The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

>propositions to their full extent. But when we do so, we find

that it conducts us to absurdity, as we shall very quickly

prove.

 

The souls of idiots not being responsible for their sins will

go to heaven; the souls of such men as Goethe and Rousseau are

in danger of hell-fire. Therefore it is better to be born an

idiot than to be born a Goethe or a Rousseau; and that is

altogether absurd.

 

It is asserted that the doctrine of the immortality of the

soul, and of happiness in a future state, gives us a solution

of that distressing problem, the misery of the innocent on

earth. But in reality it does nothing of the kind, It does not

explain the origin of evil, and it does not justify the

existence of evil. A poor helpless infant is thrust into the

world by a higher force; it has done no one any harm, yet it is

tortured in the most dreadful manner; it is nourished in vice,

and crime, and disease; it is allowed to suffer a certain time

and then it is murdered. It is all very well to say that

afterwards it was taken to everlasting bliss; but why was it

not taken there direct? If a man has a child and beats that

child for no reason whatever, is it any palliation of the crime

to say that he afterwards gave it cake and wine?

 

This brings us to the character of the Creator. We must beg to

observe again that we describe, not the actual Creator, but the

popular idea of the Creator. It is said that the Supreme Power

has a mind; this we deny, and to show that our reasons for

denying it are good, we shall proceed to criticise this

imaginary mind.

 

In the first place, we shall state as an incontrovertible maxim

in morality that a god has no right to create men except for

their own good. This may appear to the reader an extraordinary

statement; but had he lived in France at the time of Louis XIV,

he would also have thought it an extraordinary statement that

kings existed for the good of the people and not people for the

good of kings. When the Duke of Burgundy first propounded that

axiom, St. Simon, by no means a servile courtier, and an

enlightened man for his age, was “delighted with the

benevolence of the saying, but startled by its novelty and

terrified by its boldness.” Our proposition may appear very

strange, but it certainly cannot be refuted; for if it is said

that the Creator is so great that he is placed above our laws

of morality, then what is that but placing Might above Right?

And if the maxim be admitted as correct, then how can the

phenomena of life be justified?

 

It is said that the Creator is omnipotent, and also that he is

benevolent. But one proposition contradicts the other. It is

said that he is perfect in power, and that he is also perfect

in purity. We shall show that he cannot possibly be both.

 

The conduct of a father towards his child appears to be cruel,

but it is not cruel in reality. He beats the child, but he does

it for the child’s own good; he is not omnipotent; he is

therefore obliged to choose between two evils. But the Creator

is omnipotent; he therefore chooses cruelty as a means of

education or development; he therefore has a preference for

cruelty or he would not choose it; he is therefore fond of

cruelty or he would not prefer it; he is therefore cruel, which

is absurd.

 

Again, either sin entered the world against the will of the

Creator, in which case he is not omnipotent, or it entered with

his permission, in which case it is his agent, in which case he

selects sin, in which case he has a preference for sin, in

which case he is fond of sin, in which case he is sinful, which

is an absurdity again.

 

The good in this world predominates over the bad; the good is

ever increasing, the bad is ever diminishing. But if God is

Love why is there any bad at all? Is the world like a novel in

which the villains are put in to make it more dramatic, and in

which virtue only triumphs in the third volume? It is certain

that the feelings of the created have in no way been

considered. If indeed there were a judgment-day it would be for

man to appear at the bar not as criminal but as an accuser.

What has he done that he should be subjected to a life of

torture and temptation? God might have made us all happy, and

he has made us all miserable. Is that benevolence? God might

have made us all pure, and he has made us all sinful. Is that

the perfection of morality? If I believed in the existence of

this man-created God, of this divine Nebuchadnezzar, I would

say, “You can make me live in your world, O Creator, but you

cannot make me admire it; you can load me with chains, but you

cannot make me flatter you; you can send me to hell-fire, but

you can not obtain my esteem. And if you condemn me, you

condemn yourself. If I have committed sins, you invented them,

which is worse. If the watch you have made does not go well,

whose fault is that? Is it rational to damn the wheels and the

springs?”

