Chapter IV (1)

RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.

I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable
possession of humanity?—Frequent confusion of a sentiment
for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and
morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference between the evolution
of belief in the individual and the evolution of belief
in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void
behind?

II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a
dissolution of morality among the people?—Is religion
the sole safeguard of social authority and public
morality?—Christianity and socialism—Relation between
non-religion and immorality, according to statistics.

III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage
between religion and free-thought?—Projects for
Protestantizing France—Michelet, Quinet, De Laveleye,
Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual, moral, and political
superiority of Protestantism—Utopian character of
the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals, of
substituting one religion for another—Is the possession
of religion a condition _sine qua non_ of superiority in
the struggle for existence?—Objections urged against
France and the French Revolution by Matthew Arnold;
Greece and Judea compared, France and Protestant nations
compared—Critical examination of Matthew Arnold’s
theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their
respective ideals from within?

We have seen the dissolution which menaces religious dogmatism, and even religious morality, in modern societies. And from the very fact of such dissolution certain more or less disturbing social problems arise. Is it really a perilous thing, this gradual enfeeblement of what has so long served as the basis of social and domestic virtue? Certain people delight in subjecting nine-tenths of the human race to a sort of ostracism. They declare in advance that the people, and all women and children, are incapable of rising to a conception which it is recognized that a large number of men have attained. The mass of the people, it is said, and women and children, must be appealed to on the side of the imagination; only, one must take care to choose the least dangerous form of appeal possible, for fear of injuring those whom one means to serve. Let us consider to what extent this incapacity of the people, of women and children, for philosophy is capable of demonstration. It is the more necessary in this book, in that it is the sociological aspect of religion that is here the subject of investigation.

_I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of humanity?_

[Sidenote: Tendency to regard religious beliefs as necessary in proportion to their absurdity.]

In our days, be it remarked, religious sentiment has found defenders among those who, like Renan, Taine, and so many others, are most firmly convinced of the absurdities of the dogmas themselves. So long as such men occupy a purely intellectual point of view—that is to say, their real point of view—the whole of the contents of religion, all the dogmas, all the rites appear to them to be so many astounding errors, a vast system of unconscious, mutual deception; but the instant, on the contrary, they regard religion from the point of view of sensibility—that is to say, from the point of view of the masses—everything becomes justifiable in their eyes; everything that they would attack without scruple as a bit of reasoning becomes sacred to them as a bit of sentiment, and by a strange optical illusion the absurdity of religious beliefs becomes an additional proof of their necessity; the greater the abyss which separates them from the intelligence of the masses, the greater their fear of having this abyss filled up. They do not for themselves feel the need of religious beliefs, but on this very account they regard them as indispensable for other people. They say, “How many irrational beliefs the people do have that we get along very well without!” And they conclude, therefore, “These beliefs must be extremely necessary to the existence of social life and must correspond to a real need, in order thus firmly to have implanted themselves in the life of the masses.”[73]

[73] Moreover when one has passed one’s life, or even many
years, in any study whatsoever, one is inclined extremely to
exaggerate the importance of this study. Greek professors
believe that Greek is necessary to the best interests of
humanity. When any question arises of drawing up a curriculum,
if the professors of the several studies are interrogated, each
wishes to see his own especial branch of science in the first
rank. I remember that after I myself had been making Latin
verses for some years I would have ranged myself voluntarily
among the defenders of Latin verse. Whenever anyone makes an
especial study of some work of genius, that of an individual,
or _a fortiori_ that of a people—Plato, Aristotle or Kant, the
Vedas or the Bible, this work tends to become in his eyes the
very centre of human thought; the book of which one makes a
special study tends to become _the_ book. A priest looks upon
the whole of human life as an affair of faith simply; knowledge
to a priest means simply a knowledge of the Fathers of the
Church. It is not astonishing that even members of the laity,
who have made religion the principal object of their studies,
should be inclined to magnify its importance for humanity,
or that the historian of religious thought should regard it
as including the whole of human life, and as acquiring, even
independently of any notion of revelation, a sort of inviolable
character.

[Sidenote: Free-thought for an intellectual aristocracy.]

