Chapter XX: The Priesthood of Secularism

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

An instinct inherited from the habits of many generations teaches our social fellow-creatures to entrust the welfare of their communities to the protection of an experienced leader. Birds that become gregarious only at a certain time of the year select a guide for that special occasion. Others have a permanent leader, and among the more intelligent quadrupeds that leadership becomes dual. Besides the stout champion who comes to the front in moments of danger, wild cattle, horses, antelopes, deer, and the social quadrumana have a veteran pioneer who guides their migrations and sentinels their encampments.

Among the primitive tribes of our fellow-men, too, the authority of leadership is divided between a warrior and a teacher, a chieftain and a priest. The obstinacy of savages, who refuse to yield to reason, suggested the plan of controlling their passions by the fear of the unseen, but ghost-mongery was not the only, nor even the most essential, function of primitive priesthood. The elders of the Brahmans were the guardians of homeless children and overseers of public charities. The Celtic Druids were the custodians of national treasures. The rune-wardens of the ancient Scandinavians preserved the historical traditions and law records of their nation. The priests of the Phœnicians (like our Indian medicine men) were trained physicians. The Egyptian hierophants were priests of knowledge, as well as of mythology. They were the historians and biographers of their nation. They codified the national laws. They taught geometry; they taught grammar; they taught and practiced surgery; they devoted a large portion of their time to astronomical observations. Their temple-cities were, in fact, free universities, and the waste of time devoted to the rites of superstition was more than compensated by secular studies, and to some degree also by the political services of learned priests, who seem to have been occasionally employed in diplomatic emergencies.

Motives of political prudence induced the law-givers of the Mediterranean nations to circumscribe the authority of their pontiffs, which at last was, indeed, almost limited to the supervision of religious ceremonies. But in Rome, as well as in Greece and the Grecian colonies of western Asia, the true functions of priesthood were assumed by the popular exponents of philosophy, especially by the Stoics and Pythagoreans. The weekly lectures of Zeno were attended by a miscellaneous throng of truth-seekers; the disciples of Pythagoras almost worshiped their master; Diagoras and Carneades traveled from town to town, preaching to vast audiences of spell-bound admirers; Apollonius of Tyana rose in fame till cities competed for the honor of his visits; the clientèle of no Grecian prince was thought complete without a court philosopher; the tyrant Dionysius, in all the pride of his power, invited the moral rigorist Plato and submitted to his daily repeated reproofs. Philosophers were the confessors, the comforters, and the counselors of their patrons, and philosophic tutors were in such request that wealthy Romans did not hesitate to procure them from the traffickers in Grecian captives and indulge them in all privileges but that of liberty. Centuries before a bishop of Rome contrived to avert the wrath of King Alaric, doomed cities had been spared at the intercession of pagan philosophers, and philosophers more than once succeeded in allaying the fury of mutineers who would have ridiculed an appeal to mythological traditions.

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The power of filial love hardly exceeds that of the passionate veneration which kindles about the person of a sincere teacher of truth. The homage paid to an apostle of light is the noblest form of hero-worship. The hosannas of idol-service overflowing upon the idol-priest are marred by the discords of hypocrisy and the reproving silence of reason; but the approval of wisdom is the highest reward of its ministry. The brightness of that prestige shames the gilded halo of the mythology-monger; the minister of Truth may lack the pomp of consecrated temples, but his disciples will make a hermit’s cave a Delphic grotto and will not willingly let the record of his oracles perish. The chants of the Eleusynian festivals, the shout of the Lupercalia, the mumblings of augurs and sibyls, have been forever silenced; but the words of Plato still live; Socrates still speaks to thousands of truth-seekers; the wisdom of Seneca still brightens the gloom of adversity.

Religions founded on any basis of truth can survive the fall of their temples. Jerusalem was wrecked in the storm of Roman conquest, but the health-laws of the Mosaic code defied the power of the destroyer, and of all the creeds born on the teeming soil of the East, Judaism alone can still be preached without an alloy of cant and compromise.

