Chapter VIII: Prudence

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.”

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 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?

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 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 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.

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 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 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.