 

But it is when we open the Book of Nature, that book inscribed

in blood and tears; it is when we study the laws regulating

life, the laws productive of development, that we see plainly

how illusive is this theory that God is Love. In all things

there is cruel, profligate, and abandoned waste. Of all the

animals that are born a few only can survive; and it is owing

to this law that development takes place. The law of Murder is

the law of Growth. Life is one long tragedy; creation is one

great crime. And not only is there waste in animal and human

life, there is also waste in moral life. The instinct of love

is planted in the human breast, and that which to some is a

solace is to others a torture. How many hearts yearning for

affection are blighted in solitude and coldness! How many women

seated by their lonely firesides are musing of the days that

might have been! How many eyes when they meet these words which

remind them of their sorrows will be filled with tears! O cold,

cruel, miserable life, how long are your pains, how brief are

your delights! What are joys but pretty children that grow into

regrets? What is happiness but a passing dream in which we seem

to be asleep, and which we know only to have been when it is

past? Pain, grief, disease, and death—are these the inventions

of a loving God? That no animal shall rise to excellence except

by being fatal to the life of others—is this the law of a kind

Creator? It is useless to say that pain has its benevolence,

that massacre has its mercy. Why is it so ordained that bad

should be the raw material of good? Pain is not less pain

because it is useful; murder is not less murder because it is

conducive to development. Here is blood upon the hand still,

and all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten it.

 

To this then we are brought with the much-belauded theory of a

semi-human Providence, an anthropoid Deity, a Constructive

Mind, a Deus Paleyensis, a God created in the image of a

watchmaker. What then are we to infer? Why, simply this, that

the current theory is false; that all attempts to define the

Creator bring us only to ridiculous conclusions; that the

Supreme Power is not a Mind, but something higher than a Mind;

not a Force, but something higher than a Force; not a Being,

but something higher than a Being; something for which we have

no words, something for which we have no ideas. We are to infer

that Man is not made in the image of his Maker, and that Man

can no more understand his Maker than the beetles and the worms

can understand him. As men in the days of ignorance endeavoured

to discover perpetual motion and the philosopher’s stone, so

now they endeavour to define God. But in time also they will

learn that the nature of the Deity is beyond the powers of the

human intellect to solve. The universe is anonymous; it is

published under secondary laws; these at least we are able to

investigate, and in these perhaps we may find a partial

solution of the great problem. The origin of evil cannot be

explained, for we cannot explain the origin of matter. But a

careful and unprejudiced study of Nature reveals an interesting

fact and one that will be of value to mankind.

 

The earth resembles a picture, of which we, like insects which

crawl upon its surface, can form but a faint and incoherent

idea. We see here and there a glorious flash of colour; we have

a dim conception that there is union in all its parts; yet to

us, because we are so near, the tints appear to be blurred and

confused. But let us expand our wings and flutter off into the

air; let us fly some distance backwards into Space until we

have reached the right point of view. And now the colours blend

and harmonise together, and we see that the picture represents

One Man.

 

The body of a human individual is composed of cell-like bodies

which are called “physiological units.” Each cell or atom has

its own individuality; it grows, it is nurtured, it brings

forth young, and it dies. It is in fact an animalcule. It has

its own body and its own mind. As the atoms are to the human

unit, so the human units are to the human whole. There is only

One Man upon the earth; what we call men are not individuals

but components; what we call, death is merely the bursting of a

cell; wars and epidemics are merely inflammatory phenomena

incident on certain stages of growth. There is no such thing as

a ghost or soul; the intellects of men resemble those instincts

which inhabit the corpuscules, and which are dispersed when the

corpuscule dies. Yet they are not lost, they are preserved

within the body and enter other forms. Men therefore have no

connection with Nature, except through the organism to which

they belong. Nature does not recognise their individual

existence. But each atom is conscious of its life; each atom

can improve itself in beauty and in strength; each atom can

therefore, in an infinitesimal degree, assist the development

of the Human Mind. If we take the life of a single atom, that

is to say of a single man, or if we look only at a single

group, all appears to be cruelty and confusion; but when we

survey mankind as One, we find it becoming more and more noble,

more and more divine, slowly ripening towards perfection. We

belong to the minutiae of Nature, we are in her sight, as the

rain-drop in the sky; whether a man lives, or whether he dies,

is as much a matter of indifference to Nature as whether a

rain-drop falls upon the field and feeds a blade of grass, or

falls upon a stone and is dried to death. She does not

supervise these small details. This discovery is by no means

flattering, but it enlarges our idea of the scheme of creation.

That universe must indeed be great in which human beings