Frequently, along with this belief in the omnipotence of the religious sentiment, there goes a certain contempt for those who are the victims of it; they are the serfs of thought, they must remain attached to the soil, bound within the limits of their own narrow horizon. The aristocracy of science is the most jealous of aristocracies, and a certain number of our contemporary men of science are bent on carrying their coat of mail in their brain. They profess toward the mass of the people a somewhat contemptuous charity, and propose to leave it undisturbed in its beliefs, immersed in prejudice as being the sole habitat in which it is capable of existing. For the rest, they sometimes envy the people its eternal ignorance, platonically of course. The bird no doubt possesses vague regrets, vague desires, when he perceives from on high a worm trailing tranquilly through the dew, oblivious of heaven; but the bird, as a matter of fact, is always careful to retain his wings, and our superior men of science do the same. In their judgment, certain superior minds are capable of enfranchising themselves from religion, without evil results following; the mass of the people cannot. It is necessary to reserve freedom of conscience and free-thought for a certain select few; the intellectual aristocracy should defend itself by a fortified camp. Just as the ancient Roman people demanded bread and spectacles, so modern people demand temples, and to give them temples is sometimes the sole means of making them forget that they have not enough bread. The mass of humanity must, as a mere necessity of existence, adore a god, and not simply god in general, but a certain God whose commandments are to be found in a pocket Bible. A sacred book, _that_ is what is necessary. We are reminded of Mr. Spencer’s saying, that the superstition of the present day is the superstition of the printed page; we believe that some mystical virtue inheres in the four and twenty letters of the alphabet. When a child asks questions concerning the birth of his younger brother, he is told that one found him under a bush in the garden; and the child is content. The mass of the people is a big child simply, and must be dealt with after the same fashion. When the mass of the people asks questions about the origin of the world, hand it the Bible—it will there see that the world was made by a determinate Being, who carefully adjusted its parts to each other; it will learn the precise amount of time that was consumed in the work; seven days, neither more nor less; and it needs learn nothing further. Its mind is walled in by a good solid barrier which it is forbidden to overleap even by a look—the wall of faith. Its brain is carefully sealed, the sutures become firm with age, and there is nothing to do but to begin the same thing over again with the next generation.

Is it then true that religion is thus, for the mass of mankind, either a necessary good or a necessary evil, rooted in the human heart?

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Confusion of religious sentiment with need for philosophy and morality.]

The belief that the religious sentiment is innate and perpetual rests upon a confusion of the religious sentiment with the need that exists in mankind for philosophy and morality; and however closely bound up together philosophy and morality and religion may be, they are in themselves distinct and separate, and tend progressively to become more and more manifestly so.

[Sidenote: Religious sentiment not innate.]

In the first place, how universal soever the religious sentiment may appear to be, it must be admitted that it is not innate. Persons who have passed their childhood without any communication with other human beings, owing to some corporal defect, display no signs of the possession of religious ideas. Dr. Kitto, in his book on the loss of the senses, cites the case of an American woman who was congenitally deaf and dumb, and who later, after she was capable of communicating with the people about her, was found not to possess the slightest notion of a divinity. The Rev. Samuel Smith, after twenty-three years intercourse with deaf mutes, says that, education apart, they possess no notion of a divinity. Lubbock and Baker cite a great number of examples of savages who are in the same case. According to the conclusions set forth above, in the beginning religions did not spring ready-made out of the human heart: they were imposed on man from without, they reached him through his eyes and through his ears; they contained no element of mysticism—in their first steps. Those who derive mysticism from an innate religious sentiment reason a little after the manner of those who in politics should derive royalty from some supposed innate respect for a royal race. Such a respect is the work of time, of custom, of the sympathetic tendencies of a body of men long trained in some one direction; there is contained in it no single primitive element, and yet the power of the sentiment of loyalty to a royal race is considerable. The Revolution showed as much, in the wars of the Vendée. But this power wears out some day or other, the cult for royalty disappears with the disappearance of royalty itself; other habits are formed, creating other sentiments, and the spectator is surprised to see that a people which was royalist under monarchy becomes republican under republicanism. The reign of sensibility over intelligence is not perpetual; sooner or later, the position of the two must be reversed; there is an intellectual habitat to which we must as inevitably adapt ourselves as to our physical habitat. The perpetuity of the religious sentiment depends upon its legitimacy. Born, as it is, of certain beliefs and certain customs, its fate is one with theirs. So long as a belief is not completely compromised and dissolved, the sentiment attaching to it may no doubt possess the power of preserving it, for sentiment always plays the rôle of protector and preserver. The human soul in this respect is analogous to society. Religious or political sentiments resemble iron braces buried in some wall menaced with ruin; they bind together the disjointed stones, and may well sustain the edifice for some time longer than, but for them, it would have stood; but let the wall once be undermined, so that it begins to give way, and they will fall with it. No better method could be employed for securing the complete and absolute extinction of a dogma or an institution than to maintain it till the last possible instant; its fall under such circumstances becomes a veritable annihilation. There are periods in history when to preserve is not to save but definitely to ruin.

[Sidenote: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.]

