Nature has guarded the health of her creatures by a marvelous system of protective intuitions. The sensitive membrane of the eye resents the intrusion of every foreign substance. An intuitive sense of discomfort announces every injurious extreme of temperature. To the unperverted taste of animals in a state of nature wholesome food is pleasant, injurious substances repulsive or insipid. Captain Kane found that only the rage of famine will tempt the foxes of the Arctic coastlands to touch spoiled meat. In times of scarcity the baboons of the Abyssinian mountains greedily hunt for edible roots, which an unerring faculty enables them to distinguish from the poisonous varieties. The naturalist Tschudi mentions a troop of half-tamed chamois forcing their way through a shingle roof, rather than pass a night in the stifling atmosphere of a goat stable.

Man in his primitive state had his full share of those protective instincts, which still manifest themselves in children and Nature-guided savages. It is a mistake to suppose that the lowest of those savages [19]are naturally fond of ardent spirits. The travelers Park, Gerstaecker, Vambery, Kohl, De Tocqueville, and Brehm agree that the first step on the road to ruin is always taken in deference to the example of the admired superior race, if not in compliance with direct persuasion. The negroes of the Senegal highlands shuddered at the first taste of alcohol, but from a wish to conciliate the good will of their visitors hesitated to decline their invitations, which subsequently, indeed, became rather superfluous. The children of the wilderness unhesitatingly prefer the hardships of a winter camp to the atmospheric poisons of our tenement houses. Shamyl Ben Haddin, the Circassian war chief, whose iron constitution had endured the vicissitudes of thirty-four campaigns, pathetically protested against the pest air of his Russian prison cell, and warned his jailers that, unless his dormitory was changed, Heaven would hold them responsible for the guilt of his suicide. I have known country boys to step out into a shower of rain and sleet to escape from the contaminated atmosphere of a city workshop, and after a week’s work in a spinning mill return to the penury of their mountain homes, rather than purchase dainties at the expense of their lungs.

The word frugality, in its original sense, referred literally to a diet of tree fruits, in distinction to carnivorous fare, and nine out of ten children still decidedly prefer ripe fruit and farinaceous dishes to the richest meats. They as certainly prefer easy, home-made clothes to the constraint of fashionable fripperies. The main tenets of our dress-reformers are [20]anticipated in the sensible garments of many half-civilized nations. Boys, within reach of a free bathing river, can dispense with the advice of the hydropathic school. They delight in exercise; they laugh at the imaginary danger of fresh-air draughts, and the perils of barefoot rambles in wet and dry. They would cast their vote in favor of the outdoor pursuit of hundreds of occupations which custom, rather than necessity, now associates with the disadvantages of indoor confinement. The hygienic influence of arboreal vegetation has been recognized by the ablest pathologists of modern times; avenues of shade trees have been found to redeem the sanitary condition of many a grimy city, and the eminent hygienist, Schrodt, holds that, as a remedial institution, a shady park is worth a dozen drug stores. But all these lessons only confirm an often manifested, and too often suppressed, instinct of our young children: their passionate love of woodland sports, their love of tree shade, of greenwood camps, of forest life in all its forms. Those who hold that “nature” is but a synonym of “habit” should witness the rapture of city children at first sight of forest glades and shady meadow brooks, and compare it with the city dread of the Swiss peasant lad or the American backwoods boy, sickened by the fumes and the uproar of a large manufacturing town. A thousands years of vice and abnormal habits have not yet silenced the voice of the physical conscience that recalls our steps to the path of Nature, and will not permit us to transgress her laws unwarned. [21]

The reward of nature-abiding habits is not confined to the negative advantage of escaping the discomforts of disease. In the pursuit of countless competitive avocations the Art of Survival is a chief secret of success, but in this age of sanitary abuses our lives are mostly half-told tales. Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. For millions of our fellow-men an increase of health and longevity would suffice to make life decidedly worth living. Health lessens the temptations to many vices. Perfect health blesses its possessor with a spontaneous cheerfulness almost proof against the frowns of fortune and the cares of poverty. With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but [22]in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. The sweetness of health reflects itself in grace of form and deportment, and wins friends where the elegance of studied manners gains only admirers. Health is also a primary condition of that clearness of mind the absence of which can be only partially compensated by the light of learning. Health is the basis of mental as of bodily vigor; country-bred boys have again and again carried off the prizes of academical honors from the pupils of refined cities, and the foremost reformers of all ages and countries have been men of the people; low-born, but not the less well-born, sons of hardy rustics and mechanics, from Moses, Socrates, Epictetus, Jesus Ben Josef, and Mohammed, to Luther, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Abraham Lincoln.

Habitual sin against the health-laws of Nature was originally chiefly a consequence of untoward circumstances. Slaves, paupers, immigrants to the inhospitable climes of the higher latitudes, were forced to adopt abnormal modes of life which, in the course of time, hardened into habits. Man, like all the varieties of his four-handed relatives, is a native of the tropics, and the diet of our earliest manlike ancestors was, in all probability, frugal: tree-fruits, berries, nuts, roots, and edible herbs and gums. But the first colonists of the winter lands were obliged to eke out an existence by eating the flesh of their fellow-creatures, and a carnivorous diet thus became the [23]habitual and, in many countries, almost the exclusive diet of the nomadic inhabitants.

Alcohol is a product of fermentation, and the avarice of a cruel master may have forced his slaves to quench their thirst with fermented must or hydromel till habit begot a baneful second nature, and the at first reluctant victims of intoxication learned to prefer spoiled to fresh grape-juice. Sedentary occupations, however distasteful at first, are apt to engender a sluggish aversion to physical exercise, and even habitual confinement in a vitiated atmosphere may at last become a second nature, characterized by a morbid dread of fresh air. The slaves of the Roman landowners had to pass their nights in prison-like dungeons, and may have contracted the first germ of that mental disease known as the night-air superstition, the idea, namely, that after dark the vitiated atmosphere of a stifling dormitory is preferable to the balm of the cooling night wind.

In modern times an unprecedented concurrence of circumstances has stimulated a feverish haste in the pursuit of wealth, and thus indirectly led to the neglect of personal hygiene. The abolition of the public festivals by which the potentates of the pagan empires compensated their subjects for the loss of political freedom, the heartless egotism of our wealthy Pharisees, venal justice, and the dire bondage of city life all help to stimulate a headlong race toward the goal of the promised land of ease and independence—a goal reached only by a favored few compared with the multitudes who daily drop down wayworn and exhausted. [24]

But the deadliest blow to the cause of health was struck by the anti-natural fanaticism of the Middle Ages, the world-hating infatuation of the maniacs who depreciated every secular blessing as a curse in disguise, and despised their own bodies as they despised nature, life, and earth. The disciples of the world-renouncing messiah actually welcomed disease as a sign of divine favor, they gloried in decrepitude and deformity, and promoted the work of degeneration with a persevering zeal never exceeded by the enlightened benefactors of the human race. For a period of fifteen hundred years the ecclesiastic history of Europe is the history of a systematic war against the interests of the human body; the “mortification of the flesh” was enjoined as a cardinal duty of a true believer; health-giving recreations were suppressed, while health-destroying vices were encouraged by the example of the clergy; domestic hygiene was utterly neglected, and the founders of some twenty-four different monastic orders vied in the invention of new penances and systematic outrages upon the health of the poor convent-slaves. Their diet was confined to the coarsest and often most loathsome food; they were subjected to weekly bleedings, to profitless hardships and deprivations; their sleep was broken night after night; fasting was carried to a length which often avenged itself in permanent insanity; and their only compensation for a daily repetition of health-destroying afflictions was the permission to indulge in spiritual vagaries and spirituous poisons: the same bigots who grudged their followers a night of unbroken rest or a mouthful of [25]digestible food indulged them in quantities of alcoholic beverages that would have staggered the conscience of a modern beer-swiller.

