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THE
BIBLE OF NATURE;

OR, THE
PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.
A Contribution to the Religion of the Future.

BY
FELIX L. OSWALD.

“Light is help from Heaven.”—G. E. Lessing.

New York:
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,
28 LAFAYETTE PLACE.

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Copyrighted,
By Felix L. Oswald,
1888.

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TO
THE MEMORY OF
BENEDICT SPINOZA,
THIS WORK IS REVERENTLY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR.

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CONTENTS.

PAGE.

[Introduction], 9

PHYSICAL MAXIMS.

MENTAL MAXIMS.

MORAL MAXIMS.

OBJECTIVE MAXIMS.

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THE BIBLE OF NATURE; OR, THE PRINCIPLES OF SECULARISM.

INTRODUCTION.

From the dawn of authentic history to the second century of our chronological era the nations of antiquity were beguiled by the fancies of supernatural religions. For fifteen hundred years the noblest nations of the Middle Ages were tortured by the inanities 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]]

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 foredoomed 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 loveliest 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 afflicted, and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness.” “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 Antinaturalism 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 [[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 believeth 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.” “Whosoever 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 denounced as unworthy of a true believer: “Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? 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 preördained damnation 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]]utter darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “They shall be cast into a furnace of 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 ascendeth 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 Antinaturalism, 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 progress 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 surrounding darkness. We cannot conceive of any state of society more adverse to the intellectual improvement [[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 Rome 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 persecuted 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 jailers, 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 bondage [[14]]of feudal and ecclesiastic slave farms where they learned to envy the peace of the dead and the freedom 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 perseverance. 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 plowing, 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 whenever 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; without 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 depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of the prodigious multitude of convents which sprang up on [[15]]every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable men to find in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; 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 instincts of the human heart, were denounced as sinful. The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, 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 stimulated 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-American priests almost annihilated the native population [[16]]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 inhabitants 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 became 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 Roman empire,” says Professor Marsh—“precisely that portion of terrestrial surface, in short, which about the commencement 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 [[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 meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable 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 productiveness 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 centuries 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 conformity 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. [[18]]

I.—PHYSICAL MAXIMS.

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CHAPTER I.

HEALTH.

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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 discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. 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 themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages [[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 highlands 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 subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons 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 spinning 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 carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are [[20]]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic 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. [[21]]

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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; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises 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 lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness 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]]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 condition 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; 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, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.

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C.—PERVERSION.

Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable 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 varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability, frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and 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 [[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 hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to prefer spoiled to fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender 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 preferable 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 the 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]]

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 despised 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 degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged 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 outrages 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 permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of [[25]]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience 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 plainest 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 baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment 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 are [[26]]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 leisure 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-stories 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.

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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 unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of a king’s touch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still [[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 wearisome 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-headaches 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 inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the [[28]]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 inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless 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 blessing 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 roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar 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, [[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 seeks 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 tenement 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 distinctions, [[30]]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. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, 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 wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.

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E.—REDEMPTION.

It has often been said that the physical regeneration of the human race could be achieved without the aid of a miracle, if its systematic pursuit were followed 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 occupation could be counteracted by gymnastics, and the trustees of our education fund should build a gymnasium 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 [[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 enemies 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 zoölogical 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 magnificence and extent that their foundations have withstood the ravages of sixteen centuries. Many of those establishments were entirely free, and even the Thermæ, 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]](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 Puritanism the dreariest period of that dismal era known as the Reign of the Cross.

The preservation of health is at least not less important than the preservation of Hebrew mythology; 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 that frugality which in the times of the pagan republics 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 remarkable [[33]]longevity of the Jews and Mohammedans has a great deal to do with their dread of impure food.

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CHAPTER II.

STRENGTH.

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A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

Bodily vigor is 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. The bigot who undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth 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. Monkeys (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]]trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly 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 athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, 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 [[35]]witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm 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.

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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 legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars [[36]]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern 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 adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors the strong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” 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 prevailed 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 [[37]]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly 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 Norway 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 immortalized 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 longevity. 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]]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 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at the night-shift 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 shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly 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 whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of 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 [[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 Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them that in the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”

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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]]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According 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 messiah, 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 Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing 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 lingering [[41]]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 opportunity 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 unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity 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 children. 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 prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school. [[42]]

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 Golgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”

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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 perverted instincts exploded in vices; 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 represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the [[43]]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation 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 conventional 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]]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 assistance 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.

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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 Grecian 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; 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 [[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.

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CHAPTER III.

CHASTITY.

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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 system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis 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 control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of [[46]]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.

