conformity. " Verily, I say
unto you, there is no man that has left brethren or
sisters or father and mother for my sake and the
gospels', but he shall receive a hundredfold," etc.
" He that loveth father and mother more than me is
not worthy of me." " And another of his disciples
said unto him : Lord, suffer me first to go and bury
my father. But Jesus said unto him : Follow me,
and let the dead bury their dead." " For if you love
them which love you, what reward have ye *?"
178 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The conversion of Rome, which theologians are
fond of representing as the crowning miracle of
Christianity, was a natural consequence of its pes-
simistic tendencies, which could not fail to recom-
mend themselves to the instincts of a decrepit
generation. "Worn-out sensualists consoled them-
selves with the hope of a better hereafter. Cowards
pleased themselves with the idea of fulfilling the
duty of meek submission to the injustice of the
' powers that be.' Monastic drones denounced the
worldliness of industrial enterprises. Physical indo-
lence welcomed the discovery that ' bodily exercise
profiteth but little.' Envious impotence insisted on
the duty of self-abasement. Transgressors against
the health-laws of Nature relied upon the eflicacy of
the prayer-cure. Stall-fed priests sneered at the
lean philosopher who wasted his time upon laborious
inquiries, while he might wax fat on faith and the
sacrifices of the pious. The demon- dogma was a
godsend to the spiritual poverty of the elect. The
so-called scholars of the Galilean church, who could
not encounter the pagan philosophers on their own
ground, found it very convenient to postulate a
spook for every unknown phenomenon. . . .
Despots before long recognized the mistake of per-
secuting a creed which inculcated the duty of passive
submission to oppressors " (Secret of the East, p. 54).
They also recognized the advantage of a spiritual
excuse for the infamy of their ingratitude to the
secular benefactors of mankind. Csesar and Trajan
FRIENDSHIP. 179
treated the humblest centurion as a friend rather
than as a servant. Constantine and Justinian treated
the ablest ministers like slaves who can be forced to
toil, and turned out to starve after having worn out
their strength in the service of the Lord's anointed.
Belisarius, after repeatedly saving his master from
well-deserved ruin, was sacrificed to the spite of a
crowned harlot, and left to beg his bread in the
streets of the city which his valor alone had for years
protected from the rage of hostile armies. Aetius,
who had saved all Europe by stemming the torrent
of Hunnish conquest, was treated like a rebellious
slave for refusing to betray his brave allies, and the
stipulated pay of his veterans was squandered on
pimps and clerical parasites. Charles Martel, whose
heroism turned the scales against the power of the
invading Moriscoes, was openly reviled by the very
priests who owed him the preservation of their lives,
as well as of their livings ; his image was dragged in
the mire, his soul consigned to the pit of torment —
all for having defrayed the costs of his campaign by
tithing prelates as well as laymen. Columbus was
loaded with chains by the pious prince whose castles
he had filled with the treasures of a new world ; the
philosopher Vanini was betrayed to death by a
Christian spy who had for years enjoyed his con-
fidence and his hospitality. John Huss was sur-
rendered by the imperial priest-slave whose own
hand had signed the document of his safe-conduct.
The earl of Stafford was sacrificed by the crowned
Jesuit who divided his time between prayers for the
theological interests of his subjects and plots for the
180 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
subversion of their political liberties. The dogma of
self-denial has not prevented our financial pharisees
from amassing fortunes that would dwarf the spoils
of a Koman triumphator; but the hospitality of
Maecenas has not survived the religion of Nature.
Our philosophers have to study the problems of life
in a personal struggle for existence ; our poets have
to choose between starvation and hypocrisy. Patriots
are left to the consoling reflection that virtue is its
own reward. The endowers of theological seminaries
seem to rely on the mercy of Christ to cancel the
odium of their shortcomings in the recognition of
secular merit. Kepler, Campanella, and Spinoza
perished in penury. Locke and Rousseau, the recog-
nized primates of the intellectual world, were left to
languish in exile, admired and neglected by a host of
"friends" — Christian friends — in every city of the
civilized world. Schubert, Buerger, and Frederick
Schiller, the idols of a poetry-loving nation, were
left to fight the bitter struggle for existence to an
extreme of which all the records of pagan antiquity
furnish only a single parallel. Anaxagoras, the
founder of a philosophic school counting its disciples
by thousands, was left to languish in exile, till the
rumor of his extreme distress brought the most
illustrious of those disciples to the sick-bed of his
neglected teacher. u Do not, do not leave us !" he
cried, in an agony of remorse ; " we cannot afford to
lose the light of our life !"
" O Pericles," said the dying exile, " those who
need a lamp should take care to supply it with oil !"
But how many lights of our latter-day lives have
FRIENDSHIP, 181
thus been extinguished before their time ! Not one
of the plethoric British aristocrats who spiced their
leisure with the sweets of poetry ever dreamed of
relieving the cruel distress of Robert Burns, or of
cutting the knot of the financial embroglio that
strangled out the life of Sir Walter Scott.
E. — REFORM.
Time is the test of truth ; and the fallacies of the
" Brotherhood in Christ " plan have been abundantly
demonstrated by their consequences. Instead of
being a bond of union, the doctrine of renunciation
has been found to be a root of discord and rancor,
and in times of need the fellowship of its converts
has proved a most rotten staff. Even the wretches
who betrayed their friends to the spies of the Holy
Inquisition had no difficulty in palliating the infamy
of their conduct with the sanction of scriptural pre-
cepts. For centuries the appeals of martyrs to the
cause of freedom and Freethought have been an-
swered with the advice of Christian submission to
the "powers that be," and our modern pharisees
rarely fail to reprove the " worldliness " of a poor
neighbor's lament for the loss of his earthly pos-
sessions.
The founder of " Positivism," the Religion of
Humanity, proposes to dedicate the days of the year
to the leaders of progress, and inscribe our places of
worship with the names of discoverers, reformers,
and philosophers rather than of bigots and world-
despising saints. And for the sake of those who
would not wish to repeat the mistake of sacrificing
182 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the present to the past, the builders of those sanc-
tuaries should add a temple of Friendship. From
the adoration of self- torturing fanatics, from the
worship of sorrow and the love of enemies, mankind
will at last revert to the ancestral plan of elective
affinities, and the dread of preferring natural to
theological duties will not much longer prevent
our fellow-men from recognizing their obligations to
their earthly benefactors.
CHAPTER XV.
EDUCATION.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The doctrine of Pythagoras, the philosophic Mes-
siah of Paganism, included the strange tenet of
metempsychosis. After death, held the confessors of
that dogma, the souls of men and brutes would re-
appear in new forms, higher or lower, according to
the character-traits of the dying individual. Thus
the soul of a wealthy glutton might be reborn in a
pig-sty, that of a high-minded peasant perhaps on
the throne of a king. Death and rebirth are the
upper and lower spokes of a wheel that turns and
turns forever, and in the persons of their neighbors
the Pythagoreans saw wanderers that might have
walked this earth thousands of years ago.
The strangeness of such a theory is still increased
by the circumstance that its teacher was an eminent
astronomer, an accomplished mathematician, and the
leader of a memorable hygienic reform. Our aston-
EDUCATION. 183
ishment is not lessened by the well-established fact
that, under some form or other, the doctrine of sOul-
migration has for ages been the accepted creed of a
large plurality of our fellow-men. It is well known,
however, that to his trusted disciples Pythagoras
imparted an esoteric or explanatory version of his
dogmas ; and if we learn that the great philosopher
attached a special importance to the influence of
hereditary dispositions, the truth at last dawns upon
us that the doctrine of metempsychosis referred to
the reappearance of individual types, passions, and
dispositions in the bodily and mental characteristics
of the next generation. " Parents live in their chil-
dren." The instinctive recognition of that truth rec-
onciles our dumb fellow-creatures to the prospect of
death. At the end of summer the night-moth care-
fully deposits her eggs in a silver cradle, hidden safe
in the crevice of some sheltering nook, where they
will survive the rigor of the winter and answer the
first summons of spring. Having thus, as it were,
insured the resurrection of her type, the parent
moth quietly resigns herself to the fate of sleeping
her own winter-slumber in the arms of death. On
the Orinoco wounded river-turtles will use their last
strength to climb the slope of some bush-hidden
sand-bank, and after intrusting their eggs to the pro-
tection of the deep drift sand, will reenter the water
and quietly float off with the seaward currents. In
the virgin-woods of Southern Mexico, where the
harpy- eagle fills the maws of her hungry brood by
incessant raids on the small denizens of the tree-
tops, the traveler D' Armand once witnessed a curious
184 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
scene. An eagle had pounced upon a nursing
mother monkey, who at first struggled desperately
to free herself from the claws of the murderer j but.
finding resistance in vain, she loosened her grasp on
the branches, and, just as the eagle carried her off,
she disengaged the arm of her baby from her neck,
and shaking off the little creature with a swing of her
arm, she deliberately flung it back into the sheltering
foliage of the tree-top, thus taking the last possible
chance of surviving in her child.
The "dread of annihilation" reveals itself in the
instincts of a dying philosopher as plainly as in the
instincts of a wounded animal ; but, on self-examina-
tion, that fear would prove to have but little in com-
mon with a special solicitude for the preservation of
material forms or combinations — conditions which
the process of organic change constantly modifies in
the cradle as well as in the grave. It is rather the
type of the body and its correlated mental disposi-
tions which the hope of resurrection yearns to pre-
serve, and even childless men have often partly
realized that hope by impressing the image of their
soul on a younger mind, and transmitting their
cherished projects and theories through the medium
of education. In the consciousness of that accom-
plished task Socrates could as calmly die in the arms
of his disciples as the Hebrew patriarch in the arms
of his children and grandchildren. "You kill a
sower," cried St. Adalbert under the clubs of his
assassins, " but the seed he has planted will rise and
survive both his love and your hatred."
Even the influence of a great practical example has
EDUCATION. 185
often impressed the mental type of a reformer or
patriot on a series of subsequent generations. The
Buddhist Calanus, preaching the doctrine of renuncia-
tion to an audience of scoffers, deeply affected the
most thoughtless of his witnesses by proving his
personal convictions in the flames of a funeral pile.
" I leave no sons," were the last words of Epamin-
ondas, " but two immortal daughters, the battles of
Leuctra and Mantinea." Rousseau smiled when he
learned the intrigues of his enemies who were trying
their utmost to enlist the cooperation of a violent
pulpit-orator. " They are busy recruiting their corps
of partisans," said he, ;i but Time will raise me an
ally in every intelligent reader of the next generation."