The bodily health of a community was held so utterly below the attention of a Christian magistrate that every large city became a hotbed of contagious diseases; small-pox and scrofula became pandemic disorders; the pestilence of the Black Death ravaged Europe from end to end—nay, instead of trying to remove the cause of the evil, the wretched victims were advised to seek relief in prayer and self-torture, and a philosopher uttering a word of protest against such illusions would have risked to have his tongue torn out by the roots and his body consigned to the flames of the stake.

Mankind has never wholly recovered from that reign of insanity. Indifference to many of the plainest health-laws of nature is still the reproach of our so-called civilization. Our moralists rant about the golden streets of the New Jerusalem, but find no time to expurgate the slums of their own cities; our missionary societies spend millions to acquaint the natives of distant islands with the ceremony of baptism, but refuse to contribute a penny to the establishment of free public baths for the benefit of their poor neighbors, whose children are scourged or caged like wild beasts for trying to mitigate the martyrdom of the midsummer season by a bath in the waters of the next river. Temperance, indeed, is preached in the name of the miracle-monger who turned water into alcohol; but millions of toilers who seek to drown their misery in the Lethe of intoxication are [26]deprived of every healthier pastime; the magistrates of our wealthy cities rage with penal ordinances against the abettors of public amusements on the day when nine-tenths of our laborers find their only leisure for recreation. Poor factory children who would spend the holidays in the paradise of the green hills are lured into the baited trap of a Sabbath-school and bribed to memorize the stale twaddle of Hebrew ghost-stories or the records of fictitious genealogies; but the offer to enlarge the educational sphere of our public schools by the introduction of a health primer would be scornfully rejected as an attempt to divert the attention of the pupils from more important topics.

But the laws of Nature cannot be outraged with impunity, and the aid of supernatural agencies has never yet protected our ghost-mongers from the consequences of their sins against the monitions of their physical conscience. The neglect of cleanliness avenges itself in diseases which no prayer can avert; during the most filthful and prayerful period of the Middle Ages, seven out of ten city-dwellers were subject to scrofula of that especially malignant form that attacks the glands and the arteries as well as the skin. Medical nostrums and clerical hocus-pocus of the ordinary sort were, indeed, so notoriously unavailing against that virulent affection that thousands of sufferers took long journeys to try the efficacy of a king’s touch, as recorded by the unanimous testimony of contemporary writers, as well as in the still [27]current term of a sovereign remedy. A long foot-journey, with its opportunities for physical exercise, outdoor camps, and changes of diet, often really effected the desired result; but, on their return to their reeking hovels, the convalescents experienced a speedy relapse, and had either to repeat the wearisome journey or resign themselves to the “mysterious dispensation” of a Providence which obstinately refused to let miracles interfere with the normal operation of the physiological laws recorded in the protests of instinct. Stench, nausea, and sick-headaches might, indeed, have enforced those protests upon the attention of the sufferers; but the disciples of Antinaturalism had been taught to mistrust the promptings of their natural desires, and to accept discomforts as signs of divine favor, or, in extreme cases, to trust their abatement to the intercession of the saints, rather than to the profane interference of secular science.

The dungeon-life of the monastic maniacs, and the abject submission to the nuisance of atmospheric impurities, avenged themselves in the ravages of pulmonary consumption; the votaries of dungeon-smells were taught the value of fresh air by the tortures of an affliction from which only the removal of the cause could deliver a victim, and millions of orthodox citizens died scores of years before the attainment of a life-term which a seemingly inscrutable dispensation of Heaven grants to the unbelieving savages of the wilderness. The cheapest of all remedies, fresh air, surrounded them in immeasurable abundance, craving admission and offering them the [28]aid which Nature grants even to the lowliest of her creatures, but a son of a miracle-working church had no concern with such things, and was enjoined to rely on the efficacy of mystic ceremonies: “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 cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”

Thousands of the fatuous bigots who prayed for “meekness of spirit” continued to gorge themselves with the food of carnivorous animals, and thus inflamed their passions with the sanguinary, remorseless propensities of those brutes. Luigi Cornaro, the Italian reformer, assures us that it was no uncommon thing for a nobleman or prelate of his century to swallow fourteen pounds of strong meats at a single meal, and that, after invoking the blessing of Heaven upon such a repast, the devourer of meat-pies would rise with his paunch distended “like the hide of a drowned dog.” The “Love of Enemies,” “forgiveness and meekness,” were on their lips; but those fourteen pounds of meat-pie worked out their normal result; and among the carnivorous saints of that age we accordingly find men whose fiendish inhumanity would have appalled the roughest legionary of pagan Rome. Cæsar Borgia, the son of a highest ecclesiastic dignitary, a disciple of a priestly training-school, and himself a prince of the church, seems to have combined the stealthy cunning of a viper with the bloodthirst of a hyena. Four times he made and broke the most solemn treaties, [29]in order to get an opportunity to invade the territory of an unprepared neighbor. His campaigns were conducted with a truculence denounced even by his own allies; with his own hand he poisoned fourteen of his boon companions, in order to possess himself of their property; twenty-three of his political and clerical rivals were removed by the dagger of hired assassins or executed upon the testimony of suborned perjurers. He tried to poison his brother-in-law, Prince Alphonso of Aragon, in order to facilitate his design of seducing his own sister; he made repeated, and at last partly successful, attempts to poison the brother of his mother and his own father, the pope.

The heartless neglect of sanitary provisions for the comfort of the poor avenges itself in epidemics that visit the abodes of wealth as well as the hovels of misery. A stall-fed preacher of our southern seaport towns may circulate a petition for the suppression of Sunday excursions, in order to prevent the recreation-needing toilers of his community from leaving town on St. Collection Day; he may advocate the arrest of bathing schoolboys, in order to suppress an undue love of physical enjoyments, or to gratify a female tithe-payer who seeks an opportunity of displaying her prudish virtue at the expense of the helpless; he may vote to suppress outdoor sports in the cool of the late evening, when the inhabitants of the tenement streets are trying to enjoy an hour of extra Sabbatarian recreation—a privilege to be reserved for the saints who can rest six days out of seven, and on the seventh harvest the fruits of other men’s labor. But epidemics refuse to recognize such distinctions, [30]and the vomit of yellow fever will force the most reverend monopolist to disgorge the proceeds of the tithes coined from the misery of consumptive factory children. Nor can wealth purchase immunity from the natural consequences of habitual vice. The dyspeptic glutton is a Tantalus who starves in the midst of abundance. The worn-out tradesman, whose restless toil in the mines of mammon has led to asthma or consumption, would vainly offer to barter half his gold for half a year of health. Thousands of families who deny themselves every recreation, who linger out the summer in the sweltering city, and toil and save “for the sake of our dear children,” have received Nature’s verdict on the wisdom of their course in the premature death of those children.

Bodily vigor is the basis of mental and physical health. Strength is power, and the instinctive love of invigorating exercise manifests itself in the young of all but the lowest brutes. The bigot who undermines the health of his children by stinting their outdoor sport as “worldly vanity,” and “exercise that profiteth but little,” is shamed by animals who lead their young in races and trials of strength. Thus the female fox will train her cubs; the doe will race and romp with her fawn, the mare with her colt. Monkeys (like the squirrels of our northern forests) can be seen running up and down a tree and leaping from branch to branch, without any conceivable purpose but the enjoyment of the exercise itself; dogs run races, young lions wrestle and paw each other in a playful trial of prowess; even birds can be seen sporting in the air, and dolphins on the play-fields of the ocean. In nearly all classes of the vertebrate animals the rivalry of the males is decided by a trial of strength, and the female unhesitatingly accepts the victor as the fittest representative of his species.