The perpetuity of religion has therefore in nowise been demonstrated. From the fact that religions always have existed it cannot be concluded that they always will exist; by ratiocination like that one might indeed achieve singular consequences. Humanity has always, in all times and places, associated certain events with others which chanced to accompany them; _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ is a universal sophism and the principle of all superstition. It is the basis of the belief that thirteen must not sit down at table, that one must be careful not to spill the salt, etc. Certain beliefs of this kind, such as that Friday is an unlucky day, are so widespread that they suffice sensibly to affect the average of travellers arriving in Paris on that day of the week by train and omnibus; a number of Parisians are averse to beginning a journey on Friday, or to attending to business that can be postponed; and it must be remembered that the intelligence of Parisians, at least of the men, stands high in the scale. What can one conclude from that if not that superstition is tenacious of life in the bosom of humanity and will long be so? Let us reason, then, in regard to superstition as in regard to mythological religion. Must we not admit that the need of superstition is innate in man, that it is part of his nature, that his life would really be incomplete if he ceased to believe that the breaking of a mirror is a sign that someone will die? Let us therefore set about finding some _modus vivendi_ with superstition; let us combat superstitions which are harmful not by exposing their irrationality but by substituting in their stead superstitions which are contrary to them and inoffensive. Let us declare that there are political superstitions and instruct women and children in them; let us inoculate, for example, feeble minds with that ingenious Mohammedan aphorism, that the duration of one’s life is determined in advance and that the coward gains absolutely nothing by fleeing from the field of battle; if he was fated to die, he will die on his own doorstep. Does not that strike one as a useful belief for an army to hold and more inoffensive than a great many religious beliefs? Perhaps it even contains an element of truth.

[Sidenote: That religious beliefs have been useful no reason for retaining them.]

One might go far along that path and discover a number of necessary or at least useful illusions, a number of “indestructible” beliefs. “It is,” says M. Renan, “more difficult to hinder mankind’s believing than to induce it to believe.” Certainly it is. In other words, it is more difficult to instruct than to deceive. If it were not so, what merit would there be in the communication of knowledge? Knowledge is always more complex than prejudice. A knowledge sufficiently complete to put one on one’s guard against lapses of judgment demands years of patience. Happily, humanity has long centuries before it, long centuries and treasures of perseverance; for there is no creature more persevering than man and no man more obstinate than the savant. But it may be said that religious myths, being better adapted than pure knowledge to popular intelligence, possess after all the advantage of symbolizing a portion of the truth; and that on this score one may permit them to the vulgar. It is as if one should say that the “vulgar” should be permitted to believe that the sun moves round the earth because the common man is incapable of conceiving, with accuracy, the infinite complexity of the motion of the stars. But every theory, every attempted explanation, however crude it may be, is in some degree a symbol of the truth. It is symbolic of the truth to say that nature experiences a horror of a vacuum, that the blood lies motionless in the arteries, that the line of vision runs from the eye to the object, instead of from the object to the eye. All these primitive theories are incomplete formulations of the reality, more or less popular efforts to “render” it; they rest upon visible facts not yet correctly interpreted by a completer scientific knowledge; and does that constitute a reason for respecting all these symbols, and for condemning the popular intelligence to fatten upon them? Primitive and mythical explanations served in the past to build up the truth; they ought not nowadays to be employed to obscure it. When a scaffolding has served its purpose in aiding one to erect an edifice, one tears it down. If certain tales are good to amuse children with, one at least should be careful that they are not taken too seriously. Let us not take outworn dogmas too seriously, let us not regard them with excessive complacency and tenderness; if they are still legitimately objects of admiration to us when we reset them among the circumstances to which they owed their birth, they cease to be so the instant one endeavours to perpetuate them among the circumstances of modern life where they are quite out of place.

[Sidenote: Preliminary acquisition of falsehood not necessary to recognition of truth.]

Like M. Renan, Mr. Max Müller almost sees an example to be followed in the castes established by the Hindus among the minds, as among the classes of the people, in the regular periods or asrâmas through which they oblige the intelligence successively to pass, in the hierarchy of religions with which they burden the spirit of the faithful. For them traditional error is sacred and venerable; it serves as a preparation for the truth; one must place a bandage on the eyes of the neophyte in order to be able to take it off again afterward. The tendencies of the modern mind are precisely the opposite; it likes to supply the present generation at once, and without superfluous preliminary, with the whole body of truth acquired by the generations which have passed away, without false respect or false courtesy for the errors it replaces; it is not enough that the light should filter into the mind through some secret rift, the doors and windows must be thrown wide open. The modern mind fails to see in what respect a deliberate effort to inculcate absurdity in a portion of the community can serve to secure rectitude of judgment in the remaining portions; or in what respect it is necessary to build a house of truth upon a foundation of falsehood; or to run down the part of the hill that we have already climbed, as a preparation for climbing higher.

[Sidenote: Transformation of faith inevitable.]