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
In the simple lives of the lower animals every day
may bring the sufficient reward of its toil ; but the
problem of progress, even from the first dawn of
civilization, involves tasks too apt to extend beyond
the span of individual existence. The forest-clearing
husbandman, the state-founding patriot, the scientific
inquirer, all risk to receive the summons of night be-
fore the completion of their labor. Before reaching
the goal of their hopes their earthly pilgrimage may
end at the brink of the unknown river, and education
alone can bridge that gulf, and make every day the
way-station of an unbroken road. Children or chil-
dren's children will take up the staff from the last
resting-place of their pilgrim father ; and, moreover,
all progress is cumulative. Every laborer works with
the experience of his forefathers, as well as his own j
186 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
every son stands on the shoulders of his father. Even
the failure of individual efforts contributes a helpful
lesson to the success of the next attempt :
Freedom's brave battle, once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though often baffled, e'er is won.
Persistent adherence to the programme of a tradi-
tional policy has often made the work of successive
centuries the triumphant execution of a single plan.
The empire of Islam sprung from the seed which the
prophet of Mecca had planted in the soil of his
native land. The storm of the Protestant revolt
rose from the anathemas of a poor Wittenberg friar ;
the unquenchable fire of the French Revolution was
kindled by the burning indignation of a Swiss recluse,
and his fervid appeals :
Those oracles that set the world aflame,
Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more ;
and the vast fabric of our republican federation was
founded by the poor colonists who sought indepen-
dence in the freedom of the wilderness, and combined
against the power of a selfish despot. Education
sows a seed which may sprout even during the life-
time of the sower, and bless individual life with the
sweets of a guaranteed triumph over the power of
death. Resurgam, "I shall live after death," ex-
presses the significance of that triumph, and of the
" esoteric doctrine of Pythagoras."
C. PERVERSION.
The Christian church has constantly perverted the
purpose of education, but has never yet deserved the
EDUCATION. 187
reproach of having neglected its means. From the
very beginning the sect of the apostle- training Gal-
ilean has been a sect of assiduous educators. They
were not satisfied with founding schools and opening
their doors to all comers, but went forth in quest of
new converts, and pursued their aim with a persist-
ence of zeal and a versatility of skill that could not
fail to accomplish its purpose. As soon as a suffi-
cient increase of power enabled them to control the
institutes of primary instruction they turned their
chief attention to the dogmatical education of the
young. They derived no aid from the attractiveness
and still less from the plausibility of their doctrine,
but they realized Schopenhauer's remark that " there
is in childhood a period measured by six, or at most
by ten years, when any well-inculcated dogma, no
matter how extravagantly absurd, is sure to retain its
hold for life." And though the propagation of an
unnatural creed is not favored by natural fertility, the
naturally barren doctrine of renunciation was thus
successfully propagated by a system of incessant
grafting. By the skilful application of that process
the most dissimilar plants were made subservient to
its purpose. The " Worship of Sorrow " with its
whining renunciation of worldly enjoyments, and its
indifference to health and physical education, was
grafted on the manful naturalism of the Hebrew law-
giver. Saint- worship, the veneration of self- torturing
fanatics, was grafted on a stem of pagan mythology,
and dozens of Christian martyrs have thus usurped
the honor and the sacrifices of pagan temples.
Christian holidays were grafted on the festivals of
188 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the nature-loving Saxons. But persuasion failing,
the missionaries of the cross did not hesitate to re-
sort to more conclusive measures. Like refractory-
children cudgeled along the path of knowledge, the
obstinate skeptics of northern Europe were harassed
with fire and sword till they could not help admitting
the dangers of unbelief. The gardenlands of the
Albigenses were wasted till they found no difficulty
in yearning for the peace of a better world. Philos-
ophers were tortured in the prisons of the Holy In-
quisition till the sorrows of life favored the renuncia-
tion of its hopes.
For thirteen centuries the sunshine of millions of
human hearts was ruthlessly sacrificed to promote
the task of luring mankind from life to ghost-land,
and during all those ages education was systematic-
ally turned from a blessing into an earth-blighting
curse.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
There is a story of a Portuguese slave-dealer who
carried a private chaplain on his pay-roll, and fre-
quently expressed his solicitude for the spiritual
welfare of his shackled captives. A very similar
kind of spiritual duty has for centuries been made
the excuse for an almost total neglect of secular
education. Divorced from the control of common
sense, religion soon degenerated into mere cere-
monialism. A priest who would travel twenty miles
through a snow-storm to supply a dying man with a
consecrated wafer had no sympathy with the needs
of the living. He would extort the last penny of his
EDUCATION. 189
tithes at the risk of starving a village full of needy
parishioners. He would groan at the sight of an
unbaptized child, but had not a drop of water to cool
the brows of burning Moors or Jews. He would
rave about the cruelty of a prince who had deprived
the clergy of their mass- shillings, but had no ear for
the laments of the exiled Moriscoes or the curses
of starving serfs.
Such was the morality which arrogated the right
of suppressing that system of physical and intel-
lectual education which had filled the homes of the
Mediterranean nations with all the blessings of
health, science, and beauty. Theological training
had failed to kindle the dawn of a supernatural mil-
lennium, but had thoroughly succeeded in extin-
guishing the light of human reason. Not absolute
ignorance only, but baneful superstition — worse than
ignorance by just as much as poison is worse than
hunger — was for centuries the inevitable result of all
so-called school-training ; and the traditions of that
age of priest-rule have made religion almost a
synonyme of cant. It also gave book-learning its
supposed tendency to mental aberration. Can we
wonder at that result of an age when the literary
products of Christian Europe were confined almost
exclusively to ghost- stories and manuals of cere-
mony ? Can we wonder that delusions of the most
preposterous kind assumed the virulence of epidemic
diseases'? Maniacs of self-mutilation, of epileptic
contortions, of were- wolf panics, traversed Europe
from end to end. Men gloried in ignorance, and
boasted their neglect of worldly science till the con-
190 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
sequences of that neglect avenged its folly in actual
madness.
The saddest of all the sad " it might have beens "
is, perhaps, a reverie on the probable results of
earlier emancipation — of the employment of thirteen
worse than wasted centuries in scientific inquiries,
agricultural improvements, social and sanitary re-
forms. We might have failed to enter the portals of
the New Jerusalem, but we would probably have
regained our earthly paradise.
E. — REFORM.
The days of the Holy Inquisition are past; but
the restless propaganda of Jesuitry still shames the
inactivity of Rationalism. Our friends sit listless,
relying on the theoretical advantages of their cause,
while the busy intrigues of our enemies secure them
all practical advantages.
Even in our model republic only primary educa-
tion stands neutral. 'le private enterprise has
made nearly every h%uer college a stronghold of
dogmatism. And even the semi-secularism of pri-
mary instruction is more than offset by the ultra
orthodoxy of " Sunday-schools." Millions of factory
children have to sacrifice their only day of leisure at
the bidding of their dogmatic task-master and with
the timid connivance of their parents. " We cannot
row against the stream," I have heard even Free-
thinkers say. " Let the youngsters join the crowd;
if it does them no good, it can do no harm." But it
will do harm, even beyond the waste of time and the
wasted opportunities for health-giving exercise. The
EDUCATION. 191
process of dogmatic inoculation may fail to serve its
direct purpose, but the weekly repetition of the ex-
periment is sure to contaminate the moral organism
with unsound humors which may become virulent at
unexpected times and, likely enough, undermine that
very peace of the household which a short-sighted
mother hoped to promote by driving her boys to
Sunday-school, as she would drive troublesome cattle
to a public pasture.
The Freethinkers of every community should com-
bine to engage a teacher, or at least facilitate home
instruction by collecting text-books of Secularism,
such as Voltaire's "Philosophical Cyclopedia;" Rous-
seau's "Emile;" Hallam's "History of the Middle
Ages ;" Ingersoll's pamphlets ; Paine's " Age of Rea-
son;" Lecky's "History of Rationalism " and "His-
tory of Morals;" Leasing' s "Nathan;" Goethe and
Schiller's "Xenions;" Darwin's "Descent of Man;"
Plutarch's Biographies ; Trelawney's " Last Days of
Shelley and Byron ;" McDonnell's Freethought nov-
els; Parker Pillsbury's "F of Sabbatarian Leg-
islation;" Reade's "Martyrdom of Man;" Bennett's
"Gods and Religions of Ancient and Modern Times;"
Gibbon's "History of Christianity;" Keeler's "Short
History of the Bible;" "Bible Myths and Their Par-
allels in Other Religions;" "Supernatural Religion;"
Greg's "Creed of Christendom;" Lord Amberley's
"Analysis of Religious Belief;" "Religion Not His-
tory."
We should have Freethought colleges and Secular
missions, and even isolated Liberals might do better
than "drift with the stream." They might let their
192 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
children pass their Sundays in the freedom of the
forests and mountains to worship the God of Nature
in his own temple, and learn a lesson from the
parental devotion of their dumb fellow-creatures.
She- wolves, deprived of their whelps, have been
known to enter human habitations at night to suckle
their young through the bars of a heavy cage.
Thrushes and fly-catchers will enter an open window
to feed or rescue their captive nestlings, and with a
still wider sympathy a Liberal friend of mine tries to
aid his neighbors' children, as well as his own. Re-
nouncing the hope of abolishing Sabbatarianism, he
conceived the idea of controlling it, and induced his
neighbors to send their children to a " Sunday Gar-
den" with a free museum of pictures and stuffed
birds, gymnastic contrivances, and a little restaurant
of free temperance refreshments — apples, peanuts,
and lemonade. He defrays the expenses of the
establishment, which his neighbors consider a sort of
modified kindergarten; and under the name of
"Sunday books" circulates a private library of purely
secular literature.
"If life shall have been duly rationalized by
science," says Herbert Spencer, " parents will learn
to consider a sound physical constitution as an
entailed estate, which should be transmitted unim-
paired, if not improved;" and with a similar rec-
ognition of social obligations Freethinkers should
endeavor to transmit to their children a bequest of
unimpaired common sense. Loyalty to their Prot-
estant ancestors, loyalty to posterity, and to the
majesty of truth herself, should prompt us to stand
EDUCATION. 193
bravely by our colors and train our children to con-
tinue the struggle for light and independence.