Normal children are passionately fond of athletic sports. In western Yucatan I saw Indian girls climb [34]trees with the agility of a spider-monkey, and laughingly pelt each other with the fruits of the Adansonia fig. The children of the South-sea Islanders vie in aquatic gymnastics. Spartan girls joined in the foot-races of their brothers, and by the laws of Lycurgus were not permitted to marry till they had attained a prescribed degree of proficiency in a number of athletic exercises. Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life.

The enthusiasm that gathered about the heroic games of Olympia made those festivals the brightest days in the springtime of the human race. The million-voiced cheers that hailed the victor of the pentathlon have never been heard again on earth since the manliest and noblest of all recreations were suppressed by order of a crowned bigot. The rapture of competitive athletics is a bond which can obliterate the rancor of all baser rivalries, and still unites hostile tribes in the arena of pure manhood: as in Algiers, where the Bedouins joined in the gymnastic prize-games of their French foemen: the same foemen whose banquets they would have refused to share even at the bidding of starvation. In Buda-Pesth I once [35]witnessed a performance of the German athlete Weitzel, and still remember the irrepressible enthusiasm of two broad-shouldered Turks who crowded to the edge of the platform, and, with waving kerchiefs, joined in the cheers of the uncircumcised spectators.

The “survival of the fittest” means, in many important respects, the survival of the strongest. In a state of nature weakly animals yield to their stronger rivals; the stoutest lion, the swiftest tiger, has a superior chance of obtaining prey; the stouter bulls of the herd defy the attack of the wolves who overcome the resistance of the weaker individuals; the fleetest deer has the best chance to escape the pursuit of the hunter.

A state of civilization does only apparently equalize such differences. The invention of gunpowder has armed the weak with the power of a giant; but the issue of international wars will always be biased by the comparative strength of sinew and steadiness of nerve of the men that handle those improved weapons. In the last Franco-Prussian war the French were favored by an undoubted superiority of arms, but they were utterly beaten by a nation whose sons had devoted their youth to gymnastics. The arms of the Gothic giants were of the rudest description: hunting-spears and clumsy battle-axes; but those axes broke the ranks of the Roman legionaries, with their polished swords and elaborate tactics. For the last two thousand years the wars [36]that decided the international rivalries of Asia, Europe, and North America nearly always ended with the victory of a northern nation over its southern neighbors. The men of the north could not always boast a superiority in science or arms, nor in number, nor in the advantage of a popular cause; but the rigor of their climate exacts a valiant effort in the struggle for existence, and steels the nerves even of an otherwise inferior race. “Fortis Fortuna adjuvat,” said a Roman proverb, which means literally that Fortune favors the strong, and which has been well rendered in the paraphrase of a modern translator: “Force begets fortitude and conquers fortune.” Nor is that bias of fate confined to the battles of war. In the contests of peace, too, other things being equal, the strong arm will prevail against the weak, the stout heart against the faint. Bodily strength begets self-reliance. “Blest are the strong, for they shall possess the kingdom of the earth,” would be an improved variation of the gospel text. The Germanic nations (including the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon) who have most faithfully preserved the once universal love of manly sports, have prevailed against their rivals in the arena of industry and science, as well as of war.

An American manufacturer, who established a branch of his business at Havre, France, hired American and British workmen at double wages, maintaining that he found it the cheapest plan, since one of his expensive laborers could do the work of three natives. In the seaport towns, even of South America and Southern Europe, a British sailor [37]is always at a premium. American industry is steadily forcing its way further south, and may yet come to limit the fields of its enterprise only by the boundaries of the American continent. From the smallest beginnings, a nation of iron-fisted rustics has repeatedly risen to supremacy in arms and arts. Two hundred years before the era of Norman conquests in France, Italy, and Great Britain, the natives of Norway were but a race of hardy hunters and fishermen. A century after the battle of Xeres de la Frontera, the half-savage followers of Musa and Tarik had founded high schools of science and industry. And, as the fairest flower springs from the hardy thorn, the brightest flowers of art and poetry have immortalized the lands of heroic freemen, rather than of languid dreamers. The same nation that carried the banners of freedom through the battle-storm of Marathon and Salamis, adorned its temples with the sculptures of Phidias and its literature with the masterpieces of Sophocles and Simonides.

Physical vigor is also the best guarantee of longevity. Nature exempts the children of the south from many cares; yet in the stern climes of the higher latitudes Health seems to make her favorite home; in spite of snowstorms and bitter frosts the robust Scandinavian outlives the languid Italian. In spite of a rigorous climate, I say, for that his length of life is the reward of hardy habits is proved by the not less remarkable longevity of the hardy Arab and the manful Circassian, in climes that differ from that of Norway as Mexico and Virginia differ from Labrador. Men of steeled sinews overcome disease [38]as they brave the perils of wars and the hardships of the wilderness; hospital-surgeons know how readily the semi-savages of a primitive borderland recover from injuries that would send the effeminate city-dweller to the land of the shades. Toil-hardened laborers, too, share such immunities. On the 25th of March, 1887, Thomas McGuire, the foreman of a number of laborers employed at the night-shift of the Croton Aqueduct, fell to the bottom of the pit, a distance of ninety-five feet, and was drawn up in a comatose condition, literally drenched in his own blood. At the Bellevue Hospital (city of New York) the examining surgeon found him still alive, but gave him up for lost when he ascertained the extent of his injuries. Both his arms were broken near the shoulder, both thighs were fractured, his skull was horribly shattered about the left temple and frontal region, six of his ribs were broken and their splinters driven into the lungs. There seemed no hope whatever for him, and, after the administration of an anesthetic, he was put in a cot and left alone to die. To the utter surprise of the attending surgeon, the next morning found the mass of broken bones still breathing. His fever subsided; he survived a series of desperate operations, survived an apparently fatal hemorrhage, and continued to improve from day to day, till about the middle of June he recovered his complete consciousness, and was able to sit up and answer the questions of the medical men who, in ever increasing numbers, had visited his bedside for the last three weeks. As a newspaper correspondent sums up his case: “His strong constitution had [39]repulsed the assaults of death, till finally the grim monster went away to seek a less obstinate victim.” And, moreover, the exercise of athletic sports lessens the danger of such accidents: a trained gymnast will preserve his equilibrium where a weakling would break his neck.

According to the mythus of the Nature-worshiping Greeks, the darling of Venus was a hunter (not a tailor or a hair-dresser), and the gift of beauty is, indeed, bestowed on the lovers of health-giving sports, far oftener than on the votaries of fashion. Supreme beauty is country-bred; the daughters of peasants, of village squires, of fox-hunting barons, have again and again eclipsed the galaxies of court belles. Country boys have won hearts that seemed proof against the charm of city gallants. “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” says old Mrs. Montague in Barry Cornwall’s “Table Talk,” “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.” “Women will condone many a moral blemish in a suitor,” says Arthur Schopenhauer; “they will pardon rudeness, egotism, and intellectual poverty; they will forgive even homeliness sooner than effeminacy. Instinct seems to tell them that in the result of marriage a mother’s influence can neutralize any defect but that.”