In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate 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 occupations, 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 flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more 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 significance of the instinct of sexual selection seems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages [[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 importance 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 perpetuation 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 reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize 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 elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice [[48]]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 temporary 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 spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular 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 flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed 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 irremediable 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 transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship. [[49]]

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B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian 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, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence 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 manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished 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]]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.

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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 “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as an à-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 [[51]]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom 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 distinctly 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 woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrations à la Origenes, 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 millions 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 hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children 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 Austria [[52]]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 occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.

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D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage 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 Christians 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 mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract [[53]]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 significance, 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. Layton’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 abominations.)

The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries [[54]]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-encouraged 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.

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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 conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. 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 temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted [[55]]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. 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 Reformants (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]]

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CHAPTER IV.

TEMPERANCE.

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A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

Instinct is hereditary experience. The lessons derived 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 shudder 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 ascertain 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 experience; but instinct at once informed them that an encounter with a reptile of that sort had brought some of their forefathers to grief. [[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 attention 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 monkeys, 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 experiment 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]]

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 moonlight; 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 supplement the defects of instinct in that respect. Trappers know that poisoned baits after a while lose their seductiveness, and old rats have been seen [[59]]driving their young from a dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel.

Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclination 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 drunkard, 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 continued 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 prisoners of the Holy Inquisition at last lost their love of liberty and came to prefer the stench of their subterranean [[60]]black-holes to the breezes of the free mountains.

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 forbidding taste.

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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 remain 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 individual 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 baneful effects of intemperance are by no means limited [[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 includes almost all other blessings whatever. Spontaneous 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 poison-engendered distempers with the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance prolongs that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone the demon of life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest tribulation: Undimmed 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 described a nation of vegetarians who passed life so pleasantly that visitors refused to leave them, and renounced their native lands. The religion of Mohammed 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 representatives of physical manhood. At the horse [[62]]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 temperate 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 gluttons it has made life worth living, after the shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian 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; but [[63]]Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of unnaturalism, and at once reduced his daily allowance 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 content. Habitual abstinence from unnatural 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.”

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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. Thousands 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]]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 history; 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 Rome.

Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, 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 abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a “Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but the most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to children 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. Lycurgus 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 opinion [[65]]always respected the emulation of patriarchal frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.

But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed 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 sacrament. 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 Portugal 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]]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 Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, 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 Sabbatarian 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.” [[67]]

Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes drives our workingmen 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.

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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 their 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 intemperance 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 measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On our own continent, outdoor life in the struggle with the [[68]]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 ancestors, the athletic Greeks, the world-conquering Romans, the Scandinavian giants, the heroic Visigoths? 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 intellectual activity and the constant increase of general information.

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 appalling 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 paradise. And yet that waste expresses only the indirect [[69]]and smaller part of the damage caused by the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and happiness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended in the purchase of disease were devoted 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 inflames passions which no prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all theology against a diet of bull-beef?” 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 matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors in the butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-baits and Tyburn spectacles.

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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]]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 morbid 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, constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appetency, 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 momentary 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 circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce, even for the moment of the fever-stimulus, a [[71]]glimpse of happiness at all comparable to the unclouded 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 attractions 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 services 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]]committee to sixteen courses of opium. “Frugality” should again be promoted in the ancient sense of the word; in a community of reformants temperance and vegetarianism should go hand in hand. Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used in 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 palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and caustic spices. The second 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 renunciation of several deep-rooted prejudices, but its path of salvation will in no sense be a path of thorns. [[73]]

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CHAPTER V.

SKILL.

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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 precision. 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 larvæ. 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 displays 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 encourage 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]]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 misarrangement here and there.

Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. 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 Doré’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 manipulations 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 [[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 construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-carpenter of his empire.

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B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The English word king, like Danish kong and German König, are derived from können (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 mechanical 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]]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, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable 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 constructiveness 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 Turkish 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 development 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 development 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 [[77]]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical 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 school of practical 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 amateur 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 landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, 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 mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show [[78]]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 instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”

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C.—PERVERSION.

The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments 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 antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably 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 [[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 mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the same Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by [[80]]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. Fashionable 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 reëstablish a sanctimonious reputation by volunteering his assistance to the managers of a mythology-school.

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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 [[81]]afflictions of care. There is no doubt that the feeling of emptiness that seeks refuge in the fever of passion or intoxication, is a wholly abnormal condition, 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 gambling 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 ennui—

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]]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 mechanical 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 compare 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 seas.

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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 “instinct of constructiveness” would still prove to retain enough of its native energy to make the change [[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 training) in the by-trade of some mechanical accomplishment (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 chemistry, 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 laboratory furnishes an abundance of apparatus. Private taste might, of course, modify the details of that plan, and even without regard to eventual results, its proximate benefits if once known would alone insure its general adoption in the homes of the ennui-stricken classes. The educational advantages [[84]]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. [[85]]

II.—MENTAL MAXIMS.