By the far-reaching influence of education Secular-
ists should bridge the chasm which orthodoxy hopes
to cross on the wings of faith. Secularism shall
preach the gospel of immortality on earth.
IV -OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.
CHAPTER XVI.
FOREST CULTURE.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
It is wonderful how often instinct has anticipated
the practical lessons of science. Long before com-
parative anatomy taught us the characteristics of our
digestive organs the testimony of our natural pre-
dilections indicated the advantages of a frugal diet.
Long before modern hygiene pointed out the perils
of breathing the atmosphere of unventilated dormi-
tories the evidence of our senses warned us against
the foulness of that atmosphere. And ages before
the researches of agricultural chemistry began to re-
veal the protective influence of arboreal vegetation,
an instinct which the child of civilization shares with
the rudest savage revolted against the reckless de-
struction of fine woodlands, and sought to retrieve
the loss by surrounding private homes with groves
and parks. The love of forests is as natural to our
species as fhe love of rocks to the mountain-goat.
Trees and tree- shade are associated with our tradi-
tions of paradise, and that the cradle of the human
race was not a brick tenement or a wheat-farm, but a
tree-garden, is one of the few points on which the
genesis of Darwin agrees with that of the Penta-
FOREST CULTURE. 195
teuch. The happiest days of childhood would lose
half their charm without the witchery of woodland
rambles, and, like an echo of the foreworld, the in-
stincts of our forest-born ancestors often awake in
the souls of their descendants. City children are
transported with delight at the first sight of a wood-
covered landscape, and the evergreen arcades of a
tropical forest would charm the soul of a young
Esquimaux as the ever-rolling waves of the ocean
would awaken the yearnings of a captive sea-bird.
The traveler Chamisso mentions an interview with a
poor Yakoot, a native of the North Siberian ice-coast,
who happened to get hold of an illustrated magazine
with a woodcut of a fine southern landscape : a river-
valley, rocky slopes rising toward a park-like lawn
with a background of wooded highlands. With that
journal on his knees the Yakoot squatted down in
front of the traveler's tent, and thus sat motionless,
hour after hour, contemplating the picture in silent
rapture. " How would you like to live in a country
of that kind?" asked the professor. The Yakoot
folded his hands, but continued his reverie. " I hope
we shall go there if we are good," said he at last, with
a sigh of deep emotion.
The importance of hereditary instincts can be often
measured by the degree of their persistence. Man
is supposed to be a native of # the trans- Caucasian
highlands — Armenia, perhaps, or the terrace-lands of
the Hindookoosh. Yet agriculture has succeeded in
developing a type of human beings who would in-
stinctively prefer a fertile plain to the grandest high-
land paradise of the East. Warfare has in like man-
196 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
ner engendered an instinctive fondness for a life of
perilous adventure, as contrasted with the arcadian
security of the Golden Age. There are men who
prefer slavery to freedom, and think pallor more at-
tractive than the glow of health, but a millennium of
unnaturalism has as yet failed to develop a species of
human beings who would instinctively prefer the
dreariness of a treeless plain to the verdure of a pri-
meval forest.
B. KEWAKDS OF CONFOKMITY.
The love of forest-trees is a characteristic of the
nature-abiding nations of the North, and has re-
warded itself by an almost complete reversion of the
original contrast between the garden lands of the
South and the inhospitable wilderness of the higher
latitudes. Forest destruction has turned Southern
Europe into a desert, while the preservation of forests
has made the homes of the hyperborean hunters an
Eden of beauty and fertility. " One-third to the
hunter, two-thirds to the husbandman," was the rule
of Margrave Philip in his distribution of forest and
fields, and expresses the exact proportion which
modern science indicates as most favorable to the
perennial fertility of our farm-lands. In a single cent-
ury the forest- destroying Spaniards turned many
of their American colonies from gardens into sand-
wastes, while, after fourteen hundred years of con-
tinuous cultivation, the fields of the Danubian Valley
are still as fertile as in the days of Trajan and Taci-
tus. Along the river-banks and half-way up the
foot-hills the arable land has been cleared, but higher
FOREST CULTURE. 197
up the forest has been spared. All the highlands
from Katisbon to Budha-Pesth still form a con-
tinuous mountain park of stately oaks and pines,
and, as a consequence, springs never fail ; crops are
safe against winter floods and summer drouths;
song-birds still return to their birthland, and re-
ward their protectors by the destruction of noxious
insects ; meadows, grain-fields, and orchards produce
their abundant harvest year after year \ famine is un-
known, and contagious diseases rarely assume an
epidemic form. In Switzerland and Prussia the pres-
ervation of the now remaining woodlands is guaran-
teed by strict protective laws ; Scandinavia requires
her forest-owners to replant a certain portion of
every larger clearing ; in Great Britain the parks of
the ancient mansions are protected like sacred monu-
ments of the past, and landowners vie in lining their
field-trails with rows of shade-trees. The fertility of
those lands is a constant surprise to the American
traveler disposed to associate the idea of eastern
landscapes with the picture of worn-out fields. Sur-
rounded byBussian steppes and trans- Alpine deserts,
the homes of the Germanic nations still form a
Goshen of verdure and abundance. Forest protectors
have not lost their earthly paradise.
C. PEE VERSION.
Sixteen hundred years ago the highlands of the
European continent were still covered with a dense
growth of primeval forests. The healthfulness and
fertility of the Mediterranean coastlands surpassed
that of the most favored regions of the present world,
198 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
and the dependence of those blessings on the preser-
vation of the spring-sheltering woodlands was clearly
recognized by such writers as Pliny and Columella,
though their own experience did not enable them to
suspect all the ruinous consequences of that whole-
sale forest destruction, which modern science has
justly denounced as the ne 2)lus ultra folly of human
improvidence. Practical experiments had, however,
demonstrated such facts as the failing of springs on
treeless slopes, and the violence of winter floods in
districts unprotected by rain-absorbing forests, and
tree culture was practiced as a regular branch of ra-
tional husbandry. But with the triumph of the Gal-
ilean church came the millennium of unnaturalism.
Rational agriculture became a tradition of the past ;
the culture of secular science was fiercely denounced
from thousands of pulpits ; improvidence, " unworld-
liness," and superstitious reliance on the efficacy of
prayer were systematically inculcated as supreme
virtues ; the cultivators of the soil were treated like
unclean beasts, and for a series of centuries the
garden regions of the East were abandoned to the
inevitable consequences of neglect and misculture.
Millions of acres of fine forest lands passed into the
hands of ignorant priests, who, in their greed for im-
mediate gain, and their reckless indifference to the
secular welfare of posterity, doomed their trees to
the ax, entailing barrenness on regions favored by
every natural advantage of soil and climate. Drouths,
famines, and locust- swarms failed to impress the pro-
test of nature. Her enemies had no concern with
such worldly vanities as the study of climatic vu
FOEEST CULTUEE. 199
tudes, and hoped to avert the consequences of their
folly by an appeal to the intercession of miracle-
working saints.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Yet the saints failed to answer that appeal. The
outraged laws of nature avenged themselves with the
inexorable sequence of cause and effect, and in spite
of all prayer-meetings the significance of their crime
against the fertility of their Mother Earth was
brought home to the experience of the ruthless de-
stroyers. In their net-work of moss and leaves
forests absorb the moisture of the atmosphere, and
thus nourish the springs which in their turn replenish
the brooks and rivers. When the highlands of the
Mediterranean peninsulas had been deprived of their
woods the general failing of springs turned rivers
into shallow brooks, and brook-valleys into arid
ravines. Summer rains became too scarce to sup-
port the vegetation of the farm lands ; the tillers of
the soil had to resort to irrigation and eat their
bread in a harder and ever harder struggle for exist-
ence, till vast areas of once fertile lands had to be
entirely abandoned, and the arable territory of this
planet was yearly reduced by the growth of an
artificial desert. And while the summer drouths be-
came more severe, winter floods became more frequent
and destructive. From the treeless slopes of the
Mediterranean coastlands winter rains descended like
waterfalls, turning once placid rivers into raging tor-
rents, and depriving the fields of their small remnant
of fertile mould. Hillsides which in the times of
200 THE BIBLE OF NATUKE.
Virgil had furnished pastures for thousands of herds
were thus reduced to a state of desolation almost as
complete as that of a volcanic cinder-field; their
dells choked with rock debris, their terraces rent by
a chaos of gullies and clefts, while the soil, swept
from the highlands, was accumulated in mudbanks
near the mouth of the river. Harbors once offering
anchorage for the fleets of an empire became inacces-
sible from the ever-growing deposits of diluvium.
Yearly mud inundations engendered climatic diseases
and all-pervading gnat swarms. Insectivorous birds,
deprived of their nest shelter, emigrated to less in-
hospitable lands, and the scant produce of tillage had
to be shared with ever-multiplying legions of destruc-
tive insects. Along the south coasts of Italy the
shore-hills for hundreds of miles present the same
dreary aspect of monotonous barrenness. Greece is a
naked rock; forests have almost disappeared from
the plains of Spain and Asia Minor; in northern
Africa millions of square miles, once teeming with
cities and castles, have been reduced to a state of
hopeless aridity. The Mediterranean, once a forest-
lake of paradise, has become a Dead Sea, surrounded
by barren rocks, and sandy or dust clouded plains.
According to a careful comparison of the extant data
of statistical computations, the population of the ter-
ritory once comprised under the jurisdiction of the
Csesars has thus been reduced from 290,000,000 to
less than 80,000,000, i.e., from a hundred to less than
thirty per cent. In other words, an average of
seventy-eight in a hundred human beings have been
starved out of existence, and the same area of ground
FOREST CULTURE. 201
which once supported a nourishing village, at present
almost fails to satisfy the hunger of a small family.
For we must not forget that modern industry has
devised methods of subsistence undreamed of by the
nations of antiquity, and that the religion of resigna-
tion has taught millions to endure degrees of wretch-
edness which nine out of ten pagans would have re-
fused to prefer to the alternative of self-destruction.
A whole tenement of priest-ridden lazaronis now
contrive to eke out a subsistence on a pittance which
a citizen of ancient Borne would have been too proud
to ask a woman to share ; yet with all their talent for
surviving under conditions of soul and body degrad-
ing distress, only eight children of the Mediterranean
coastlands can now wring a sickly subsistence from
the same area of soil which once sufficed to supply
twenty-nine men with all the blessings of health and
abundance.