The history of Antinaturalism is the history of a persistent war against the manlier instincts of the human race. Buddha and his Galilean disciples [40]considered the body the enemy of the soul. According to their system of ethics, Nature and all natural instincts are wholly evil; the renunciation of earth and all earthly hopes is their price of salvation, and the chief endeavor of their insane zeal is directed against the interests of the human body. The gospel of Buddha Sakiamuni, and its revamp, the “New Testament” of the Galilean messiah, abound with the ravings of an anti-physical fanaticism as unknown to the ethics of the manly Hebrews as to the philosophy of the earth-loving Greeks and Romans. The duty of physical education and health-culture was entirely ignored in the gospel of the life-despising Nazarene. “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” was the ideal of the Grecian philosopher. A world-renouncing mind in a crushed body, was the ideal of the Christian moralists. The sculptors and painters of the Middle Ages vied in the representation of cadaverous saints, hollow-eyed devotees, and ghastly self-torturers. Physical training was tolerated as a secular evil indispensable for such purposes of the militant church as the hunting of heretics and the invasion of Mussulman empires; but its essential importance was vehemently disclaimed; the superior merit of sacrificing health to the interests of a body-despising soul was constantly commended, and the founders of the monastic orders that superseded the pagan schools of philosophy did not hesitate to enforce their dogmas by aggressive measures; the wretched convent slaves had to submit to weekly bleedings and strength-reducing penances; their novices were barbarously scourged for the clandestine indulgence of a lingering [41]love for health-giving sports—wrestling in the vacant halls of their cloister-prison, or racing conies on their way to their begging-grounds. The Olympic festivals were suppressed by order of a Christian emperor. The fathers of the church lost no opportunity to inveigh with rancorous invectives against the pagan culture of the manly powers, “so inimical to true contriteness of spirit and meek submission to the yoke of the gospel.” The followers of Origenes actually practiced castration as the most effectual means of taming the stubborn instincts of unregenerate boys. Their exemplar, who had recommended that plan for years, came at last to suspect the necessity of eradicating a germ of worldliness in his own mind, and proceeded to accomplish that purpose by emasculating himself. The anti-physical principle of European Buddhism manifests itself likewise in the fanaticism of the Scotch ascetics who raged against the scant physical recreations of a people already sufficiently afflicted by climatic vicissitudes and the parsimony of an indigent soil. It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school. [42]

quotes a German poet from the Vulgata, “when suddenly,” he adds, “a gaunt, blood-streaming Jew rushed in with a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross on his shoulder, which cross he dashed on the banquet table of the appalled gods, who turned paler and paler till they finally faded away into a pallid mist. And a dreary time then began; the world turned chill and bleak. The merry gods had departed; Olympus became a Golgotha, where sickly, skinned, and roasted deities sneaked about mournfully, nursing their wounds and chanting doleful hymns. Religion, once a worship of joy, became a whining worship of sorrow.”

But Nature had her revenge, and the despisers of their own bodies became so truly contemptible that in comparison the rudest barbarians of antiquity seemed respectable men. The neglect of physical exercise avenged itself in loathsome diseases, the perverted instincts exploded in vices; the monkish self-abasers became caricatures of manhood: bloated, whining, mean, and viciously sensual wretches, the laughing-stock of foreign nations and the curse and disgrace of their own. Physically, mentally, and morally, the earth-despising convent drone represented the vilest type of degeneration to which the manhood of our race has ever been degraded, and the [43]enforced veneration of such monsters, as exemplars of perfection, has perverted the ethical standards of mankind to a degree for which our present generation is as yet far from having wholly recovered. The love of athletic recreations is still smirched with the stigma of the Middle Ages; “respectability” is too often mistaken for a synonym of pedantry and conventional effeminacy; parents still frown upon the health-giving sports of their children; vice still sneaks in the disguise of saintliness and world-renouncing aversion to physical recreations.

The degeneration of many once manful races has reached an incurable phase: the listless resignation to physical abasement and decrepitude. Earth has spurned her despisers; millions of priest-slaves in southern Europe have lost the inheritance of their fathers, and have to till the soil for aliens and despots. The arbitrament of war has made them taste the lowest dregs of national humiliation; the life-long worshipers of whining saints appealed in vain to the God of Battles, and were forced to eat dust at the feet of the despised Infidel and heretic. The ships of the Spanish Armada were consecrated by a chorus of ranting priests commending them to the miraculous protection of heaven; and heaven’s answer came in the blast of the hurricane that buried their fleet in the depths of the sea. The same nation once more invoked the aid of the saints for the protection of an armament against the great naval powers of the nineteenth century. The ships were ceremoniously baptized with the most fulsomely pious names: “The Holy Savior of the World,” “Saint Maria,” “Saint [44]Joseph,” “The Most Holy Trinity,” and sent forth in full reliance on the protection of supernatural agencies. But in the encounter with Nelson’s self-relying veterans the sacred bubble at once collapsed. St. Joseph’s impotence howled in vain for the assistance of the Holy Ghost. The Savior of the World could save himself only by a shameful flight, and the Most Holy Trinity succumbed to a decided surplus of holes.

The manifestations of the sexual instinct are guided by the plain and emphatic monitions of a physical conscience, developed partly with the primordial evolution of our organism, partly by the hereditary experience transmitted during the social development of our species. The guardians of our prevailing system of ethics, too, have enforced the regulations of their added supervision with a zeal apparently justified by the importance of its purpose; but an analysis of those regulations strikingly illustrates the perils of abandoning the plain path of Nature, to follow the vagaries of hyper-physical dogmatists. The Nature-guided bias of sexual intuitions refers to time, selection, and circumstantial restrictions. The control of our clerical moralists ignores the first and second law of modification, while their recognition of [46]the third involves a large number of irrelevant and irrational precepts.

In a state of nature, instinct and circumstances coöperate in the prevention of sexual precocity. Active exercise furnishes a vent to those potential energies which physical sloth forces to explode in sensual excesses. The adult males of all species of vertebrate animals fiercely resent the encroachments of immature rivals. Savages postpone their nuptials to a period of life when the possession of property or prestige enables them to undertake the adequate support of a family. In countries where both sexes spend a large portion of their time in outdoor occupations, precocious prurience is very rare. In the pastoral highlands of the Austrian Alps (Styria, Salzburg, and the Tyrol), boys and girls meet only at church festivals, but enjoy their amusements apart, the girls in dances and singing-picnics; the boys in shooting-matches, foot-races, and mountain excursions. A lad under eighteen caught in flirtations is at once laughed back to manlier pastimes, while girls even more jealously guard the exclusiveness of their festivals, and would chase away an intrusive bachelor as promptly as a trespassing boy. Lycurgus fixes the marriageable age of a groom at thirty years, of a bride at twenty. Among the martial Visigoths thirty and twenty-five years were the respective minima.

The importance of limiting the license of precocious passion has never been directly denied, but the significance of the instinct of sexual selection seems to have been unaccountably misunderstood. Marriages [47]without the sanction, and even against the direct protest, of that instinct are constantly encouraged. “Love matches,” in the opinion of thousands of Christian parents, seem to be thought fit only for the characters of a sentimental romance, or the heroes of the stage. The overpowering sway of a passion which asserts its claims against all other claims whatever ought sufficiently to proclaim the importance of its purpose and the absurdity of the mistake which treats its appeals as a matter of frivolous fancy.

And, in fact, only the universality of that passion transcends the importance of its direction. For, while the sexual instinct, per se, guarantees the perpetuation of the species, the instinct of selection refers to the composition of the next generation, of which it thus determines the quality as the other determines the quantity. And just as the vital powers of the individual organism strive back from disease to health, the genius of the species seeks to reëstablish the perfection of the type, and to neutralize the effects of degenerating influences. We accordingly find that the individuals of each sex seek the complement of their own defects. Small women prefer tall men; fickle men worship strong-minded women; dark grooms select fair brides; practical business men are attracted by romantic girls; city belles admire a rustic Hercules, and vice versa. Exceptional intensity of mutual passion denotes exceptional fitness of the contemplated union, or rather the results of that union; for, here as elsewhere, Nature, in a choice of consequences, will sacrifice [48]the interests of individuals to the interests of the species. Passionate love, accordingly, is ever ready to attain its purpose at the price of the temporary advantages of life, nay, of life itself; and the voluntary renunciation of such advantage is, therefore, in the truest sense a self-sacrifice for the benefit of posterity, a surrender of personal interests to the welfare of the species. In spite of the far-gone perversion of our ethical standards, we accordingly find an instinctive recognition of such truth in the popular verdict that applauds heroic loyalty to a higher law when lovers break the fetters of sordid interest or caste restrictions. In their hearts, the very flatterers condemn the decision of a bride who has sacrificed love to wealth, even in obedience to a parental mandate, or the monitions of Nature-estranged moralists.