If the religious sentiment should disappear, it may be objected, it would leave a void which it would be impossible to fill, and humanity’s horror of a vacuum is even greater than nature’s. Humanity, therefore, would satisfy somehow or other, even with absurdities, that eternal need of believing of which we have spoken above. The instant one religion is destroyed another takes its place; it will be always so from age to age, because the religious sentiment will always exist as a continuing need for some object of worship which it will create and re-create in spite of all the ratiocination in the world. No victory over nature can be lasting; no permanent need in the human breast can be long silenced. There are periods in human life when faith is as imperious as love; one experiences a hunger to embrace something, to give one’s self—even to a figment of the imagination; one is a victim to a fever of faith. Sometimes this mood lasts throughout one’s whole life, sometimes it lasts some days only or some hours; there are cases in which it does not present itself till late, and even very late, in life. And the priest has taken note of all these vicissitudes; he is always there, patient, waiting tranquilly for the moment when the symptoms shall appear, and the sleeping sentiment shall awaken and become masterful; he has the Host ready, he has great temples reverberating with sacred prayers, where man may come to kneel, and breathe in the spirit of God, and arise strengthened. The reply is that it is a mistake to regard all humanity as typified in the person of the recently disabused believer. It has often been made a subject of reproach to free-thinkers that they endeavour to destroy without replacing, but one cannot destroy a religion in the breasts of a people. At some certain moment in its history it falls of its own weight, with the disappearance of the pretended evidences on which it was resting; it does not, properly speaking, die; it ceases simply—becomes extinct. It will cease definitely when it shall have become useless, and there is no obligation to replace what is no longer necessary. Among the masses, intelligence is never far in advance of tradition; one never adopts a new idea until one has by degrees become accustomed to it. It all takes place without violence, or at least without lasting violence; the crisis passes, the wound closes quickly, and leaves no trace behind; the forehead of the masses bears no scar. Progress lies in wait for the moment of least resistance, of least pain. Even revolutions do not succeed except in so far as they are purely beneficial, as they constitute a universally advantageous evolution. For the rest, there is no such thing as a revolution, or a cataclysm, properly so called, in human belief. Each generation adds a doubt to those which existed before in the minds of their parents, and thus faith falls away bit by bit, like the banks of a river worn by the stream; the sentiments which were bound up with the belief go with it, but they are incessantly replaced by others, a new wave sweeps forward to fill the void, and the human soul profits by its losses and grows larger, like the bed of a river. The adaptation of a people to its environment is a beneficent law. It has often been said, and justly, that there is food for the soul as well as food for the body; and the analogy may be pursued by remarking that it is difficult to induce a people to change its national diet. For centuries the inhabitants of Brittany have lived upon imperfectly cooked buckwheat cakes, as they live by their simple faith and infantine superstitions. It may, however, be affirmed, _a priori_, that the day will come when the reign of the buckwheat cake in Brittany will be at an end, or at least will be shared by other, and better prepared, and more nourishing foods; it is equally rational to affirm that the faith of Brittany will some day come to an end, that the somewhat feeble minds of the inhabitants will sooner or later seek nourishment in solider ideas and beliefs, and that the whole of their intellectual life will, by degrees, be transformed and renewed.

[Sidenote: The disenchantment that accompanies it temporary.]

It is only those who have been reared in a faith, and then disabused of it, that preserve, along with their primitive sentiments, a certain home-sickness for a belief to correspond to these sentiments. The reason is that they have been violently hastened in their passage from belief to incredulity. The story of the passing disenchantment with life, which the recent disbeliever experiences, has often been told. “I felt horribly exiled,” M. Renan once said, in speaking of the moral crisis through which he himself had passed. “The fish in Lake Baikal have taken thousands of years, it is said, to transform themselves from salt-water to fresh-water fish. I had to achieve my own transformation in the course of some weeks. Catholicism surrounds the whole of life like an enchanted circle with so much magic that, when one is deprived of it, everything seems insipid and melancholy; the universe looked to me like a desert. If Christianity was not true, everything else seemed to me to be indifferent, frivolous, scarce worthy of attention; the world looked mediocre, morally impoverished to me. The world seemed to me to be in its dotage and decadence; I felt lost in a nation of pigmies.” This pain incident to metamorphosis, this sort of despair at renouncing everything that one has believed and loved up to that time, is not peculiar to the Christian who has fallen away from Christianity; it exists in diverse degrees, as M. Renan well knew, whenever a love of any sort comes to an end in us. For him who, for example, has placed his whole life in the love of a woman and feels himself betrayed by her, life seems not less disenchanted than for the believer who sees himself abandoned by his God. Even simple intellectual errors may produce an analogous sentiment. Archimedes no doubt would have felt his life crumble away beneath him, if he had discovered irremediable lacunæ in his chain of theorems. The more intimately a god has been personified and humanized, the more intimately he comes to be beloved, and the greater must be the wound he leaves behind when he deserts the heart. But even though this wound be in certain instances incurable, that fact constitutes no argument in support of the religion of the masses, for an illegitimate and unjustifiable love may cause as much suffering when one is deprived of it as a legitimate love. The bitterness of truth lies less in truth itself than in the resistance offered to it by intrenched and established error. It is not the world which is desert when deprived of the god of our dreams, it is our own heart; and we have ourselves to blame if we have filled our hearts with nothing better than dreams. For the rest, in the majority of cases, the void, the sense of loss which a religion leaves behind, is not lasting; one adapts one’s self to one’s new moral environment, one becomes happy again; no doubt not in the same manner—one is never happy twice in the same manner—but in a manner less primitive, less infantine, more stable. M. Renan is an example of it. His transmutation into a fresh-water fish was achieved in reality tranquilly enough; it is doubtful whether he ever dreams now of the salt-water stretches of the Bible, and nobody has ever declared so forcibly that he is happy. One might almost make it a matter of reproach to him, and suggest that the profoundest happiness is sometimes not so precisely aware of itself. If every absolute faith is a little naïve, one is not absolutely without naïveté when one is too confident of one’s own happiness.