E. REFORM.
The discovery of two new continents has respited
the doomed nations of the Old World, but the rapid
colonization of those land supplements will soon re-
duce mankind to the alternative of tree-culture or em-
igration to the charity- farm of the New Jerusalem.
In the words of a great German naturalist, " We shall
have to work the world over again." On a small
scale the practicability of that plan has already been
conclusively demonstrated. By tree-culture alone
arid sand-wastes have been restored to something like
tolerable fertility, if not to anything approaching
their pristine productiveness. In the lower valley of
202 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the Nile (the ancient Thebaid) Ibrahim Pasha set out
thirty- five million Circassian forest- trees, of which
one-third at least took root, and by their growth not
only reclaimed the sterility of the soil but increased
the average annual rainfall from four to fifteen
inches. In the Landes of western France a large
tract of land has been reclaimed from the inroads of
the coast sand by lining the dunes with a thick belt
of trees, and some fifteen hundred square miles of
once worthless fields have thus been restored to a
high degree of productiveness. In the Austrian
Karst, a sterile plateau of limestone cliffs and caves
has been dotted with groves till the valleys have been
refreshed with the water of resuscitated springs ; and
pasture-lands, long too impoverished even for the
sustenance of mountain goats, once more are covered
with herds of thriving cattle.
The experience of the next three or four genera-
tions will not fail to make every intelligent farmer a
tree-planter. Our barren fields will be turned into
pine plantations , every public highway will be lined
with shade- trees. The communities of the next cent-
ury will vie in the consecration of township groves,
in the founding of forestry clubs, in the celebration
of arbor days and woodland festivals. The barren
table-lands of our central states will be reclaimed,
and before the end of the twentieth century the work
of redemption will be extended to the great deserts
of the Eastern continents. And as a hundred years
ago armies of tree-fellers were busy wresting land
from the primeval forest, in a hundred years more
armies of tree-planters will be busy wresting land
RECREATION. 203
from the desert. The men that will " work the
world over again" will not be apt to forget the terms
of their second lease.
In turning up the soil of the reclaimed desert they
will unearth the foundations of buried temples, tem-
ples once sacred to the worship of gods whose
prophets drenched the world with blood to enforce
the observance of circumcision rites, wafer rites, and
immersion rites, and filled their scriptures with
minute instructions for the ordinances of priests and
the mumbling of prescribed prayers. In musing
over the ruins of such temples, the children of the
future will have a chance for many profitable medita-
tions — the reflection, for instance : From what mis-
takes those alleged saviors might have saved the
world if their voluminous gospels had devoted a
single page to an injunction against the earth-
desolating folly of forest-destruction !
CHAPTEK XVII.
RECREATION.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The indoor occupations of civilized life imply the
necessity of providing artificial substitutes for the
opportunities of physical exercise, which men in a
state of nature can find abundantly in the course of
such healthful pursuits as hunting, fishing, and prim-
itive agriculture. For similar reasons civilization
ought to compensate the lost chance of outdoor
sports which only the favorites of fortune can afford
204 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
to combine with the exigencies of city life. To the
children of nature life is a festival ; outdoor recrea-
tions, exciting sports, offer themselves freely and
frequently enough to dispense with artificial supple-
ments; but the dreariness of workshop life makes
those substitutes a moral as well as physical neces-
sity. Under the influence of unalloyed drudgery the
human soul withers like a plant in a sunless cave,
and weariness of heart reacts on the body in a way
analogous to the health-undermining effect of sorrow
and repeated disappointment. To the unbiased
judgment of our pagan forefathers the necessity of
providing city dwellers with opportunities for public
recreation appeared, indeed, as evident as the neces-
sity of counteracting the rigors of the higher latitudes
with contrivances for a supply of artificial warmth.
The cities of ancient Greece had weekly and monthly
festivals, besides the yearly reunions of competing
athletes and artists, and once in four years the
champions of the land met to contest the prize of
national supremacy in the presence of assembled
millions. Hostilities, even during the crisis of civil
war, were suspended to insure free access to the
plains of Corinth, where the Olympic Games were
celebrated with a regularity that made their period
the basis of chronological computation for a space ci
nearly eight hundred years. When Rome became
the capital of the world, the yearly disbursements for
the subvention of free public recreations equaled the
tribute of a wealthy province. There were free race
courses, gymnasia, music halls, and wrestling-ring;
free public baths and magnificent amphitheaters for
KECEEATION. 205
the exhibition of free dramatic performances, gladia-
torial combats, and curiosities of art and natural his-
tory. Every proconsul of a foreign province was
instructed to collect wild animals and specimens of
rare birds and reptiles ; every triumphator devoted a
portion of his spoils to a celebration of free circenses
— "circus games" — by no means limited to the
mutual slaughter of prize fighters, but including
horse races, concerts, trials of skill, and new arts.
It would be a mistake to suppose that the liberality
of such establishments offered a premium on idleness.
The immense increase of the metropolitan population
justified the constant extension cf that liberality, but
even after the erection of permanent amphitheaters
the vigilance of public censors discouraged mendi-
cancy ; the complaints of wives, creditors, and land-
lords against habitual idlers were made the basis of
penal proceedings, and from the total appropriations
for tlie support of free municipal institutions the
overseers of the poor deducted considerable sums
for purposes of public charity.
Nor did the citizens of the metropolis monopolize
the privilege of free public amusements. At the time
of the Antonines not less than fifty cities of Italy
alone had amphitheaters of their own, and the
smallest hamlet had at least a palaestra, where the
local champions met every evening for a trial of
strength and skill.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The alternation of day and night should reveal the
truth that nature is averse to permanent gloom.
206 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
Sunlight is a primary condition of all nobler life, and
only ignorance or basest selfishness can doom a child
of earth to the misery of toil uncheered by the sun-
rays of recreation. For even enlightened selfishness
would recognize the advantages of the pagan plan.
The passions of personal ambition burnt then as
fiercely as now, but the Roman world-conquerors
thought it wiser, as well as nobler, to share their
spoils with the soldiers who had fought their battles,
with the workmen who had reared their castles, with
the neighbors who had witnessed their triumphs.
The very slaves of Greece and Rome were indulged
in periodic enjoyments of all the luxuries fortune had
bestowed upon their masters; at the end of the
working-day menials and artisans forgot their toil
amidst the wonders of the amphitheater, and neither
their work nor their work-givers were the worse for
it. The promise of the evening cheered the labors
of the day; minds frequently unbent by the relaxa-
tion of diverting pastimes were less apt to break
under the strain of toil, less liable to yield to the
temptation of despondency, envy, and despair.
During the last four weeks of his Egyptian cam-
paign Napoleon relieved the tedium of camp-life by
a series of athletic games and horse-races, and thus
succeeded in sustaining the spirit of his troops under
hardships which at first threatened to demoralize
even his veterans. For similar purposes and with
similar success, Marshal Saxe indulged his men in a
variety of exciting sports, and Captain Kane found
dramatic entertainments the best prophylactic
against the influence of a monotonous diet combined
RECREATION. 207
with an average temperature of fifty degrees below
zero. Captain Burton ascribes the longevity of the
nomadic Arabs to their habit of passing their even-
ings as cheerfully as their stock of provisions and
anecdotes will permit, and it is a suggestive circum-
stance that the joy-loving aristocracy of medieval
France could boast a surprising number of octogen-
arians, and that the gay capitals of modern Europe,
with all their vices, enjoy a better chance of longev-
ity than the dull provincial towns.
C. — PERVERSION.
The superstition which dooms its votaries to a
worship of sorrow has for centuries treated pleasure
and sin as synonymous terms. In the era of the
Caesars the licentious passions of a large metropolis
gave that asceticism a specious pretext; but its true
purpose was soon after revealed by the suppression
of rustic pastimes, of athletic sports, and at last, even
of the classic festival which for centuries had assem-
bled the champions of the Mediterranean nations on
the isthmus of Corinth. With a similar rancor of
bigoted intolerance the Puritans suppressed the
sports of " merry old England," and their fanatical
protests against the most harmless amusements
would be utterly incomprehensible if the secret of
Christian asceticism had not been unriddled by the
study of the Buddhistic parent-dogma. The doc-
trine which the apostle of Galilee thought it wisest
to veil in parables and metaphors, the Indian mes-
siah of anti-naturalism reveals in its ghastly naked-
ness as an attempt to wean the hearts of mankind
208 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
from their earth-born loves and reconcile them to the
alternative of annihilation — "Nirvana" — the only
refuge from the delusions of a life outweighing a
single joy by a hundred sorrows. Not life only, but
the very instincts of life were to be suppressed, to
prevent their revival in new forms of re-birth ; and in
pursuit of that plan the prophet of Nepaul does not
hesitate to warn his disciples against sleeping twice
under the same tree, to lessen the chance of undue
fondness for any earthly object whatever. The in-
dulgements of life-endearing desires, that creed de-
nounced as the height of folly and recommended
absolute abstinence from physical enjoyments as the
shortest path to the goal of redemption. In its prac-
tical consequences, if not in its theoretical signifi-
cances, the same principle asserts itself in the doc-
trine of the New Testament, and justified the dread
of the life-loving pagans in realizing the stealthy
growth of the Galilean church, and anticipating the
ultimate consequences of that gospel of renunciation
whose ideal of perfection was the other-worldllness of
an earth- despising fanatic. More or less consciously,
the suppression of earthly desires has always been
pursued as the chief aim of Christian dogmatism;
the "world" has ever been the antithesis of the
Christian kingdom of God, the "flesh" the irrecon-
cilable antagonist of the regenerate soul. Hence that
rancorous fury against the " worldliness " of natural-
ism, against the pagan worship of joy, against the
modern revivals of that worship. Hence the grief of
those M whining saints who groaned in spirit at the
sight of Jack in the Green;" hence the crusade
FOREST CULTURE. 209
against Easter-fires, May-poles, foot-races, country
excursions, round-dances, and picnics; hence the
anathemas against the athletic sports of ancient
Greece and the entertainments of the modern theater.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Wherever the fanatics of the Galilean church have
trampled the flowers of earth, the wasted gardens
have been covered with a rank thicket of weeds.