In extremes of adverse circumstances, love itself, however, will often voluntarily withdraw its claim. Hopeless inequality of station, disease, and irremediable disabilities will extinguish the flame of a passion that would have defied time and torture. A lover struck with a cureless malady will shrink from transmitting his affliction; a proud barbarian will refuse to make a refined bride the witness of his humiliations. The perils of consanguinity may reveal themselves to a sort of hereditary (if not aboriginal) instinct; and the discovery of an unsuspected relationship has more than once deadened desire as if by magic, and turned love into self-possessed friendship. [49]

In the oldest chronicle of the human race the historian of the patriarchs has preserved a genealogical record which seems to have been transmitted for the special purpose of showing the casual connection of continence and longevity. That record (the fifth chapter of Genesis) states the age and the marriage date of the progenitors of ten different generations, with a regularly correspondent decrease of period in both respects, from the first to the sixth, when both increase in a single instance and then decrease to the end of the list. The lessons of that record might be read in every branch of every genealogical chronicle from Noah to the latest posterity of his sons. In all countries, among all nations of all times, premature courtship has courted premature death. Continence during the years of development rewards itself in health and vigor, both of body and of mind. Success in every line of endeavor is the reward of reserved strength. That strength becomes available in the needs of after years, and is the chief basis of that love of independence and impatience of tyranny found only among manful and continent nations. The love of the gentlest females is reserved for the manliest males of their species, while precocious coveters of such prizes meet with humiliations and disappointments. Those who forbear to anticipate the promptings of Nature can rely on the favor of her undiminished aid; and to such only is given the power of that “love that spurs to exertions.”

And if marriages are planned in heaven, that [50]heaven manifests its will in the appeals of love, and not in the counsels of avarice or expedience. If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature.

The enemies of Nature have not failed to pervert an instinct which they could not wholly suppress. That this suppression was actually attempted in the first outbreak of antinatural insanity is abundantly proved by the history of the early Christian sects, the Novatians, the Marcionites, and the followers of self-mutilating Origenes. Absolute abstinence from sexual intercourse was made the chief text of “unworldliness.” Novices were brought up in strict seclusion; mutilation was the usual penalty of violated vows, but was also practiced as an à-priori safeguard against the awakening of the sexual instinct. St. Clemens of Alexandria, one of the few semi-rational leaders of the patristic era, gives an appalling account of the consequences of those crimes against Nature, and vehemently denounces the fatuous dogma, which was nevertheless only modified, but never wholly renounced, by the moralists of a church whose ethics were undoubtedly derived from the physical nihilism [51]of Buddha Sakiamuni. The Galilean apostle of Antinaturalism indirectly inculcates the superior merit of suppression in his allusions to “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake,” and the saints “who neither marry nor are given in marriage,” as well as in the example of his personal asceticism; and Paul distinctly informs us that marriage is only a lesser evil, a compromise with the passions of the unregenerate, which perfect virtue should forbear to gratify: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman; nevertheless to avoid …,” etc. Such dogmas bore their natural fruit in the society-shunning fanaticism of hermits and anchorites; in aberrations à la Origenes, and in that dreadful source of unnatural vice, the enforced celibacy of monks and priests.

In the philosophy of those moralists, the physical interests of mankind were of no moment whatever. The church that burnt nuns and priests for yielding to the power of an irrepressible instinct, has in millions of cases sanctioned the nuptials of immature minors and the nature-insulting unions of avarice and flunkeyism. For the sake of a small fee it has encouraged the marriage of reluctant paupers, but howled its anathemas against the unions of orthodox Christians with gentiles, Jews, or Christian dissenters. Thus encouraged, Christian parents have not hesitated to sacrifice the highest interests of their children and children’s children to considerations of “expedience.” In Spanish America thousands of baby-brides—girls of twelve and thirteen; nay, even of ten years—are delivered to the marital tyranny of wealthy old debauchees; in France, Italy, and Austria [52]millions of mutually reluctant boys and girls are compelled to wed in obedience to the decision of a business committee of relatives and panders. In the cities of the northland nations marriages of expedience, though rarer, are still of daily occurrence. “Whatever is natural is wrong,” was the shibboleth of the medieval dogmatists, and the protests of instinct were suppressed in the name of morality.

Next to dietetic abuses, premature and unfit marriage is undoubtedly the most fruitful cause of the degeneration of the human species. The penalties of Nature, which every husbandman knows to avoid in the case of his cattle, are recklessly risked by parents and guardians of helpless children—perhaps in the vague hope that the normal consequences might be averted by the intercession of supernatural agencies. But miracles have ceased to suspend the operation of Nature’s laws, and it would not be an over-estimate to say that a hundred million Christians annually incur the penalty of moral or physical sufferings and premature death, as a retribution of their own or their parents’ outrages against the laws of the sexual instinct. Premature intercourse of the sexes stunts the further development of the organism and entails physical defects on the offspring of a series of successive generations. Puny, weakly, and scrofulous children people the cities of southern Europe from Havre to Messina, though infant mortality has assumed proportions which partly counteract [53]the evil by the sternest of Nature’s remedies. Our fatuous modes of indoor education, combined with the influence of a stimulating diet (meat, pepper-sauces, and coffee, instead of fruit, bread, and milk) systematically promote premature prurience. Our school-boys are thus driven to vices of which they know neither the name nor the physiological significance, though, like the victims of convent-life, they suffer the consequences—

with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolute ne plus ultra of imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:

Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.
(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)

The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries [54]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.

Instinct is hereditary experience. The lessons derived from the repetition of pleasant or painful impressions have been transmitted from an infinite number of generations, till impending dangers have come to proclaim themselves by instinctive dread, opportune benefits by instinctive desire. The shudder that warns us to recede from the brink of a steep cliff is felt even by persons who have never personally experienced the peril of falling from the rocks of a precipice. Mountain breezes are more attractive than swamp odors; the fumes of a foul dungeon warn off a child who has had as yet no opportunity to ascertain the danger of breathing contaminated air. A few years ago I bought a pet fox, with a litter of cubs, who were soon after orphaned by the escape of their mother. They had to be fed by hand; and, among other proceeds of a forage, my neighbor’s boy once brought them a bundle of lizards, and a dead rattlesnake. For the possession of those lizards there was at once an animated fight, but at sight of the serpent the little gluttons turned tail and retreated to the farther end of their kennel. They were not a month old when I bought them, and could not possibly have seen a rattlesnake before or known the effects of its bite from personal experience; but instinct at once informed them that an encounter with a reptile of that sort had brought some of their forefathers to grief. [57]

The vegetable kingdom, that provides food for nine-tenths of all living creatures, abounds with an endless variety of edible fruits, seeds, and herbs, but also with injurious and even deadly products, often closely resembling the favorite food-plants of animals; which in a state of Nature are nevertheless sure to avoid mistake, and select their food by a faculty of recognizing differences that might escape the attention even of a trained botanist. The chief medium of that faculty is the sense of smell in the lower, and the sense of taste in the higher animals. In monkeys, for instance, the olfactory organs are rather imperfectly developed, and I have often seen them peel an unknown fruit with their fingers and then cautiously raise it to their lips and rub it to and fro before venturing to bring their teeth into play. The preliminary test, however, always sufficed to decide the question in a couple of seconds. The Abyssinian mountaineers who catch baboons by fuddling them with plum brandy have to disguise the taste of the liquor with a large admixture of syrup before they can deceive the warning instincts of their victims. Where copper mines discharge their drainage into a water-course, deer and other wild animals have been known to go in quest of distant springs rather than quench their thirst with the polluted water.