[Sidenote: The essential cheapness of religious speculation.]

To the surprise and to the disenchantment which a former Christian experiences in the presence of scientific truth may be opposed the even more profound astonishment which those who have been exclusively nourished on science experience in the presence of religious dogma. The man of science can understand religious dogmas, for he can follow the course of their birth and development century by century; but he experiences, in his effort to adapt himself to this narrow environment, something of the difficulty that he might feel in an effort to enter a Liliputian fairy palace. The world of religion—with the ridiculous importance which it ascribes to the earth as the centre of the universe, with the palpable moral errors that the Bible contains, with its whole body of legend, which is affecting only to those who believe in them, with its superannuated rites—all seems so poor, so powerless to symbolize the infinite, that the man of science is inclined to see in these infantine dreams the repugnant and despicable side rather than the elevated and attractive side. Livingstone says that one day, after having preached the Gospel to a new tribe, he was taking a walk in the neighbouring fields when he heard near him, behind a bush, a strange noise like a convulsive cough; he there found a young negro who had been taken by an irresistible desire to laugh by the account of the Biblical legends, and had hidden himself there out of respect for Livingstone, and in the shadow of the bush was writhing with laughter and unable to reply to the questions of the worthy pastor. Certainly the surprising legends of religion can give rise to no such outburst of gaiety as this in one who has spent his life among the facts of science and the reasoned theories of philosophy. He feels rather a certain bitterness, such as one feels generally in the presence of human feebleness, for man feels something of the same solidarity in the presence of human error as in the presence of human suffering. If the eighteenth century ridiculed superstition, if the human mind was then “dancing,” as Voltaire said, “in chains,” it is the distinction of our epoch more accurately to have estimated the weight of those chains; and in truth, when one examines coolly the poverty of the popular attempts that have been made to represent the world and the ideal of mankind, one feels less inclination to laugh than to weep.

[Sidenote: Inevitable extinction of fanaticism.]

But, however that may be, the evolution of human belief must not be judged by the painful revolutions of individual belief; in humanity such transformations are subject to regular laws. The very explosions of the religious sentiment, explosions even of fanaticism, which still occur and have so often occurred in the course of religious degeneration, enter as an integral part into the formula of the very process of degeneration itself. After having been so long one of the most ardent interests of humanity, religious faith must, of necessity, be slow in cooling. Every human interest resembles those stars which are gradually declining at once in light and heat, and which from time to time present a solid exterior and then, as the result of some inner disturbance, burst through their outer rind and become once more brilliant to a degree that they had not rivalled for hundreds of centuries; but this very brilliancy is itself an expenditure of light and heat, a phase simply of the process of cooling. The star hardens once more on its surface, and, after every fresh cataclysm and illumination, it becomes less brilliant and dies in its efforts to revive. A spectator who should be watching it from a sufficient height might even find a certain comfort in the triumphs of the very spirit of fanaticism and reaction which result in a prolonged subsequent enfeeblement and a more rapid approach toward final extinction. Just as haste is sometimes more deliberate than deliberation, so a violent effort to reanimate the past sometimes results in hastening its death. You cannot heat a cold star from the outside.

_II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of morality among the people?_

The general enfeeblement of the religious instinct will set free, for employment in social progress, an immense amount of force hitherto set aside for the service of mysticism; but it may well be asked also whether there are not a number of forces hurtful to society, and hitherto held in check or annulled by the religious instinct, which upon its disappearance will be given free play.