Outlawed freedom has given way to the caprice of
despots and the license of crime ; outraged common
sense has yielded to the vagaries of superstition ; the
suppression of healthful recreation has avenged itself
in the riots of secret vice. The history of alcoholism
proves that every revival of asceticism has been fol-
lowed by an increase of intemperance, as inevitably
as the obstruction of a natural river-bed would be
followed by an inundation. When the convent- slaves
of the Middle Ages had been deprived of every
chance of devoting a leisure hour to more healthful
recreations, neither the rigor of their vows nor the
bigotry of their creed could prevent them from
drowning their misery in wine. When the Puritans
of the seventeenth century had turned Scotland into
an ecclesiastic penitentiary, the burghers of the
Sabbath-stricken towns sought refuge in the dream-
land of intoxication. The experience of many cen-
turies has, indeed, forced the priesthood of southern
Europe to tolerate Sunday recreations as a minor
evil. In Spain the bull-rings of the larger cities
open every Sunday at 2 p m. In Italy the patronage
of Sunday excursions and Sunday theaters is limited
210 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
only by the financial resources of their patrons. In
France Sunday is by large odds the gayest day
in the week. In the large cities of Islam the muftis
connive at Sunday dances and Sunday horse-races ;
and as a consequence a much less pardonable abuse
of holidays is far rarer in southern Europe than
in the cities of the Sabbatarian north, the consump-
tion of Sunday intoxicants being larger in Great
Britain than in France, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and
Italy taken together. Climatic causes may have
their share in effect ing that difference ; another
cause was revealed when the followers of Ibn Hanbal
attempted to enforce the asceticism of their master
upon the citizens of Bagdad. Ibn Hanbal, the Mo-
hammedan Hudibras, used to travel from village to
village, with a horde of bigots, breaking up dance-
houses, upsetting the tables of the confectionery
pedlers, pelting flower-girls, and thrashing musicians,
and when the revolt of a provincial city resulted in
the death of the " reformer," his fanatical followers
assembled their fellow-converts from all parts of the
country, and raided town after town, till they at last
forced their way into the capital of the caliphate.
The recklessness of their zeal overcame all resistance,
but the completeness of their triumph led to a rather
unexpected result. Every play-house of the metrop-
olis was not only closed, but utterly demolished;
musicians were jailed ; dance- girls were left to choose
between instant flight and crucifixion ; showmen were
banished from all public streets ; but the dwellings
of private citizens were less easy to control, and
those private citizens before long evinced a passionate
FOREST CULTURE. 211
and ever-increasing fondness for intoxicating drinks.
Elders of the mosque were seen wallowing in their
gutters, howling blasphemies that would have
appalled the heart of the toughest Giaour ; dig-
nitaries of the green turban staggered along under
the weight of a wine-skin, or waltzed about in imita-
tion of the exiled ballet performers. The Hanbalites
convoked tri-weekly, and at last daily, prayer-meet-
ings, but things went from bad to worse, till a
counter-revolution finally restored the authority of
the old city government, and the flight of the fanatics
was attended with a prompt decrease both of spiritual
and spirituous excesses.
E. — REFORM.
The predictions of our latter-day augurs would
seem to indicate that the civilization of the Caucasian
race is drifting toward Socialism; but a modern
philosopher reminds us that "a reform, however
great, is apt to come out in a different shape from
that predicted by the reformers." The citizens of the
coming republic will probably waive their claim to
free government lunch-houses and similar " estab-
lishments for preventing the natural penalties of
idleness," but they will most decidedly protest
against government interference with the legitimate
rewards of industry. Even now, few sane persons
can realize the degree of ignorance that enabled the
clergy of the Middle Ages to fatten on the proceeds
of witchcraft trials and heretic hunts, and the time
may be near when our children will find it difficult
to conceive the degree of infatuation that could
212 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
induce their forefathers to sacrifice their weekly
leisure-day at the bidding of brainless and heartless
bigots. Drudgery will perhaps continue the hard
task-master of the working-week; but the Sundays
of the future will be as free as the light of their sun.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DOMESTIC REFORM.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
In the nest-building propensity of the social insects
the biologist can recognize the first germ of the in-
stinctive desire for the establishment of a permanent
home. Certain birds, like the weaver-thrush of the
tropics, imitate the community life of the ant and
bee, but in all higher animals the homestead instinct is
associated with the desire for domestic privacy. The
eagle will suffer no other bird to approach the rock
that shelters his eyrie j the hawk, the heron, and the
kingfisher rear their brood at the greatest possible
distance from the nesting-place of their next relatives.
Each pair of squirrels try to get a tree all to them-
selves ; and even the social prairie-dog shares its home
with strangers (owls and serpents) rather than with
another family of its own tribe. The "homestead in-
stinct" of our primitive forefathers formed the first, and
perhaps the most potent, stimulus to the acquisition
of personal property. There is a period in life when
the desire for the possession of a private domicile
asserts itself with the power almost of a vital pas-
sion; and success in the realization of that desire
DOMESTIC REFORM. 213
solves in many respects the chief problems of indi-
vidual existence. The love of domestic peace, the
delight in the improvement of a private homestead,
are the best guarantees of staid habits. There was a
time when the neglect of husbandry was considered
a conclusive proof of profligate habits ; and the office
of a Koman censor comprised the duty of reproving
careless housekeepers. The poorest citizen of the
Koman commonwealth had a little patrimonium of
his own, a dwelling-house, an orchard, and a small
lot of land, which he did his best to improve, and
where his children learned their first lesson of per-
sonal rights in defense of their private playgrounds.
The ruins of Pompeii show that the civilization of
the Mediterranean coast-lands had anticipated the
conclusion of our sanitarian reformers, who recom-
mend the advantage of cottage- suburbs as a remedy
for the horrors of tenement life. Between the acro-
polis and the seaside villas the town forms an aggre-
gation of small dwelling houses, mostly one-story,
but each with a private yard (probably a little gar-
den) or a wide portico, with bath-room and private
gymnasiums. And though the ancients were well
acquainted with the manufacture of glass, their
dwelling-houses were lighted by mere lattice-win-
dows, excluding rain and the glare of the sun, but
freely admitting every breeze, and thus solving the
problem of ventilation in the simplest and most
effective manner. The dwellings of our Saxon fore-
fathers, too, resembled the log-cabins of the Kentucky
backwoods, and admitted fresh air so freely that the
large family-hearth could dispense with a chimney,
214 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
and vented its smoke through the open eaves of the
roof. In the palaces of the Roman patricians there
were special winter-rooms, with a smoke-flue resem-
bling a narrow alcove ; but even there, ventilation
was insured by numerous lattice doors, communi-
cating with as many balconies or terrace roofs.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The evolution of all hereditary instincts has been
explained by the " survival of the fittest," and the
instinct of homestead-love has doubtlessly been de-
veloped in the same way. The results of its pre-
dominance prevailed against the results of its absence.
Defensive love of a private " hearth and home " is
the basis of patriotism, so unmistakably, indeed, that
the fathers of the Roman republic for centuries re-
fused to employ foreign mercenaries, who had no
personal interest in the defense of the soil. As a
modern humorist has cleverly expressed it : " Few
men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a mus-
ket in defense of a boarding-house." And the golden
age of civic virtues is almost limited to the time when
every free citizen of Greece and Rome was a land-
owner.
Nor would it be easy to overrate the subjective
advantages of home-life. Health, happiness, and
longevity have no more insidious foe than the canker-
worm of vexation; and for the unavoidable disap-
pointments of social life there is no more effective
specific than the peace of a prosperous private home-
stead, soothing the mind with evidences of success
in the growth of a promising orchard, in the increase
DOMESTIC REFORM. 215
and improvement of domestic animals, in the happi-
ness of merry children and contented dependents.
Xenophon, after proving the excitements of an ad-
venturous life by land and sea, found a truer happi-
ness in the solitude of his Arcadian hunting-lodge.
Felix Sylla, Fortune's most constant favorite, aban-
doned the throne of a mighty empire to enjoy the
frugal fare of a small hill-farm. Voltaire, worn out
by the trials of a fifty years' life-and- death struggle
against the rancor of bigots, recovered his health
and his peace of mind amidst the pear-tree planta-
tions of Villa Ferney.
In the resources of medicine and scientific surgery
the ancients were far behind even the half- civilized
nations of modern times, but their children could enjoy
their holidays on their own playground, their sleep-
ers could breathe pure air, their worn-out laborers
could retire to the peace of a private home ; and
they enjoyed a degree of health and vigor which our
most progressive nations can hope to re-attain only
after centuries of sanitary reform.
O. PERVERSION.
The germ of the ignoble patience which submits to
the miseries of modern tenement-life, and learns to pre-
fer the fetor of a crowded slum-alley to the free air of
the woods and fields, can be traced to the voluntary
prison-life of the first Christian monasteries. With
all the gregariousDSSS of the African race, the
very slaves of our American plantations preferred
to avoid quarrels and constraint by building a sepa-
rate cabin for the use of each family ; but the ethics
216 THE BIBLE OF NATUKE.
of the Galilean church recognized no privilege of
personal rights ; the sympathies of family-life were
crushed out by the enforcement of celibacy ; every
symptom of self-assertion was denounced as a revolt
against the duty of passive subordination; the very
instincts of individuality were systematically sup-
pressed to make each convert a whining, emasculated,
self- despising, and world-renouneing " member of the
church of Christ." The mortification of the body
being the chief object of monastic seclusion, the
hygienic architecture of convent buildings was con-
sidered a matter of such absolute unimportance that
many of the cells (dormitories) had no windows at all,
but merely a door communicating with an ill- venti-
lated gallery, after the plan of our old-style prisons.
Eight feet by ten, and eight high, were the usual di-
mensions of those man-pens; and that utter indifference
to the physical health of the inmates was but rarely
seconded by a view to the advantages of private medi-
tation is proved by the circumstance that the convent-
slaves of the eastern church (in the Byzantine em-
pire, for instance) were not often permitted to enjoy
the privacy of their wretched dens ; their dormitories
were packed like the bunks of a Portuguese slave-
ship, and the word j&yncellus (cell- mate) is used as a
cognomen of numerous ecclesiastics. The abbot, and
in less ascetic centuries perhaps the learned clerks
(legend-writers, etc.), were the only members of a
monastic community who could ever rely on the
privacy of a single hour. For the admitted purpose
of mortifying their love of physical comforts, the
weary sleepers, worn-out with penance and hunger,
DOMESTIC REFORM. 217
were summoned to prayer in the middle of the night,
or eent out on, begging expeditions in the roughest
weather. Every vestige of furniture or clothing apt
to mitigate the dreariness of discomfort was banished
from their cells; they suffered all the hardships
without enjoying the peace and security of a her-
mit's home; novices (on probation), and even the
pupils of the convent-schools, were submitted to a
similar discipline, and thus monasticism became the
training- school of modern tenement-life.