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CHAPTER VI.

KNOWLEDGE.

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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 superiority 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. Knowledge is stored light, as helpful in the narrowest as in the widest sphere of conscious activity, and the instinctive 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 flickering 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 attracted 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]]fastening a red kerchief to a bush and letting it flutter 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 animals 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 furniture 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 encouragement 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. “How could you know it was not a tramp?” she asked her little [[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 education 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]]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 theological motive) impelled to forsake the home of their fathers and follow the white stranger to the land of his omniscient countrymen.

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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 acquisition by collateral benefits. A farmer’s boy studying statute law, a lawyer collecting market reports, will sooner or later find a chance to profit by their study. The infinite interaction of human affairs connects the interests of all branches of human knowledge, and makes the humblest handicraft amenable to scientific improvement. Knowledge has never hindered the successful pursuit of any manual vocation. Fifty years ago several states of the [[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 disadvantage, and knowledge an advantage, both to its possessor and his employers. In the solitudes of the Australian bush-land, Frederick Gerstäcker 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 apprenticeship 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. Mohammed 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 employer by his familiarity with the commercial customs of neighboring nations. Superior knowledge [[90]]compels even an unwilling recognition of its prestige. In the Middle Ages, when Moslems and Trinitarians were at daggers drawn, Christian kings sent respectful embassies to solicit the professional advice of Ibn Rushd (“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 Française 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 reconcile.

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C.—PERVERSION.

There is a tradition that a year before the conversion 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 children!” 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 [[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 banished, 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 attached 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 tradition 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 extravagant absurdities were propagated under the name of historical records; medleys of nursery-tales and ghost-stories which the poorest village school-teacher of pagan Rome 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 staple 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]]enemies of God and the human race. It was, indeed, almost impossible to enunciate any scientific axiom that did not conflict with the dogmas of the revelation-mongers who had for centuries subordinated 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 intellectual world, its rays struggled distorted through the dense mist of superstition which continued to brood over the face of the earth, and was only partially dispersed even by the storms of the Protestant revolt.

The light of modern science has brought its blessings 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.

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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 [[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 extermination 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 Antinaturalism had turned gardens into deserts and freemen 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 Mediterranean 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 produced 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 children [[94]]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.

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E.—REFORM.

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 coöperate for a purpose which they have shrewdly recognized as the main hope of obscurantism: The perversion of primary education by its re-subjection to the control of the clergy. The definite defeat of those intrigues should be considered the only permanent guarantee against the revival of spiritual feudalism. A perhaps less imminent, 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; but rather than perpetuate a twofold system of oppression, we should complete the work of emancipation by admitting [[95]]our sisters to all available social and educational 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 encouragement, 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.

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CHAPTER VII.

INDEPENDENCE.

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A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

If the scale of precedence in the mental development 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 surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly developed. The caterpillar [[96]]of the silk-moth will spin its satin winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of wild bees will continue to build hexagons 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 fishpond. 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 persistence as if they were thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of escape. Wild cows can be domesticated 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 capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost 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 jungles. 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 [[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 Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their relatives 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 Russian frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots 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 devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost [[98]]and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice 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 wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Germanic nations.

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B.—REWARDS 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 civilization 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 centuries 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 [[99]]prosperity has been locally proportioned to the degree 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 republic 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 condition 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 generations 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 condemning) [[100]]the early mental development of American children, 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 special branches of scholarship, but in common sense, general 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 zoölogical 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.

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C.—PERVERSION.

The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddhistic doctrine of self-abasement, as an indispensable condition of salvation. That salvation meant extinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, including [[101]]the instinct of freedom. Abject submission to injustice, the subordination of reason to dogma, the sinfulness of rebellion against the “powers that be,” were inculcated with a zeal that made the church an invaluable ally of despotism. For centuries 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 Cæsars 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 councils 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 convents. 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 certainly 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 tortures and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges; they were compelled to perform shameful and ridiculous [[102]]acts of self-abasement, all merely to “break their worldly 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 pursued wherever the union of Church and State put children and devotees at the mercy of their dogmatists.

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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. Bondage circumscribes every sphere of activity. Political despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling fetters impede the circulation of the blood. Enterprising 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 accomplished 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 [[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, perhaps, 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 product 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 outspoken skeptics. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, 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 o! 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]]classic features, never distorted by Christian contrition; 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.