That protective instincts of that sort are shared even by the lowest animals is proved by the experiment of the philosopher Ehrenberg, who put a drop of alcohol into a bottle of pond water, and under the lens of his microscope saw a swarm of infusoria precipitate themselves to the bottom of the vessel. [58]

Animals in a state of Nature rarely or never eat to an injurious excess; the apparent surfeits of wolves, serpents, vultures, etc., alternate with long fasts, and are digested as easily as a hunter, after missing his breakfast and dinner, would be able to digest an abundant supper. Instinct indicates even the most propitious time for indulging in repletion. The noon heat of a midsummer day seems to suspend the promptings of appetite; cows can be seen resting drowsily at the foot of a shade-tree; deer doze in mountain glens and come out to browse in moonlight; panthers cannot afford to miss an opportunity to slay their game at noon, but are very apt to hide the carcass and come back to devour it in the cool of the evening.

The products of fermentation are so repulsive to the higher animals that only the distress of actual starvation would tempt a monkey to touch a rotten apple or quench his thirst with acidulated grape-juice. Poppy fields need no fence; tobacco leaves are in no danger of being nibbled by browsing cattle. Nature seems to have had no occasion for providing instinctive safeguards against such out-of-the-way things as certain mineral poisons; yet the taste of arsenic, though not violently repulsive (like that of the more common, and therefore more dangerous, vegetable poisons), is certainly not attractive, but rather insipid, and a short experience seems to supplement the defects of instinct in that respect. Trappers know that poisoned baits after a while lose their seductiveness, and old rats have been seen [59]driving their young from a dish of arsenic-poisoned gruel.

Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclination to seek arsenic or alcohol for its own sake, and there is no reason to suppose that man, in that respect, differs from every known species of his fellow-creatures. Our clerical temperance lecturers rant about “the lusts of the unregenerate heart,” the “weakness of the flesh,” the “danger of yielding to the promptings of appetite,” as if Nature herself would tempt us to our ruin, and the path of safety could be learned only from preternatural revelation. But the truth is that to the palate of a child, even the child of a habitual drunkard, the taste of alcohol is as repulsive as that of turpentine or bitterwood. Tobacco fumes and the stench of burning opium still nauseate the children of the habitual smoker as they would have nauseated the children of the patriarchs. The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine by vertigo and sick headaches; the first glass of beer is rejected by the revolt of the stomach; the fauces contract and writhe against the first dram of brandy. Nature records her protest in the most unmistakable language of instinct, and only the repeated and continued disregard of that protest at last begets the abnormal craving of that poison-thirst which clerical blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our natural appetites. They might as well make us believe in a natural passion for dungeon air, because the prisoners of the Holy Inquisition at last lost their love of liberty and came to prefer the stench of their subterranean [60]black-holes to the breezes of the free mountains.

The craving for hot spices, for strong meats, and such abominations as fetid cheese and fermented cabbage have all to be artificially acquired; and in regard to the selection of our proper food the instincts of our young children could teach us more than a whole library of ascetic twaddle. Not for the sake of “mortifying the flesh,” but on the plain recommendation of the natural senses that prefer palatable to disgusting food, the progeny of Adam could be guided in the path of reform and learn to avoid forbidden fruit by the symptoms of its forbidding taste.

There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians made it a rule that the guests of their banquets must get drunk on pain of expulsion. To let anyone remain sober, they argued, would not be just to the befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be tempted to take all sorts of advantage. If the evils of drunkenness were undeserved afflictions, it would certainly be true that sobriety would give an individual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his fellow-men. He would be an archer trying his skill against hoodwinked rivals, a runner challenging the speed of shackled competitors. There is not a mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety does not give a man the advantage which health and freedom confer over crippling disease. For the baneful effects of intemperance are by no means limited [61]to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on the half-lucid intervals, and even on the after years of the reformed toper. Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food and drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit, and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers with the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance prolongs that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone the demon of life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest tribulation: Undimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of sunshine behind the cloudy. The prisoners of the outlawed Circassian insurgents admitted that, in spite of hunger, hardships, and constant danger, their captors contrived to enjoy life better than their enemies in the brandy-reeking abundance of their headquarters. The myth of the Lotos-eaters described a nation of vegetarians who passed life so pleasantly that visitors refused to leave them, and renounced their native lands. The religion of Mohammed makes abstinence from intoxicating drinks a chief duty of a true believer, and that law alone has prevented the physical degeneration of his followers. With all their mental sloth and the enervating influence of their harem life, the Turks are still the finest representatives of physical manhood. At the horse [62]fairs of Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-shouldered, proud-eyed rustics, whose appearance contrasted strangely with that of the sluggish boors and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives. After twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars, alternating with periods of luxury and tempting wealth, the descendants of the Arabian conquerors are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far superior to the rum-drinking foreigners of their coast towns. For more than six hundred years the temperate Moriscos held their own in war and peace against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic descent gave them no natural advantage over their Caucasian rivals; but they entered the arena of life with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in an age of universal superstition made their country a garden of science and industry. Their cities offered a refuge to the scholars and philosophers of three continents, and in hundreds of pitched battles their indomitable valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of their adversaries.

Frugality has cured diseases which defied all other remedies. For thousands of reformed gluttons it has made life worth living, after the shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the sixteenth century, had impaired his health by gastronomic excesses till his physicians despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he resolved to try a complete change of diet. His father, his uncles, and two of his brothers had all died before the attainment of their fiftieth year; but [63]Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of unnaturalism, and at once reduced his daily allowance of meat to one-tenth of the usual quantity, and his wine to a stint barely sufficient to flavor a cup of Venetian cistern-water. After a month of his new regimen he regained his appetite. After ten weeks he found himself able to take long walks without fatigue, and could sleep without being awakened by nightmare horrors. At the end of a year all the symptoms of chronic indigestion had left him, and he resolved to make the plan of his cure the rule of his life. That life was prolonged to a century—forty years of racking disease followed by sixty years of unbroken health, undimmed clearness of mind, unclouded content. Habitual abstinence from unnatural food and drink saves the trials of constant self-control and the alternative pangs of repentance. “Blessed are the pure, for they can follow their inclinations with impunity.”

The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition. Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster enacts laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-juice from a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the nations of Iran, to the Parsees, and to the [64]first agricultural colonists of the lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have planted vineyards on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of Bacchus was introduced into Asia Minor several centuries before the birth of Homer. The origin of the opium habit antedates the earliest records of Chinese history; for immemorial ages the Tartars have been addicted to the use of Koumis (fermented mare’s milk), the Germanic nations to beer, the natives of Siam to tea and sago-wine. Intoxication and the excessive use of animal food were prevalent vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan Greece and Rome.

Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—in distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a “Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but the most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden to children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated the fate of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of intoxicating drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband. Lycurgus recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of public opinion [65]always respected the emulation of patriarchal frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.

But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those safeguards. Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts formed the keystone of the Galilean dogma. The importance of physical welfare was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay, by the association of that practice with the rites of a religious sacrament. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation—even of a fever-dream—at the expense of the body, agreed perfectly with the tendencies of a Nature-despising fanaticism, and during the long night of the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every one of the thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a vineyard and a wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand, and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal vice. As it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing the seeds of bodily diseases [66]which their system of ethics welcomed as conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.

Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes found their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath almost an unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from Saturday night to Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain excursions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields, were not permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic excesses, however, escaped control, and thus became the general outlet for the cruelly suppressed craving for a diversion from the deadly monotony of drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will have her revenge, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone, … and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations was found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky, “who considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced himself that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths of vice.” [67]

Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as the only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness of their misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that instinct has avenged itself by its perversion.

Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes drives our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become the Lethe in which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their misery. The curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to the grave, and for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens of life to outweigh its blessings. There is a doubt if the “years” of Genesis should be understood in the present meaning of the word; but historians and biologists agree that the average longevity of our race has been enormously reduced within the last twenty centuries, and intemperance is the chief cause of that decrease. Our average stature has been reduced even below that of the ancient natives of an enervating climate, like that of the lower Nile, as proved by D’Arnaud’s measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On our own continent, outdoor life in the struggle with the [68]perils of the wilderness has somewhat redeemed our loss of physical manhood; but what are the men of modern Europe compared with their iron-fisted ancestors, the athletic Greeks, the world-conquering Romans, the Scandinavian giants, the heroic Visigoths? Like a building collapsing under the progress of a devouring fire, the structure of the human body has shrunk under the influence of the poison-habit; and there is no doubt that the moral vigor of our race has undergone a corresponding impairment—appreciable in spite of the recent revival of intellectual activity and the constant increase of general information.

The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are awakening to the significance of their delusion; the power of public opinion has forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join the crusade of the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a chief problem of civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is too deeply rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the task of redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of the wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore. The statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the abolition of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms needed to turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that waste expresses only the indirect [69]and smaller part of the damage caused by the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and happiness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended in the purchase of disease were devoted to the promotion of arson and robbery, the utmost possible extent of the consequent mischief would probably fall short of the present result. The stimulant habit in all its forms clouds the sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-vapor. Alcohol undermines the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks foster a complication of nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair the vigor of the cerebral functions. The excessive use of animal food, too, avenges itself in all sorts of moral and physical disorders. It inflames passions which no prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all theology against a diet of bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the Sioux missions; and the almost exclusive use of flesh food has, indeed, afflicted our Indians with the truculence of carnivorous beasts. The same cause has produced the same effects in western Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain delighted in matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors in the butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-baits and Tyburn spectacles.

In the arena of life animal instinct triumphs over the elemental forces of Nature, as human intelligence triumphs over instinct, and the secret of that superiority is knowledge. Skill is well-directed force. Prudence is well-applied reason. The efficiency of that directing faculty depends on experience, as we call the accumulation of recollected facts. Knowledge is stored light, as helpful in the narrowest as in the widest sphere of conscious activity, and the instinctive appreciation of that advantage manifests itself in the lowest species of vertebrate animals, nay, perhaps even in the winged insects that swarm in from near and far to explore the mystery of a flickering torch. Curiosity, rather than the supposed love of rhythm, tempts the serpent to leave its den at the sound of the conjurer’s flute. Dolphins are thus attracted by the din of a kettledrum, river-fish by the glare of a moving light. Where deer abound, a pitchwood fire, kindled in a moonless night, is sure to allure them from all parts of the forest. Antelope hunters can entice their game within rifle-shot by [86]fastening a red kerchief to a bush and letting it flutter in the breeze. When the first telegraph lines crossed the plateau of the Rocky Mountains, herds of bighorn sheep were often seen trotting along the singing wires as if anxious to ascertain the meaning of the curious innovation. Every abnormal change in the features of a primitive landscape—the erection of a lookout-tower, a clearing in the midst of a primeval forest—attracts swarms of inquisitive birds, even crows and shy hawks, who seem to recognize the advantage of reconnoitering the topography of their hunting-grounds. In some of the higher animals inquisitiveness becomes too marked to mistake its motive, as when a troop of colts gathers about a new dog, or a pet monkey pokes his head into a cellar-hole, and wears out his finger-nails to ascertain the contents of a brass rattle.

For the intelligence of children, too, inquisitiveness is a pretty sure test. Infants of ten months may be seen turning their eyes toward a new piece of furniture in their nursery. Kindergarten pets of three years have been known to pick up a gilded pebble from the gravel road and call their teacher’s attention to the color of the abnormal specimen. With a little encouragement that faculty of observation may develop surprising results. The wife of a Mexican missionary of my acquaintance, who had taken charge of an Indian orphan boy, and made a point of answering every pertinent question of the bright-eyed youngster, was one day surprised to hear him usher in a stranger and invite him to a seat in the parlor. “How could you know it was not a tramp?” she asked her little [87]chamberlain after the visitor had left. “Oh, I could tell by his clean finger-nails,” said Master Five-years, “and also by his straight shoes. Tramps always get their heels crooked!”

The shrewd remarks of boy naturalists and girl satirists often almost confirm the opinion of Goethe that every child has the innate gifts of genius, and that subsequent differences are only the result of more or less propitious educational influences. And in spite of most discouraging circumstances, the love of knowledge sometimes revives in after years with the energy almost of a passionate instinct. On the veranda of a new hotel in a railroad town of southern Texas, I once noticed the expression of rapt interest on the face of a young hunter, a lad of eighteen or nineteen, who here for the first time came in contact with the representatives of a higher civilization and with breathless attention drank in the conversation of two far-traveled strangers. “If they would hire me for a dog-robber (a low menial), I would do it for a dime a day,” he muttered, “just for the chance to hear them talk.”

“But if they should take you to some smoky, crowded, big city?”

“I don’t care,” said he, with an oath, “I would let them lock me up in a jail, if I could get an education like theirs.”

It would, indeed, be a mistake to suppose that the thirst for mental development is the exclusive product of advanced culture. In the thinly settled highlands of our western territories, miners and herders have been known to travel ten miles a day [88]over rough mountain roads to get the rudiments of a school education. Missionaries who have mastered the language of a barbarous tribe have more than once been followed by converts whom the charm of general knowledge (far more than any special theological motive) impelled to forsake the home of their fathers and follow the white stranger to the land of his omniscient countrymen.

Knowledge is power, even in the contests of brutes. Superior topographical knowledge enables the chasing wolf to intercept the flight of his game; a well-chosen ambush makes the tiger the master of his would-be slayer. Familiarity with the habits of enemies and rivals decides success in the struggle for existence.

The advantage of superior knowledge is not limited to the prestige of superlative scholarship, but asserts itself in the chances of every competitive pursuit, so infallibly, indeed, as to justify Diderot’s paradox that there is no need of any such thing as love of science for its own sake, since all knowledge repays its acquisition by collateral benefits. A farmer’s boy studying statute law, a lawyer collecting market reports, will sooner or later find a chance to profit by their study. The infinite interaction of human affairs connects the interests of all branches of human knowledge, and makes the humblest handicraft amenable to scientific improvement. Knowledge has never hindered the successful pursuit of any manual vocation. Fifty years ago several states of the [89]American Union made it a penal offense to teach a slave reading and writing; and if the planter valued his laborers in proportion to their canine submissiveness, he was perhaps right that “education spoils a nigger.” It qualified his servility, and by making him a better man, made him perhaps a less available dog. But with that single exception, ignorance is a disadvantage, and knowledge an advantage, both to its possessor and his employers. In the solitudes of the Australian bush-land, Frederick Gerstäcker found a herdsman reading Aristophanes in the original. Neither the sheep nor their owners were any the worse for that incidental accomplishment of the poor shepherd, who found his study a sufficient source of pastime, while his comrades were apt to drown their ennui in bad rum. James Cook, the greatest of modern maritime discoverers, served his apprenticeship on board of a coal-barge and employed his leisure in studying works on geography and general history. The knowledge thus acquired might seem of no direct advantage, but three years after, on board of the Eagle frigate, the erudition of the brawny young sailor soon attracted the attention of two intelligent officers whose recommendations proved the stepping-stones of his successful career. Mohammed Baber Khan, the emperor of the Mogul empire, owed his triumphs to his topographical studies of a region which afterward became the battleground of his great campaigns. Mohammed the Prophet gained the confidence of his first employer by his familiarity with the commercial customs of neighboring nations. Superior knowledge [90]compels even an unwilling recognition of its prestige. In the Middle Ages, when Moslems and Trinitarians were at daggers drawn, Christian kings sent respectful embassies to solicit the professional advice of Ibn Rushd (“Averroes”), the Moorish physician. During the progress of the life-and-death struggle of France and Great Britain, the discoveries of Sir Humphrey Davy impelled the Academie Française to send their chief prize to England. The benefits of great inventions are too international to leave room for that envy that pursues the glory of military heroes, and the triumphs of science have often united nations whom a unity of religion had failed to reconcile.