The enthusiasm of progress has nothing to fear from the growth of skepticism. Mankind will always appreciate their enlightened well-wishers. In cities where the creed of the Galilean supernaturalist has become almost as obsolete as the witchcraft delusion, progressive clergymen still draw audiences of intelligent and sincere admirers, and the apostles of social reform are haunted by anxious inquirers, disciples whom the penalties of heresy fail to deter, and who if barred out all day will come by night: “Master, what shall we do to be saved?”

In spite of sham saviors, the search after salvation has never ceased, and after eighteen centuries of clerical caricatures the ideal of true priesthood still survives in the hearts of men.

C.—PERVERSION.

The puerile supernaturalism of the pagan myth-mongers could not fail to injure their prestige, even in an age of superstition; but the antinaturalism of the Galilean fanatics not only neglected but completely inverted the proper functions of priesthood. The pretended ministers of Truth became her remorseless persecutors; the promised healers depreciated the importance of bodily health, the hoped-for apostles of social reform preached the doctrine of renunciation. We should not judge the Christian clergy by the aberrations engendered by the maddening influence of protracted persecutions. It would be equally unfair to give them the credit of latter-day reforms, reluctantly conceded to the demands of rationalism. But we can with perfect fairness judge them by the standard of the moral and intellectual types evolved during the period of their plenary power, the three hundred years from the tenth to the end of the thirteenth century, when the control of morals and education had been unconditionally surrendered into the hands of their chosen representatives. The comparative scale of human turpitude must not include the creations of fiction. We might find a ne plus ultra of infamy in the satires of Rabelais, in the myths of Hindostan, or the burlesques of the modern French dramatists. But if we confine our comparison to the records of authentic history, it would be no exaggeration to say that during the period named the type of a Christian priest represented the absolute extreme of all the groveling ignorance, the meanest selfishness, the rankest sloth, the basest servility, the foulest perfidy, the grossest superstition, the most bestial sensuality, to which the majesty of human nature has ever been degraded. Thousands of monasteries fattened on the toil of starving peasants. Villages were beggared by the rapacity of the tithe-gatherer; cities were terrorized by witch-hunts and autos-da-fé. The crimps of the inquisitorial tribunals hired spies and suborned perjurers by promising them a share of confiscated estates. The evidence of intellectual pursuits was equivalent to a sentence of death. Education was almost limited to the memorizing of chants and prayers. “A cloud of ignorance,” says Hallam, “overspread the whole face of the church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights who owe almost the whole of their distinction to the surrounding darkness.... In 992, it was asserted that scarcely a single person was to be found, even in Rome itself, who knew the first elements of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain could address a common letter of salutation to another.” Every deathbed became a harvest-field of clerical vampires who did not hesitate to bully the dying into robbing their children for the benefit of a bloated convent. Herds of howling fanatics roamed the country, frenzying the superstitious rustics with their predictions of impending horrors. Parishioners had to submit to the base avarice and the baser lusts of insolent parish priests, who in his turn kissed the dust at the feet of an arrogant prelate. The doctrine of Antinaturalism had solved the problem of inflicting the greatest possible amount of misery on the greatest possible number of victims.

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

The intellectual interregnum of the Middle Ages, the era of specters and vampires, received the first promise of dawn about the middle of the fourteenth century, when the lessons of the Crusades and the influence of Moorish civilization began to react on the nations of Christian Europe. Yet, by methods of their own, the vampires succeeded in prolonging the dreadful night. They set their owls a-shrieking from a thousand pulpits; they darkened the air with the smoke-clouds of autos-da-fé. They treated every torch-bearer as an incendiary.