[Sidenote: One must respect what is respectable only.]

“Christianity,” Guizot said, “is a necessity for mankind; it is a school of reverence.” No doubt; but less so perhaps than Hindu religions, which go the length of proposing the absolute division of mankind into castes as an object for reverence; however contrary it may be to the natural sentiments of mankind and the operation of social laws. Assuredly no society can subsist if its members neither respect nor reverence what is respectable and venerable; respect is decidedly an indispensable element in national life; the fact is one which we too easily forget in France; but society is barred from progress if one respects what is not respectable, and progress is a condition of life for a society. Tell me what you respect, and I will tell you what you are. The progress of human reverence for objects ever higher and more high is symbolic of all other kinds of progress achieved by the human mind.

[Sidenote: Christianity quite the opposite of a defence against communism.]

But for religion, say the Guizot school, the property-question would sweep away the masses of the people; it is the Church which holds them in check. If there is a property-question, let us not seek to ignore it; let us labour sincerely and actively at its solution. _Qui trompe-t-on ici?_ Is God simply a means of saving the capitalist? More than that, the property-question is not one which is more intimately bound up to-day with religion than with free-thought. Christianity, which implicitly contains within it the principles of communism, is itself responsible for spreading ideas among the people which have inevitably germinated in the course of the great intellectual germination which distinguishes the present epoch. M. de Laveleye, one of the defenders of liberal Christianity, confesses as much. It was well known that among the first Christians all property was held in common, and that communism was the immediate consequence of baptism.[74] “We hold everything in common except our women,” Tertullian and St. Justin say; “we share everything.”[75] It is well known with what vehemence the Fathers of the Church have attacked the right of private property. “The earth,” says St. Ambrose, “was given to the rich and poor in common. Why, oh, ye rich! should ye arrogate to yourselves alone the ownership of it?” “Nature created rights in common, usurpation has created private rights.” “Wealth is always the product of robbery,” says St. Jerome. “The rich man is a robber,” says St. Basil. “Iniquity is the basis of private property,” says St. Clement. “The rich man is a brigand,” says St. Chrysostom. Bossuet himself cries, in a sermon on the distribution of the necessities of life: “The murmurs of the poor are just: why this inequality of condition?” And, in the sermon on the eminent dignity of the poor: “The politics of Jesus are directly opposed to those of this century.” And finally Pascal, summing up in an illustration all the socialistic ideas which compose the bulk of Christian doctrine: “‘That dog is mine,’ say these poor children; ‘that place there is my place in the sun.’ Behold the beginning and the type of the usurpation of the earth.” When “these poor children” are men, they do not always view the usurpation of the earth with resignation; from the Middle Ages down they have, from time to time, risen in revolt and there have been resulting massacres. Men like Pastoureaux and Jacques in France and Wat Tyler in England, the anabaptists and John of Leyden in Germany, are examples of what we mean. But, these great explosions of popular clamour once at an end, the Christian priest had always at his disposal, to subdue the crowd, a robust doctrine of compensation in heaven for one’s sufferings on earth; all the beatitudes are summed up in “Blessed are the poor, for they shall see God.” In our days, owing to the progress of the natural sciences, anything like certitude on the subject of compensation in heaven has disappeared; even the Christian, less sure of Paradise, aspires to see the justice and compensations of heaven realized in this world. The most durable element in Christianity is, therefore, less the check that it imposes upon the masses than the contempt for the established order with which it inspires them. Religion is nowadays obliged to call in social science to aid it in its struggle against socialism. The true principle of private property as of social authority cannot be religious; it lies essentially in the sentiment of the rights of other people and in an increasingly scientific acquaintance with the conditions of social and political life.

[74] _Acts_ ii. 44, 45; iv. 32, sqq.

[75] Tertull. _Apolog._ c. 39, Justin., _Apolog._ I, 14.

[Sidenote: Religion not necessary to morality.]