During the latter half of the Middle Ages, feudal-
ism found an additional motive for suppressing
the love of domestic independence. The church
usurers and aristocrats monopolized real estate, and
made it more and more difficult, even for the most
industrious of their dependants, to acquire a share of
landed property. Every feudal lord secured his
control over his serfs by crowding them together
in a small village (literally an abode of villains, i.e.,
of vile pariahs), where his slave-drivers could at any
time rally them for an extra job of socage duty. The
incessant raids of mail-clad high way-robbers — robber
knights and marauding partisans — obliged all peace-
loving freemen to congregate for mutual protection
and rear their children in the stone prisons of an
over-crowded burgh. The suppression of all natural
sciences, including the science of health, aggravated
the evil by a persistent neglect of such partial rem-
edies as disinfectants and artificial ventilation. The
home of a medieval artisan combined all the disad-
vantages of a jail and a pest-house.
The revolt against feudalism has at last broken
218 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the stone- fetters of our larger cities ; city walls have
been turned into promenades, and convents into
store-houses or lunatic asylums; but the spirit of
monasticism still survives j indifference to the bless-
ings of health and domestic independence seems to
have acquired the strength of a second nature, and
thousands of our modern factory slaves actually pre-
fer their slum-prisons to the freedom of a cheaper
suburban home.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Nature rarely fails to avenge the violation of her
laws, but it might be doubted if the perversion of
any other natural instinct has entailed more numerous
or direr penalties than our habitual outrages against
the instinct of home-life. The monstrosities of our
tenement system, by a moderate estimate, cost on the
average every year the lives of 1,500,000 children under
ten years of age (in Europe and North America), and of
1,200,000 consumptives, besides thousands of victims
to epidemic disorders, aggravated, if not engendered,
by the influence of vitiated ail*. Habitual intemperance,
too, has undoubtedly been increased by the dearth of
home- comforts. Our factory-laborers, our mechan-
ics, and thousands of students and young clerks,
spend their evenings in riot, because the man-trap
of the lowest grog-shop is, after all, less unattractive
than the dungeon of a stifling tenement home. In
many of our larger cities similar causes have led to
a constant increase of a manner of existence which a
modern reformer calls the " celibacy of vice." But the
decreasing demand for independent homes is not the
DOMESTIC REFORM. 219
only cause of the decreased supply, and the heartless
selfishness of our wealthy land-gluttons has provoked
a form of nihilism which threatens to shake, if not to
subvert, the very foundations of social life.
E. REFORM.
That latter danger seems, at last, to have awakened
our political economists to the necessity of redress-
ing a many-sided abuse, and the failure of earlier re-
form projects has at least helped to emphasize the
demand for more adequate remedies. The traffic in
human life in the floating hells of the African slave-
traders hardly called for more stringent repressive
measures than the inhumanity of our tenement spec-
ulators who fatten on the profits of a system propa-
gating the infallible seeds of pulmonary consumption,
and sacrificing the lives of more children than the
superstition of the dark ages ever doomed to the
altars of Moloch. Even in a country where the jeal-
ousy of personal rights would hardly countenance
legislative interference with the construction of pri-
vate dwelling-houses, the license of tenement- owners
ought to be circumscribed by the conditions of Dr.
Paul Boettger's rule, providing for appropriation of
a certain number of cubic feet of breathing space,
and square feet of window, front, and garden (or
play-ground) room for each tenant or family of ten-
ants. The abuse of sub-renting could be limited by
similar provisions, and the adoption of the separate
cottage plan should be promoted by the-reduction of
municipal passenger tariffs and suburban taxes.
The plan of equalizing the burden of taxation and
220 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
the opportunities of land tenure by a general con-
fiscation and redistribution of real estate might
recommend itself as a last resort, though hardly in
preference to the project of Fedor Bakunin, the
" Russian Mirabeau," who proposed to found new
communities under a charter, reserving the tenth
part of all building lots for communal purposes, and
lease the tenant-right to the highest bidder. The
value of those reserve lots would increase with the
growth of the town, and by renewing their lease
from ten to ten years, the rent could be made to
cover the budget of all direct municipal expenses,
and leave a fair surplus for charitable and educa-
tional purposes. In comparison with the confiscation
plan, that project could claim all the advantages
which make prevention preferable to a drastic cure.
As a check to the evils of land monopoly the least
objectionable plan would seem to be Professor
De Graaf's proposition of a graded system of real
estate taxation, increasing the rate of tallage with
each multiple of a fair homestead lot, and thus taxing
a land-shark for the privilege of acquisition, as well
as for the actual possession, of an immoderate
estate.
The art of making home-life pleasant will yet
prove the most effective specific in the list of temper-
ance remedies, and will aid the apostles of Secularism
in that work of redemption which the gospel of
renunciation has failed to achieve.
LEGISLATIVE REFORM. 221
CHAPTEK XIX.
LEGISLATIVE REFORM.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Progress is a general law of Nature, and the com-
parative study of Evolution proves that the tendency
to improvement increases with the advance to higher
planes of development. Among the lowest organisms
the rate of progress is hardly appreciable. The sea
shells of the Devonian period can scarcely be dis-
tinguished from the shells of our present seas. The
balls of amber found on the shores of the Baltic often
contain the mummies of insects closely resembling
certain species of latter-day flies and beetles, while
the horse, the zebra, and other modern varieties of the
equine genus, have developed from a creature not
much larger than a fox. The Neanderthal skull
proves that the heads of our early ancestors were al-
most ape-like in their protruding jaws and flatness of
cranium. The lower animals adhere to inherited
habits with a persistency that has often proved their
ruin by diminishing their ability of adapting them-
selves to change of circumstances, as in the case of
that sea-lizard of the South sea islands, where its
ancestors had for ages managed to escape their only
enemies by leaving the water and crawling up the
beach, and where their modern descendants persist
in crawling landw&rd in the hope of escaping from
dogs and hunters.
The higher animals, on the other hand, rarely fail
to profit by lessons of experience. Trappers know
222 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
that the contrivances for capturing wild animals have
to be changed from time to time-, the older methods
being apt to lose their efficacy after the fate of a
certain number of victims has warned their relatives.
Old rats have been seen driving their young from a
dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel. Deer, foxes, and
wild turkeys learn to avoid the favorite trails of the
hunter; monkeys, on their first arrival in a cold
climate, impatiently tear off the jackets or shawls
furnished by the kindness of their keeper, but soon
learn to appreciate the advantage of artificial tegu-
ments, and even try to increase their stock of ward-
robe by appropriating every stray piece of cloth
they can lay their hands on.
The instinct of adaptation to the conditions of prog-
ress has asserted itself both among modern and very
ancient nations, though during the mental bondage
of the Middle Ages its manifestations were systemat-
ically suppressed by the conservatism of religious
bigots. Savages show an almost apish eagerness in
adopting the habits, fashions, and foibles of civiliza-
tion. The political institutions of primitive nations
are very elastic. The Grecian republics were not
only willing but anxious to improve their laws by
abolishing abuses and testing amendments. In
ancient Rome every general assembly of freemen
exercised the functions of a legislative council ; leg-
islative reforms were proposed by private citizens
and were often carried by acclamation, like the edict
for the expulsion of the Tarquins, and the resolution
revoking the exile of Cicero.
LEGISLATIVE REFORM. 223
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Legislative reform, the manful renunciation of en-
tangling alliances with the ghosts of the past, is a
sword that has more than once cut a Gordian knot
of fatal complications. The suppression of mon-
asteries saved four of our Spanish American sister
republics from a brocd of vampires that had drained
the life-blood of Spain for a series of centuries. In
England the timely repeal of the corn-laws averted
an explosion that might have rent the coherence of
the entire British empire. The abolition of slavery
with one blow destroyed a hydra that had menaced
the safety of the American Union by an endless series
of political disputes. By the abolition of serfdom
Czar Alexander elevated the Eussian empire to the
rank of a progressive nation. The very possibility
of national progress depends, indeed, on the hope
of legislative reform, for the rigor of unalterable
laws prevents social development as the clasp of an
iron ring prevents the growth of a tree.
0. PERVERSION.
All the intelligent nations of antiquity were dis-
tinguished by a tendency to legislative progress, till
the freedom of that progress was checked by the
claims of religious infallibility. The founder of the
Zendavesta advanced that claim for a pandect of pre-
tended revelations which became the religious code
of Central Asia, and as a consequence the intellect-
ual and industrial development of two valiant na-
tions was stunted by legislative conservatism — the
224 THE BIBLE OE NATURE.
proverbially "unalterable laws of the Medes and Per-
sians." The claims of an infallible revelation pre-
clude the necessity of reform. " Should mortals pre-
sume to improve the ordinances of a God ?"
But the blind hatred of progress which has for so
many centuries degraded the Christian hierarchy be-
low the priesthood of all other intolerant creeds, is
the earth-renouncing antinaturalism of their founder.
The priests of Zoroaster, Moses, and Mohammed
claimed the sufficiency of their dogmas for the pur-
poses of national prosperity. The priests of the
nature-hating Galilean attempted to suppress the
very desire of that prosperity. " The doctrine of
renunciation made patriotism an idle dream: the
saints, whose ' kingdom was not of this world/ had
no business with vanities of that sort ; no chieftain
could trust his neighbor; cities were pitted against
cities and castles against castles ; patriotic reformers
would vainly have appealed to the sympathies of men
who had been taught to reserve their interest for the
politics of the New Jerusalem" (Secret of the East,
p. 76).
The Rev. Spurgeon, of London, England, recently
provoked the protests of his Liberal colleagues by
the confession that he " positively hated advanced
thought f but only five centuries ago such protests
were silenced with the gag and the fagot. For nearly
a thousand years every clergyman who had the cour-
age to lift his voice in favor ©f secular reforms was
fiercely attacked as a traitor to the sacred cause of
other- worldliness. To question the authority of the
church was a crime which could not in the least be
LEGISLATIVE REFORM. 225
palliated by such pleas as the temporal interests of
mankind, and a mere hint at the fallibility of "re-
vealed scriptures" could only be expiated in the blood
of the offender. Nay, thousands of scientists, his-
torians, and philosophers who had never expressed
a direct doubt of that sort, were doomed to a death
of torture merely because the logical inference of
their discoveries was at variance with the dogmas of
the Galilean miracle-mongers. From the reign of
Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Protestant re-
volt the intolerance of Christian bigots interposed
an insuperable dam between the projects and the
realization of social reforms.