But though the delay of redemption completed the ruin of some of their victims, the ghouls did not escape the deserved retribution. Their fire alarms failed to avert the brightening dawn. Daylight found its way even through the painted glass of dome-windows, and in the open air the blood-suckers had to take wing on pain of being shaken off and trampled under foot. The slaves of Hayti never rose more fiercely against their French tyrants than the German peasants against their clerical oppressor. From Antwerp to Leipzig thousands of convents were leveled with the ground; the villages of Holland, Minden, and Brunswick joined in a general priest-hunt, carried on with all the cruelties which the man-hunters of the Frankish crusade had inflicted on the pagan Saxons. In the Mediterranean Peninsulas the Jesuits were expelled as enemies of public peace, and their colleagues could maintain themselves only by an alliance with despotism against the liberal and intellectual elements of their country. To patriots of the Garibaldi type the name of a priest has become a byword implying the very quintessence of infamy. The explosion of the French Revolution struck a still deadlier blow at clerical prestige. The fagot-arguments of the Holy Inquisition were answered by a “burning, as in hell-fire, of priestly shams and lies,” and not one out of twenty French monasteries escaped the fury of the avengers. Our Protestant clergymen see their temple walls cracked by a breach of ever-multiplying schisms, and can prop their prestige only by more and more humiliating concessions, and in every intelligent community have to purchase popularity by rank heresies against the dogmas of their predecessors. Here and there the orthodox tenets of the New Testament have survived the progress of rationalism, but haunt the shade, like specters scenting the morning air, and momentarily expecting the summons that shall banish them to the realms of their native night.

E.—REFORM.

When the harbinger of day dispels the specters of darkness, half-awakened sleepers often mourn the fading visions of dreamland, as they would mourn the memories of a vanished world, till they find that the solid earth still remains, with its mountains and forests, and that the enjoyment of real life has but just begun. With a similar regret the dupes of Jesuitism mourn the collapse of their creed and lament the decline of morality, till they find that religion still remains, with its consolations and hopes, and that the true work of redemption has but just begun.

The reign of superstition begins to yield to a religion of reason and humanity. The first forerunners of that religion appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, when the philosophers of northern Europe first dared to appeal from dogma to nature, and since that revival of common-sense the prison walls of clerical obscurantism have been shaken by shock after shock, till daylight now enters through a thousand fissures.

But Secularism has a positive as well as a negative mission, and after removing the ruins of exploded idols, the champions of reform will begin the work of reconstruction. Temples dedicated to the religion of progress will rise from the ruins of superstition. Communities of reformants will intrust the work of education to chosen teachers, who will combine the functions of an instructor with those of an exhorter. In the languages of several European nations the word “rector” still bears that twofold significance. The ministers of Secularism will not sacrifice physical health to mental culture. They will be gymnasiarchs, like the Grecian pedagogues who superintended the athletic exercises of their pupils and accompanied them on foot journeys and hunting excursions. They will be teachers of hygiene, laboring to secure the foundations of mental energy by the preservation of physical vigor, and to banish diseases by the removal of their causes. They will seek to circumscribe the power of prejudice by the extension of knowledge. They will obviate the perils of poverty by lessons of industry and prudence. Their doctrines will dispense with miracles; they will make experience the test of truth, and justice the test of integrity; they will not suppress, but encourage, free inquiry; their war against error will employ no weapons but those of logic.

The religion of reason will limit its proper sphere to the secular welfare of mankind, but will ask, as well as grant, the fullest freedom of metaphysical speculation. Why should the friends of light darken the sunshine of earth with fanatical wars for the suppression of private theories about the mystery of the unrevealed first cause? Why should they rage about the riddle of the veiled hereafter to please the ordainer of the eternal law that visits such inexorable penalties upon the neglect of the present world? Should the friends of common sense quarrel about guesses at the solution of unknowable secrets? We need not grudge our wonder-loving brother the luxury of meditating on the mysteries of the unseen or the possibilities of resurrection. Shall the soul of the dying patriarch live only in his children? Shall it wing its way to distant stars? Shall it linger on earth:

“Sigh in the breeze, keep silence in the cave,
And glide with airy foot o’er yonder sea?”

Why should we wrangle about riddles which we cannot possibly solve? But we might certainly have honesty enough to admit that impossibility. Musing on the enigmas of the “land beyond the veil” may entertain us with the visions of a dreamy hour, but should not engross the time needed for the problems of the only world thus far revealed.

Thus, founded on a basis of health-culture, reason, and justice, the office of priesthood will regain its ancient prestige, and the best and wisest of men will become ministers of Secularism by devoting their lives to the science of happiness on earth.

NOTE

[1] Weibisches Klagen, bängliches Zagen
Wendet kein Unglück, macht dich nicht frei:
Allen Gewalten zum Trotz sich erhalten,
Nimmer sich beugen, kräftig sich zeigen
Rufet die Arme der Götter herbei.