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

>they will make selfishness a virtue, and salvation of the soul

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