" I cannot conceive," says Hallam, " of any state
of society more adverse to the intellectual improve-
ment of mankind than one which admitted no middle
line between dissoluteness and fanatical mortifica-
tions."
If it had not been for the exotic civilization of
Moorish Spain, it would be strictly true that at
the end of the thirteenth century, when the enemies
of nature had reached the zenith of their power, " the
countries of Europe, without a single exception, were
worse governed, more ignorant, more superstitious,
poorer, and unhappier than the worst governed prov-
inces of pagan Borne."
In China and India, too, the resistance of religious
prejudice has for ages frustrated the hopes of polit-
ical development, and the civilization of Europe dates
only from the time when a more or less complete
separation of church and state was effected by the
insurrection of the Germanic nations, and where the
226 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
work of that separation has been left unfinished the
march of reform halts at every step. Every claim of
dogmatic infallibility has proved a spoke in the wheels
of progress.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The pig-headed conservatism of orthodox nations
has never failed to avenge itself in its ultimate results,
but its fatuity has, perhaps, been most strikingly
illustrated by the practical consequences of legisla-
tive non-progressiveness. There was a time when the
small value of real estate made it a trifle for an
Italian prince to present a favorit prelate with a few
square leagues of neglected woodlands; but now,
when those woods have been turned into vineyards
and building-lots, and over-population makes the
monopoly of land a grievous burden, hundreds of in-
dustrious peasants are obliged to starve to swell the
revenues of a bloated priest, who nevertheless suc-
ceeds in silencing all protests by an appeal to the
" necessity of respecting time-honored institutions."
At a time when agriculture and pastoral pursuits
were the chief industries of Scotland, it was no great
grievance to sequester the seventh day for the exclu-
sive service of ecclesiastic purposes; but now, when
thousands of poor factory children need outdoor
recreations as they need sunlight and bread, it has
become an infamous outrage on personal rights to
enforce a medieval by-law for the suppression of out-
door sports on the day when those who need it most
can find their only chance for recreation. Neverthe-
less, the dread of innovations defeats the urged re-
LEGISLATIVE REFORM. 227
peal of a law which for the last hundred years has
obliged millions of city dwellers to sacrifice the sun-
shine of their lives for the benefit of a few clerical
vampires. The repeal of the witchcraft laws was pre-
ceded by a transition period of at least two hundred
years, when the mere dread of an open rupture with
the specters of the past cowed intelligent jurists into
accepting the charge of an impossible crime, and con-
signing the victims of superstition to the doom of a
hideous death. Their private rationalism might re-
volt against the absurdity of the proceedings, but
there were the witnesses, there were the legal prece-
dents, there were the explicit provisions of the penal
code, and with or without the consent of their intel-
lectual conscience they had to pronounce the sen-
tence of death. The penal statutes of medieval
England made sheep stealing a capital offense, and
the mulish conservatism of British legislators refused
to abolish that relic of the Dark Ages till the com-
mon sense of the lower classes found means to redress
the abuse in a way of their own. Juries agreed to
acquit sheep-stealers altogether, rather than vote
away their lives for that of a quadruped. It was in
vain that the prosecuting attorney established the
fact of the offense beyond a shadow of reasonable
doubt. It was in vain that the charge of the judge
emphatically indorsed the indictment. It was in vain
that the defendants themselves completed the evidence
of their guilt by a frank confession ; they were ac-
quitted amidst the wrathful protests of the court and
the plaudits of the audience, till sheep- owners them-
selves were obliged to petition for the repeal of the
228 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
time- dishonored law. The idea that the mere an-
tiquity of a legal custom is an argument in its favor
is a twin sister of the superstitious veneration of
antiquated dogmas.
E. KEFOEftl.
The superstitious dread of innovation, rather than
the want of natural intelligence, has for ages thwarted
the hopes of rationalism, and the renunciation of that
prejudice promises to rival the blessing of Secular
education in promoting the advance of social reforms.
Orthodox restive?iess, rather than any conceivable de-
gree of ignorance, has, for instance, prevented the
repeal of the Religious Disability laws which still
disgrace the statutes of so many civilized nations. A
chemical inventor would be suspected of insanity for
trying to demonstrate his theories by quoting the
Bible in preference to a scientific text-book, yet on
questions as open to investigation and proof as any
problem of chemistry, the courts of numerous intel-
ligent nations still refuse to accept the testimony of
a witness who happens to prefer the philosophy of
Humboldt and Spencer to the rant of an oriental
spook-monger. The proposition to oblige a water-
drinker to defray the expense of his neighbor's pas-
sion for intoxicating beverages would justly land the
proposer in the next lunatic asylum, yet millions upon
millions of our Caucasian fellow-men are still taxed
to enable their neighbors to enjoy the luxuries of a
creed which the conscience of the unwilling tithe-
payer rejects as a degrading superstition. In Europe
countless Nonconformists have to contribute to the
LEGISLATIVE REFORM. 229
support of a parish-priest or village-rector on pain of
having a sheriff sell their household goods at public
auction. In America farmers and mechanics have to
pay double taxes in order to enable an association of
mythology-mongers to hold their property tax-free.
Because the pantheon of the Ammonites included a
god with cannibal propensities, helpless infants were
for centuries roasted on the consecrated gridiron of
that god ; and because eighteen hundred years ago
the diseased imagination of a world-renouncing bigot
conceived the idea of a deity delighting in the self-
affliction of his creatures, the gloom of death still
broods over the day devoted to the special worship of
that God, and the coercive penalties of the law are
weekly visited upon all who refuse to sacrifice their
health and happiness on the altar of superstition.
But legislative abuses are not confined to religious
anachronisms. The inconsistencies of our penal code
still betray the influence of medieval prejudices in the
unwise leniency, as well as in the disproportionate
severity, of their dealings with purely secular offenses.
The vice of intemperance was for centuries encouraged
by the example of the clergy, while the control, or
even the suppression, of the sexnal instinct was en-
forced by barbarous penalties. And while the pan-
ders of the alcohol vice are still countenanced by the
sanction of legal license and admitted to official
positions of honor and influence, the mediators of
sexual vice are treated as social outcasts, and pun-
ished with a severity out of all proportion to the
actual social standards of virtue. The deserted wife,
who in a moment of despair has caused the death of
230 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
an unborn child, is treated as the vilest of criminals,
while the crime of a railway shark or tenement-specu-
lator whose selfishness and greed have caused a fatal
disaster, is condoned in consideration of " social
respectability," i.e., a mask of orthodox sentiments
and unctuous cant. A Christian jury will thank a
banker for shooting a poor wretch whom extreme
distress may have driven to enter a house for preda-
tory purposes, but if that same banker should be con-
victed of embezzling the hard-earned savings of trust-
ing widows and orphans, his fellow-hypocrites will
circulate an eloquent petition for his release from a
few years of light imprisonment.
There is need of other reforms, which recommend
themselves by such cogent arguments that their
adoption seems only a question of time, such as the
protection of forests, the recognition of women's
rights, the "habitual criminal" law, physical educa-
tion, and the abolition of the poison-traffic.
It is undoubtedly true that the progress from bar-
barism to culture is characterized by the growth of a
voluntary respect for the authority of legal institu-
tions, but it is equally true that the highest goals of
civilization cannot be reached till the degree of that
respect shall be measured by the utility, rather than
by the antiquity, of special laws.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM. 231
CHAPTEE XX.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM.
A. LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
An instinct inherited from the habits of many gen-
erations teaches our social fellow-creatures to entrust
the welfare of their communities to the protection of
an experienced leader. Birds that become gregarious
only at a certain time of the year select a guide for
that special occasion. Others have a permanent
leader, and among the more intelligent quadrupeds
that leadership becomes dual. Besides the stout
champion who comes to the front in moments of
danger, wild cattle, horses, antelopes, deer, and the
social quadrumana have a veteran pioneer who guides
their migrations and sentinels their encampments.
Among the primitive tribes of our fellow-men, too,
the authority of leadership is divided between a
warrior and a teacher, a chieftain and a priest. The
obstinacy of savages, who refuse to yield to reason,
suggested the plan of controlling their passions by
the fear of the unseen, but ghost-mougery was not
the only, nor even the most essential, function of
primitive priesthood. The elders of the Brahmans
were the guardians of homeless children and over-
seers of public charities. The Celtic Druids were
the custodians of national treasures. The rune-
wardens of the ancient Scandinavians preserved the
historical traditions and law records of their nation.
The priests of the Phoenicians (like our Indian med-
icine men) were trained physicians. The Egyptian
232 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
hierophants were priests of knowledge, as well as of
mythology. They were the historians and biog-
raphers of their nation. They codified the national
laws. They taught geometry; they taught gram-
mar; they taught and practiced surgery; they de-
voted a large portion of their time to astronomical
observations. Their temple-cities were, in fact, free
universities, and the waste of time devoted to the
rites of superstition was more than compensated by
secular studies, and to some degree also by the polit-
ical services of learned priests, who seem to have
been occasionally employed in diplomatic emergen-
cies.
Motives of political prudence induced the law-
givers of the Mediterranean nations to circumscribe
the authority of their pontiffs, which at last was,
indeed, almost limited to the supervision of religious
ceremonies. But in Borne, as well as in Greece and
the Grecian colonies of western Asia, the true func-
tions of priesthood were assumed by the popular ex-
ponents of philosophy, especially by the Stoics and
Pythagoreans. The weekly lectures of Zeno were
attended by a miscellaneous throng of truth- seekers;
the disciples of Pythagoras almost worshiped their
master j Diagoras and Carneades traveled from town
to town, preaching to vast audiences of spell-bound
admirers ; Apollonius of Tyana rose in fame till cities
competed for the honor of his visits ; the clientele of
no Grecian prince was thought complete without a
court philosopher ;' the tyrant Dionysius, in all the
pride of his power, invited the moral rigorist Plato
and submitted to his daily repeated reproofs. Phi-
THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM. 233
losophers were the confessors, the comforters, and
the counselors of their patrons, and philosophic
tutors were in such request that wealthy Eomans
did not hesitate to procure them from the traffickers
in Grecian captives and indulge them in all privileges
but that of liberty. Centuries before a bishop of
Kome contrived to avert the wrath of King Alaric,
doomed cities had been spared at the intercession of
pagan philosophers, and philosophers more than
once succeeded in allaying the fury of mutineers who
would have ridiculed an appeal to mythological tra-
ditions.
B. REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The power of filial love hardly exceeds that of the
passionate veneration which kindles about the person
of a sincere teacher of truth. The homage paid to
an apostle of light is the noblest form of hero-
worship. The hosannas of idol- service overflowing
upon the idol-priest are marred by the discords of
hypocrisy and the reproving silence of reason; but
the approval of wisdom is the highest reward of its
ministry. The brightness of that prestige shames
the gilded halo of the mythology-monger ; the min-
ister of Truth may lack the pomp of consecrated
temples, but his disciples will make a hermit's cave a
Delphic grotto and will not willingly let the record
of his oracles perish. The chants of the Eleusynian
festivals, the shout of the Lupercalia, the mumblings
of augurs and sibyls, have been forever silenced; but
the words of Plato still live ; Socrates still speaks to
234 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
thousands of truth-seekers; the wisdom of Seneca
still brightens the gloom of adversity.
Religions founded on any basis of truth can survive
the fall of their temples. Jerusalem was wrecked in
the storm of Roman conquest, but the health-laws of
the Mosaic code defied the power of the destroyer,
and of all the creeds born on the teeming soil of the
East, Judaism alone can still be preached without an
alloy of cant and compromise.
•The enthusiasm of progress has nothing to fear
from the growth of skepticism. Mankind will always
appreciate their enlightened well-wishers. In cities
where the creed of the Galilean supernaturalist has
become almost as obsolete as the witchcraft delusion,
progressive clergymen still draw audiences of intelli-
gent and sincere admirers, and the apostles of social
reform are haunted by anxious inquirers, disciples
whom the penalties of heresy fail to deter, and who
if barred out all day will come by night : " Master,
what shall we do to be saved?"
In spite of sham saviors, the search after salva-
tion has never ceased, and after eighteen centuries of
clerical caricatures the ideal of true priesthood still
survives in the hearts of men.
0. PERVERSION.
The puerile supernaturalism of the pagan myth-
mongers could not fail to injure their prestige, even
in an age of superstition ; but the antinaturalism
of the Galilean fanatics not only neglected but com-
pletely inverted the proper functions of priesthood.
The pretended ministers of Truth became her re-
THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM. 235
morseless persecutors; the promised healers depre-
ciated the importance of bodily health, the hoped-for
apostles of social reform preached the doctrine of re-
nunciation. We should not judge the Christian
clergy by the aberrations engendered by the mad-
dening influence of protracted persecutions. It would
be equally unfair to give them the credit of latter-
day reforms, reluctantly conceded to the demands of
rationalism. But we can with perfect fairness judge
them by the standard of the moral and intellectual
types evolved during the period of their plenary
power, the three hundred years from the tenth to
the end of the thirteenth century, when the control
of morals and education had been unconditionally
surrendered into the hands of their chosen representa-
tives. The comparative scale of human turpitude
must not include the creations of fiction. We might
find a ne plus ultra of infamy in the satires of Rabe-
lais, in the myths of Hindostan, or the burlesques
of the modern French dramatists. But if we confine
our comparison to the records of authentic history,
it would be no exaggeration to say that during the
period named the type of a Christian priest repre-
sented the absolute extreme of all the groveling igno-
rance, the meanest selfishness, the rankest sloth, the
basest servility, the foulest perfidy, the grossest
superstition, the most bestial sensuality, to which
the majesty of human nature has ever been degraded.
Thousands of monasteries fattened on the toil of starv-
ing peasants. Villages were beggared by the rapacity
of the tithe-gatherer ; cities were terrorized by witch-
hunts and autos-da-fe. The crimps of the inquisitorial
236 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
tribunals hired spies and suborned perjurers by
promising them a share of confiscated es'ates. The
evidence of intellectual pursuits was equivalent to a
sentence of death. Education was almost limited to
the memorizing of chants and prayers. " A cloud of
ignorance," says Hallam, " overspread the whole face
of the church, hardly broken by a few glimmering
lights who owe almost the whole of their distinction
to the surrounding darkness In 992, it was
asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found,
even in Kome itself, who knew the first elements of
letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain could
address a common letter of salutation to another."
Every deathbed became a harvest-field of clerical
vampires who did not hesitate to bully the dying
into robbing their children for the benefit of a bloated
convent. Herds of howling fanatics roamed the
country, frenzying the superstitious rustics with
their predictions of impending horrors. Parishioners
had to submit to the base avarice and the baser lusts
of insolent parish priests, who in his turn kissed the
dust at the feet of an arrogant prelate. The doctrine
of Antinaturalism had solved the problem of inflict-
ing the greatest possible amount of misery on the
greatest possible number of victims.
D. PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The intellectual interregnum of the Middle Ages,
the era of specters and vampires, received the first
promise of dawn about the middle of the fourteenth
century, when the lessons of the Crusades and the
influence of Moorish civilization began to react on
THE PEIESTHOOD OF SECULABISM. 237
the nations of Christian Europe. Yet, by methods
of their own, the vampires succeeded in prolonging
the dreadful night. They set their owls a- shrieking
from a thousand pulpits ; they darkened the air with
the smoke-clouds of autos da-fe. They treated
every torch-bearer as an incendiary.
But though the delay of redemption completed
the ruin of some of their victims, the ghouls did not
escape the deserved retribution. Their fire alarms
failed to avert the brightening dawn. Daylight
found its way even through the painted glass of
dome-windows, and in the open air the blood suckers
had to take wing on pain of being shaken off and
trampled under foot. The slaves of Hayti never
rose more fiercely against their French tyrants than
the German peasants against their clerical oppressor.
From Antwerp to Leipzig thousands of convents
were leveled with the ground; the villages of
Holland, Minden, and Brunswick joined in a gen-
eral priest- hunt, carried on with all the cruelties
which the man-hunters of the Frankish crusade
had inflicted on the pagan Saxons. In the Med-
iterranean Peninsulas the Jesuits were expelled
as enemies of public peace, and their colleagues
could maintain themselves only by an alliance with
despotism against the liberal and intellectual ele-
ments of their country. To patriots of the Gari-
baldi type the name of a priest has become a byword
implying the very quintessence of infamy. The
explosion of the French ^Revolution struck a still
deadlier blow at clerical prestige. The fagot-argu-
ments of the Holy Inquisition were answered by
238 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
a "burning, as in hell- fire, of priestly shams and
lies," and not one out of twenty French monasteries
escaped the fury of the avengers. Our Protestant
clergymen see their temple walls cracked by a breach of
ever-multiplying schisms, and can prop their prestige
only by more and more humiliating concessions, and
in every intelligent community have to purchase pop-
ularity by rank heresies against the dogmas of their
predecessors. Here and there the orthodox tenets
of the New Testament have survived the progress of
rationalism, but haunt the shade, like specters scent-
ing the morning air, and momentarily expecting the
summons that shall banish them to the realms of
their native night.
E.« — REFORM.
When the harbinger of day dispels the specters
of darkness, half- awakened sleepers often mourn the
fading visions of dreamland, as they would mourn
the memories of a vanished world, till they find -that
the solid earth still remains, with its mountains and
forests, and that the enjoyment of real life has but
just begun. With a similar regret the dupes of
Jesuitism mourn the collapse of their creed and
lament the decline of morality, till they find that
religion still remains, with its consolations and hopes,
and that the true work of redemption has but just
begun.
The reign of superstition begins to yield to a relig-
ion of reason and humanity. The first forerunners of
that religion appeared at the end of the sixteenth
century, when the philosophers of northern Europe
THE PRIESTHOOD OF SECULARISM. 239
first dared to appeal from dogma to nature, and since
that revival of common- sense the prison walls of
clerical obscurantism have been shaken by shock
after shock, till daylight now enters through a thou-
sand fissures.
But Secularism has a positive as well as a negative
mission, and after removing the ruins of exploded
idols, the champions of reform will begin the work
of reconstruction. Temples dedicated to the religion
of progress will rise from the ruins of superstition.
Communities of reformants will intrust the work of
education to chosen teachers, who will combine the
functions of an instructor with those of an exhorter.
In the languages of several European nations the
word " rector " still bears that twofold significance.
The ministers of Secularism will not sacrifice phys-
ical health to mental culture. They will be gym-
?iasiarchs, like the Grecian pedagogues who superin-
tended the athletic exercises of their pupils and
accompanied them on foot journeys and hunting ex-
cursions. They will be teachers of hygiene, laboring
to secure the foundations of mental energy by the
preservation of physical vigor, and to banish diseases
by the removal of their causes. They will seek to
circumscribe the power of prejudice by the extension
of knowledge. They will obviate the perils of pov-
erty by lessons of industry and prudence. Their
doctrines will dispense with miracles ; they will make
experience the test of truth, and justice the test of
integrity ; they will not suppress, but encourage, free
inquiry; their war against error will employ no
weapons but those of logic.
240 THE BIBLE OF NATURE.
The religion of reason will limit its proper sphere
to the secular welfare of mankind, but will ask, as
well as grant, the fullest freedom of metaphysical
speculation. Why should the friends of light darken
the sunshine of earth with fanatical wars for the sup-
pression of private theories about the mystery of the
unrevealed first cause ? Why should they rage about
the riddle of the veiled hereafter to please the or-
dainer of the eternal law that visits such inexorable
penalties upon the neglect of the present world?
Should the friends of common sense quarrel about
guesses at the solution of unknowable secrets ? We
need not grudge our wonder-loving brother the
luxury of meditating on the mysteries of the unseen
or the possibilities of resurrection. Shall the soul of
the dying patriarch live only in his children ? Shall
it wing its way to distant stars ? Shall it linger on
earth :
" Sigh in the breeze, keep silence in the cave,
And glide with airy foot o'er yonder sea ?"
Why should we wrangle about riddles which we
cannot possibly solve ? But we might certainly have
honesty enough to admit that impossibility. Musing
on the enigmas of the " land beyond the veil " may
entertain us with the visions of a dreamy Lour, but
should not engross the time needed for the problems
of the only world thus far revealed.
Thus, founded on a basis of health-culture, reason,
and justice, the office of priesthood will regain its
ancient prestige, and the best and wisest of men will
become ministers of Secularism by devoting their
lives to the science of happiness on earth.
PROF. FELIX L. OSWALD'S WORKS.
#
THE SECKET OF THE EAST; or, The Origin
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