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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 remedies. The pupils of Freedom’s school may be required 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 constant raids on the fields and gardens of the superstitious 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 [[105]]proposal with tears of gratitude; but when the band of gaunt refugees embarked at the mouth of the Hooghly, the stadtholder’s agent was grieved to learn that their cargo of household goods included a large cageful of sacred monkeys. “They are beyond human help,” says the official memorandum, “and their children can be redeemed only by curing them of the superstition that has ruined their monkey-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 comprised 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 intriguing hierarchy, working its restless bellows to forge the chains of their pupils—of the rising generation, who as yet seem to hesitate at the way-fork of Feudalism and Reform. A timely word may decide their choice, and, by all the remaining hopes of [[106]]Earth and Mankind! that word shall not remain unspoken.

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CHAPTER VIII.

PRUDENCE.

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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 development 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 latitudes. Hibernating mammals show a similar sagacity in the selection of their winter quarters. Squirrels 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 extremity [[107]]of a projecting branch. Foxes, minks, raccoons, 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 highway.

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 cautiously 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 unknown delicacies. I have seen a toddling farmer’s boy smelling and nibbling an orange for hours before yielding to the temptation of its prepossessing appearance. 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 despoilers. [[108]]

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B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

Civilization has partially healed the wounds of that Millennium of Madness called the Rule of the Cross, and of all the insanities of the Middle Ages the Improvidence 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 humblest mechanic. Affluence is no longer confined to the palaces of kings. There is no doubt that the cottage of the average modern city tradesman contains 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 nature with the industrial classes of the higher latitudes, and the benefits of such habits can be best appreciated by comparing the homes of the thrifty Northlanders—Scotch and Yankees—with those of the [[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 explain that contrast is proved by the curious fact that within less than five centuries Spain and North Germany have exchanged places. Two hundred years before the conquest of Granada the fields 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 countrymen 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]]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 children 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 tendency 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.

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C.—PERVERSION.

There is a story of an enterprising Italian who increased 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 temporal 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 thought 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.” [[111]]

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 unclean food was denounced as a relic of worldliness; and in mitigating the consequences of such insults to nature, prayer and mystic ceremonies were recommended 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 unclean 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 delusion; 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 below the lowest ebb of pagan savagery. The untutored 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]]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 confide 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?

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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 superseding the lingering influence of pagan philosophy, progressive industry waned, and at last almost ceased to supply even a reduced demand; commerce lingered, and the sources of subsistence were wholly confined to the produce of a more and more impoverished 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 [[113]]products of Nature: timber, salt, amber, and perhaps 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 limited 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 Rome 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 application of such prophylactics, diseases of the most virulent kind became more prevalent. The [[114]]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 invade 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 “Flagellants” 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.

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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-insurrected slaves of the church. With all their hereditary bias of prejudice the victims of the miracle dogma [[115]]cannot help contrasting their lot with that of the industrial skeptic. They cannot help seeing self-reliant science succeeds where prayer-relying orthodoxy fails. The prosperity of Protestantism, its physical, intellectual, political, and financial superiority 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 admit 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 system 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 phenomena. 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 disease, 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]]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 influenced by the hope that in such cases the event of an imprudent venture might be modified by the interceding 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 Religion of Nature will teach every man to answer his own prayers, and Prudence will be the Providence of the Future.

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CHAPTER IX.

PERSEVERANCE.

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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 disuse. In special adaptations of the sense of touch and sight, for instance, man surpasses all his fellow-creatures, 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 [[117]]neglect of certain mental faculties and dispositions. The instinct of enterprise, for instance, has been developed from rather feeble germs of the animal soul, while the instinct of perseverance appears to have lost something of its pristine energy. The African termite ant rears structures which, in proportion to the size of the builders, surpass the pyramids as a mountain surpasses the monuments of the mound-builders. By the persistent coöperation of countless generations 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 sometimes 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-determined [[118]]programme of study or business with persistent 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.

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B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The advantages of perseverance are not too readily admitted by the numberless victims of that facile disposition that loves to ascribe its foibles to the “versatility of genius,” or a high-minded “aversion to pedantic routine;” yet now, as in the days of yore, life reserves its best rewards for the most persistent competitors. Singleness of purpose, like a sharp wedge, forces its way through obstacles that resist many-sided endeavors. The versatile poets and philosophers 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 nations had steadfastly followed a narrower but consistent policy. “Aut non tentaris aut perfice,” “either try not, or persevere,” was a Roman 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 Hohenzollern, attained supremacy by persistent adherence to an established system of political tactics. Even questionable [[119]]enterprises have thus been crowned with triumph, as the ambitions of the Roman pontiffs, and the projects 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 prevailed 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 purpose 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 prospects was, indeed, demonstrated by daily proofs. But at the first frown of Fortune they would get discouraged, and remove their exploring outfit to another 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]]sackful of nuggets, while the prospector had nothing but prospects.”

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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 denied the value of earthly existence, 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, moreover, 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.