The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗
- Author: Winwood Reade
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a higher principle of conduct than social love. But when the
faith in a personal god is extinguished; when prayer and praise
are no longer to be heard; when the belief is universal that
with the body dies the soul, then the false morals of theology
will no longer lead the human mind astray. Piety and virtue
will become identical. The desire to do good which arose in
necessity, which was developed by the hopes of a heavenly
reward, is now an instinct of the human race. Those hopes and
illusions served as the scaffolding, and may now safely be
removed.
There will always be enthusiasts for virtue as there are now,
men who adorn and purify their souls before the mirror
of their conscience, and who strive to attain an ideal
excellence in their actions and their thoughts. If from such
men as these the hope of immortality is taken, will their
natures be transformed? Will they who are almost angels turn
straightway into beasts? Will the sober become drunkards? Will
the chaste become sensual? Will the honest become fraudulent?
Will the industrious become idle? Will the righteous love that
which they have learnt to loathe? Will they who have won by
hard struggles the sober happiness of virtue return to the
miseries of vice by which few men have not at one time or
another been enthralled? No; they will pass through some hours
of affliction; they will bear another illusion to the grave;
not the first that they have buried, not the first they have
bewailed. And then, no longer able to hope for themselves, they
will hope for the future of the human race: unable to believe
in an eared God who listens to human supplications they will
coin the gold of their hearts into useful actions instead of
burning it as incense before an imaginary throne.
We do not wish to extirpate religion from the life of man;
we wish him to have a religion which will harmonise
with his intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen, not
destroy. We wish, in fact, to give him a religion, for now
there are many who have none. We teach that there is a God,
but not a God of the anthropoid variety, not a God who is
gratified by compliments in prose and verse, and whose
attributes can be catalogued by theologians. God is so great
that he cannot be defined by us. God is so great that he does
not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms
that are called men. Those who desire to worship their
Creator must worship him through mankind. Such it is
plain is the scheme of Nature. We are placed under secondary
laws, and these we must obey. To develop to the utmost our
genius and our love, that is the only true religion. To do that
which deserves to be written, to write that which deserves to
be read, to tend the sick, to comfort the sorrowful, to animate
the weary, to keep the temple of the body pure, to cherish the
divinity within us, to be faithful to the intellect, to educate
those powers which have been entrusted to our charge and to
employ them in the service of humanity, that is all that we can
do. Then our elements shall be dispersed and all is at an end.
All is at an end for the unit, all is at an end for the atom,
all is at an end for the speck of flesh and blood with the
little spark of instinct which it calls its mind, but all is
not at an end for the actual Man, the true Being, the glorious
One. We teach that the soul is immortal; we teach that there is
a future life; we teach that there is a Heaven in the ages far
away; but not for us single corpuscules, not for us dots of
animated jelly, but for the One of whom we are the elements,
and who, though we perish, never dies, but grows from period to
period and by the united efforts of single molecules called
men, or of those cell-groups called nations, is raised towards
the Divine power which he will finally attain. Our religion
therefore is Virtue, our Hope is placed in the happiness of our
posterity; our Faith is the Perfectibility of Man.
A day will come when the European God of the nineteenth
century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the
Nile; when surplices and sacramental plate will be exhibited
in museums; when nurses will relate to children the legends of
the Christian mythology as they now tell them fairy tales. A day will
come when the current belief in property after death (for is not existence
property, and the dearest property of all? ) will be accounted
a strange and selfish idea, just as we smile at the savage
chief who believes that his gentility will be continued in the
world beneath the ground, and that he will there be attended by
his concubines and slaves. A day will come when mankind will be
as the Family of the Forest, which lived faithfully within
itself according to the Golden Rule in order that it might not
die. But Love not Fear will unite the human race. The world
will become a heavenly Commune to which men will bring the
inmost treasures of their hearts, in which they will reserve
for themselves not even a hope, not even the shadow of a joy,
but will give up all for all mankind. With one faith, with one
desire, they will labour together in the Sacred Cause—the
extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, the perfection of
genius, the perfection of love, the invention of immortality,
the exploration of the infinite, and the conquest of creation.
You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we
can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed
us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor
savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating
flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every
day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by
animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant
of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us
in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with
yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of
your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and
laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and workshops are preparing the materials of the human growth. And as
for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our
lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much
more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few
centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries to-day than
did the King of England in the Anglo-Saxon times; and at his
command are intellectual delights, which but a little while ago
the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe
to the labours of other men. Let us therefore remember them
with gratitude; let us follow their glorious example by adding
something new to the knowledge of mankind; let us pay to the
future the debt which we owe to the past.
All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists;
but all men can join in that gigantic and god-like work, the
progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves
the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil
passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates
the social affections: he who endeavours to better his condition, and to
make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his
motives, he will not have lived in vain. But if he act thus not from mere
prudence, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but
from a pure sense of duty, as a citizen of Nature, as a patriot of the
planet on which he dwells, then our philosophy which once
appeared to him so cold and cheerless will become a religion of
the heart, and will elevate him to the skies; the virtues which
were once for him mere abstract terms will become endowed with
life, and will hover round him like guardian angels, conversing
with him in his solitude, consoling him in his afflictions,
teaching him how to live, and how to die. But this condition is
not to be easily attained; as the saints and prophets were
often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers
before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions
would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can
only be acquired by means of severe and long-continued culture
of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may
live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself
will be defective. To cultivate the intellect is therefore a
religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognised by
men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be
distrusted, and that it should be subservient to faith, will
inevitably fall.
We have written much about inventions and discoveries and
transformations of human nature which cannot possibly take
place for ages yet to come, because we think it good that the
bright though distant future should be ever present in the eyes
of man. But we shall now consider the existing generation, and
we shall point out the work which must be accomplished, and in
which all enlightened men should take a part. Christianity must
be destroyed. The civilised world has outgrown that religion,
and is now in the condition of the Roman Empire in the pagan
days. A cold-hearted infidelity above, a sordid superstition
below, a school of Plutarchs who endeavour to reconcile the
fables of a barbarous people with the facts of science and the
lofty conceptions of philosophy; a multitude of augurs who
sometimes smile when they meet, but who more often feel
inclined to sigh, for they are mostly serious and worthy men.
Entering the Church in their youth, before their minds were
formed, they discover too late what it is that they adore, and
since they cannot tell the truth, and let their wives and
children starve, they are forced to lead a life which is a lie.
What a state of society is this in which “freethinker” is a term
of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as a sin! Men have a
Bluebeard’s chamber in their minds which they dare not open;
they have a faith which they dare not examine lest they should
be forced to cast it from them in contempt. Worship is a
convention, churches are bonnet shows, places of
assignation, shabby-genteel salons where the parochial “at home”
is given, and respectable tradesmen exhibit their daughters in
the wooden stalls. O wondrous, awful, and divine religion! You
elevate our hearts from the cares of common life, you transport
us into the unseen world, you bear us upwards to that sublime
temple of the skies where dwells the Veiled God, whom mortal
eye can never view, whom mortal mind can never comprehend. How
art thou fallen! How art thou degraded! But it will be only for a
time. We are now in the dreary desert which separates two ages
of Belief. A new era is at hand.
It is incorrect to say “theology is not a progressive science.”
The worship of ancestral ghosts, the worship of pagan deities,
the worship of a single god, are successive periods of progress
in the science of Divinity. And in the history of that science,
as in the history of all
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