But is not religion a safeguard of popular morality? It is true that immorality and crime are habitually conceived as associated with non-religion, and as products of it. Criminologists, however, have demonstrated that no proposition could be less tenable. If one considers the mass of the delinquents in any country, one will find that irreligion among them is an exception, and a rare exception. In unusually religious countries like England delinquents are not less numerous, and the average of belief among them is higher; the greater number, Mayhew says, profess to believe in the Bible. In France, where non-religion is so common, it is natural that it should also be common among the criminal classes, but it is far from being the rule; it is most frequent among the leaders, the organizers of crime, those, in effect, who rise above the mass of their fellows, like Mandrin in the last century, La Pommerais, Lacenaire. If sociologists find themselves obliged to attribute a positive antisocial bias to certain criminals, it is not surprising that they should recognize in a number of them an amount of instruction and a degree of talent amply sufficient to disembarrass them of the superstitious beliefs of the multitude, which are shared by their companions in crime. Neither their talents nor their culture have sufficed absolutely to check their evil disposition, but certainly they have not been responsible for it. Criminologists cite a number of facts which go to prove that the most minute and sincere practice of religion may go along with the greatest crimes. Despine relates that Bourse had scarcely finished a robbery and a homicide, before he went to kneel and take part in a church service. G., a courtesan, as she set fire to her lover’s house, cried: “God and the ever blessed Virgin do the rest!” The wife of Parency, while her husband was killing an old man as a preliminary to robbery, was praying God for her husband’s success. It is well known how religious the Marquise of Brinvilliers was; her very condemnation was facilitated by the fact of her having written with her own hands a secret confession of her sins in which she made mention, along with parricides, fratricides, arsons, and poisonings without number, of the list of the number of times that she had been remiss or negligent in confession.[76] Religion is no more responsible for all these crimes than non-religion is; the higher elements of both are equally debarred of entrance into the brain of a criminal. Although the moral sense and religious sentiment are in origin distinct, they act and react incessantly upon each other. It may be announced, as a law, that no one whose moral sense is obliterated can be capable of experiencing genuine religious sentiment in all its purity, though such a person may well be more than usually apt to attach a value to the superstitious forms of a cult. The religious sentiment, at its height, always rests upon a refined moral sense, although, when religious sentiment goes further and becomes fanaticism, it may react on and debase the moral sense. On a person who is deficient in moral sense, religion produces no effects but such as are evil—fanaticism, formalism, and hypocrisy—because it is of necessity ill-comprehended and misconstrued.

[76] It must not be believed that even prostitutes, who
as a class are so closely allied to criminals, are wholly
non-religious. A case is cited of a number of prostitutes who
subscribed the money to have one of their companions, who was
on the point of death, removed from a house of ill-fame to
some place where the priest might visit her; others subscribed
money for a great number of masses to be said for the soul of
a companion who was dead. At all events prostitutes are quite
superstitious, and their religion swarms with strange and
ridiculous beliefs.

In Italy criminals are usually religious. Quite recently the
Tozzi family of butchers, after having killed and dismembered a
young man, sold his blood, mixed with sheep’s blood, in their
shop, and went none the less to perform their devotions to the
Madonna, and to kiss the statue of the Virgin. The Caruso band,
Lombroso says, habitually placed sacred images in the caves
and woods in which they lived, and burned candles before them.
Verzeni, who strangled three women, was an assiduous frequenter
of the church and the confessional, and he came of a family
which was not only religious but bigoted. The companions of
La Gala, who were imprisoned at Pisa, obstinately refused to
take food on Friday during Lent, and when the keeper tried
to persuade them to do so, they replied, “Do you think we
have been excommunicated?” Masini, with his band, met three
countrymen and among them a priest; he slowly sawed open the
throat of one of them with an ill-sharpened knife, and then,
with his hands still bloody, obliged the priest to give him the
consecrated Host. Giovani Mio and Fontana went to confession
before going out to commit a murder. A young Neapolitan
parricide, covered with amulets, confessed to Lombroso that
he had invoked the aid of the Madonna de la Chaîne in the
accomplishment of his horrible crime. “And that she really
helped me I conclude from this, that at the first blow of the
stick my father fell dead, although I am myself personally
weak.” Another murderer, a woman, before killing her husband,
fell on her knees and prayed to the blessed Virgin to give her
the strength to accomplish her crime. Still another announced
his acceptance of a line of action devised by his companion in
these words, “I will come, and I will do that with which God
has inspired thee.”

[Sidenote: Ignorance, not Catholicism, responsible for immorality.]

Catholic countries often supply an unusually high percentage of criminals, because Catholic countries are more ignorant than Protestant countries. In Italy, for example, as many as sixteen out of every hundred deaths in the Papal States and Southern Italy, have at times been deaths by violence, whereas in Liguria and Piedmont only two or three out of every hundred are deaths by violence. The population of Paris is not, on the whole, more immoral than that of any other great European city, although it is distinctly less religious; what a difference, for example, between London and Paris! The churches, temples, and synagogues in Paris would not hold one-tenth of the population, and, as they are half empty in time of services, a statistician may with some show of reason conclude that only about a twentieth of the population fulfil their religious duties. Whereas Paris contains only 169 places of worship, London, in 1882, possessed 1231—without counting the religious assemblies which regularly gather in the parks, the public squares, and even under the railway viaducts.

[Sidenote: Non-religion not responsible for French Revolution and the Commune.]

But should not the crimes of the Commune and those of the French Revolution be set down to non-religion? One might, with more show of truth, render religion responsible for the massacres of St. Bartholomew and of the Dragonnades, for, in the wars of the Huguenots, of the Vaudois, of the Albigenses, the issue was a religious issue, whereas in the case of the Commune the issue was wholly a social one; religion was only very indirectly involved in it. The analogy for the Commune is to be found in the wars concerning the agrarian laws of ancient Rome, or in contemporary strikes which are so often accompanied by bloodshed, or in any of the brutal uprisings of the labourer or the peasant against the capitalist or the owner of the soil. Be it remarked, moreover, that in all these and the like contests the stronger party—the representative of society and, it is alleged, of religion—commits, in the name of repression, violences comparable to and sometimes less excusable than those with which they charge the party of disorder.

[Sidenote: Labour for labour’s sake.]

What demoralizes races and peoples is not so much the downfall of religion as the luxury and idleness of the few and the discontented poverty of the many. In society demoralization begins at the two extremes, top and bottom. The law of labour is open to two species of revolt; the revolt of the discontented working man who curses the law of labour even while he obeys it, and the revolt of the idle noble, or man of fortune, who ignores it simply. The richest classes in society are often those whose lives show a minimum of devotion, of disinterestedness, of true moral elevation. For a fashionable woman, for example, the duties of life too frequently consist in an unbroken round of trifles; she is utterly ignorant of what it means to take pains. To bear a child or two (to exceed the number of three, one of them has said, is the height of immorality), to have a nurse to take care of them, to be faithful to one’s husband, at least within the limits of coquetry—behold the whole duty of woman! Too frequently, in the upper classes, duty comes to be conceived simply as a matter of abstinence, of not being as nasty or as wicked as one might. Temptations to do evil increase in number as one mounts in the social scale, whereas what one may call temptations to do good decrease in number. Fortune enables one to hire a substitute, so to speak, in all the duties of life—in caring for the sick, in nursing children, in rearing them, and so forth; the rich are not obliged to pay, as the saying is, with their person—_payer de la personne_! Wealth too often produces a species of personal avarice, of miserliness of one’s self, a restriction of moral and physical activity, an impoverishment of the individual and of the race. The shopkeeping class constitute the least immoral section of the rich, and that because they preserve their habits of work; but they are constantly affected by the example of the higher classes, who take a pride in being useless. The remnant of morality, which exists among the middle class, is partly due to the love of money; money does, in effect, possess one advantage, that it must in general be worked for. Nobles and business men love money but in different ways. Young men of good family love it as a means of expense and of prodigality, people in a small way of business love it for its own sake, and out of avarice. Avarice is a powerful safeguard for the remnants of morality in a people. It coincides, in almost all its results, with a disinterested love of labour; it exercises no evil influence except in the matter of marriage, where the question of the girl’s portion becomes paramount, and in the matter of children, of which it tends to restrict the number. All things considered, as between prodigality and avarice, the moralist is obliged to cast his vote for the latter on the ground that it is not favourable to debauchery, and does not therefore tend to dissolve society; both are maladies which benumb and may destroy one, but the former is contagious and is transmitted by contact. We may add that love of expense rarely serves to encourage regular labour: it produces, rather, an appetite for gambling and even for robbery; clever strokes on the stock-exchange amount, in certain cases, to robbery pure and simple. Thence arises a secondary demoralizing influence. Prodigals are necessarily attracted to the more or less shaky forms of financial speculation, by which, absolutely without labour properly so called, more money can be amassed than by labour; the miser, on the contrary, will hesitate, will prefer effort to risk, and his effort will be more beneficial to society. In effect, the only thing that can maintain society in a healthy state is that love of labour for its own sake which is so rarely met with, and which one must endeavour to develop; but this love of intellectual and physical labour is in nowise bound up with religion; it is bound up with a certain broad culture of the mind and heart which render idleness insupportable.

[Sidenote: Religion the creature of circumstance.]

Similarly with the other moral and social virtues which are alleged to be inseparable from religion. In all times humanity has found a certain average of vice, as of virtue, necessary. Religions themselves have always been obliged to give way before certain prevalent habits and passions. If we had been living at the time of the Reformation, we should have heard Catholic priests maintaining, with all the seriousness in the world, that, but for Catholic dogmas and the authority of the Pope, society would dissolve and perish. Happily experience has proved that these dogmas and that authority are not indispensable to social life; the conscience of mankind has attained its majority and no longer needs the services of a guardian. The day will come, no doubt, when Frenchmen will no more feel an inclination to enter into a house of stone and invoke God to the sound of a hymn than an Englishman or a German experiences to-day an inclination to kneel before a priest and confess to him.

_III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?_

[Sidenote: Dependence of Catholicism on power.]