There is a tradition that a year before the conversion of Constantine the son of the prophetess Sospitra was praying in the temple of Serapis, when the spirit of his mother came over him and the veil of the future was withdrawn. “Woe to our children!” he exclaimed, when he awakened from his trance, “I see a cloud approaching, a great darkness is going to spread over the face of the world.” That darkness proved a thirteen hundred years’ eclipse of common sense and reason. There is a doubt if the total destruction of all cities of the civilized world could have struck a more cruel blow to Science than the dogma of salvation by faith and abstinence from the pursuit of free inquiry. The ethics of the world-renouncing fanatic condemned the love of secular knowledge as they condemned the love of health and the pursuit of physical prosperity, and the children [91]of the next fifty generations were systematically trained to despise the highest attribute of the human spirit. Spiritual poverty became a test of moral worth; philosophers and free inquirers were banished, while mental castrates were fattened at the expense of toiling rustics and mechanics; science was dreaded as an ally of skepticism, if not of the arch-fiend in person; the suspicion of sorcery attached to the cultivation of almost any intellectual pursuit, and the Emperor Justinian actually passed a law for the “suppression of mathematicians.”

When the tyranny of the church reached the zenith of its power, natural science became almost a tradition of the past. The pedants of the convent schools divided their time between the forgery of miracle legends and the elaboration of insane dogmas. The most extravagant absurdities were propagated under the name of historical records; medleys of nursery-tales and ghost-stories which the poorest village school-teacher of pagan Rome would have rejected with disgust were gravely discussed by so-called scholars. Buckle, in his “History of Civilization,” quotes samples of such chronicles which might be mistaken for products of satire, if abundant evidence of contemporary writers did not prove them to have been the current staple of medieval science.

When the gloom of the dreadful night was broken by the first gleam of modern science, every torch-bearer was persecuted as an incendiary. Astronomers were forced to recant their heresies on their bended knees. Philosophers were caged like wild beasts. Religious skeptics were burnt at the stake, as [92]enemies of God and the human race. It was, indeed, almost impossible to enunciate any scientific axiom that did not conflict with the dogmas of the revelation-mongers who had for centuries subordinated the evidence of their own senses to the rant of epileptic monks and maniacs. And when the sun of Reason rose visibly above the horizon of the intellectual world, its rays struggled distorted through the dense mist of superstition which continued to brood over the face of the earth, and was only partially dispersed even by the storms of the Protestant revolt.

The light of modern science has brought its blessings only to the habitants of the social highlands; the valley dwellers still grope their way through the gloom of inveterate superstitions and prejudices, and centuries may pass before the world has entirely emerged from the shadow of the life-blighting cloud which the son of Sospitra recognized in the rise of the Galilean delusion.

Of all the sins of Antinaturalism, the suppression of human reason has brought down the curse of the direst retribution. It is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit. The actual extinction of their local sunshine could hardly have entailed greater misery upon the slaves of the Christian church. The victims of a permanent Egyptian darkness might have taken refuge in the Goshen of their neighbors, in the sunny garden-homes of the Parsees and Spanish Moriscos, but the jealousy of the clerical tyrants closed every [93]gate of escape, and for thirteen centuries the nations of Christian Europe suffered all the horrors of enforced ignorance and superstition. The history of that dismal night is, indeed, the darkest page in the records of the human race, and its horrors bind the duties of every sane survivor to a war of extermination upon the dogmas of the insane fanatic whose priests turned the paradise of southern Europe into a hell of misery and barbarism.

The battle against the demon of darkness became a struggle for existence, in which the powers of Nature at last prevailed, but for millions of our fellow-men the day of deliverance has dawned too late; spring-time and morning returned in vain for many a once fertile land where the soil itself had lost its reproductive power, where the outrages of Antinaturalism had turned gardens into deserts and freemen into callous slaves. The storm that awakened the nations of northern Europe from the dreams of their poison-fever could not break the spell of a deeper slumber, and the moral desert of the Mediterranean coast-lands remains to warn the nations of the future, as the bleaching bones of a perished caravan remain to warn the traveler from the track of the simoom.

The religion of Mohammed, with its health-laws and encouragements to martial prowess, has produced no ruinous results of physical degeneration, but the entire neglect of mental culture has not failed to avenge itself in the loss of national prestige. For after the northern nations of Christendom had broken the yoke of their spiritual tyrants, the children [94]of Islam remained faithful to the task-masters of their less grievous bondage, but also to its total indifference to secular science, and from that day the crescent of the prophet became a waning moon.

If the scale of precedence in the mental development of our fellow-creatures can be determined by any single test, that test is the instinctive love of Independence. Many of the lower animals may surprise us by constructive achievements that rival the products of human science, but their instinct of freedom is quite imperfectly developed. The caterpillar [96]of the silk-moth will spin its satin winter-gown in a box full of mulberry leaves as skilfully as in the freedom of the tropical forests. In the hive of their captor a swarm of wild bees will continue to build hexagons and store up honey as diligently as in the rocks or hollow trees of the wilderness. Captive river-fish will eat and pair a day after their transfer to a fishpond. Birds, on the other hand, mourn their lost liberty for weeks. During the first half-month of its captivity, a caged hawk rarely accepts any food; sea-birds and eagles starve with a persistence as if they were thus trying to end an affliction from which they see no other way of escape. Wild cows can be domesticated in a month; wild elephants hardly in a year. Several species of the larger carnivora can be trained only if caught in their cub-hood, as in after years they become almost wholly untamable. The lower varieties of quadrumana, the Brazilian capuchin monkeys and East Indian macaques, seem almost to invite capture by the frequency of their visits to the neighborhood of human dwellings, while the apes proper are, without any exception, the shyest creatures of the virgin woods. The gorilla is so rarely seen in the vicinity of human settlements that its very existence was long considered doubtful. Sir Stamford Raffles asserts that at the distant sound of an ax the orang of Sumatra at once abandons its favorite haunts in the coast jungles. On the west coast of Borneo a large orang was once surprised by the crew of an English trading-vessel, but fought with a desperation that obliged its would-be captors to riddle it with rifle-balls, though they knew that a [97]living specimen of that size would be worth its weight in silver.

That same resolution in defense of their liberties has always distinguished the nobler from the baser tribes of the human race. The natives of the Gambia Valley have no hesitation in selling their relatives to the Portuguese slave-traders, while the liberation of a single countryman (whom the enemy had determined to hold as a hostage) impelled the Circassian highlanders to risk their lives in a series of desperate assaults upon the ramparts of a Russian frontier post. The hope of covering the retreat of their fleeing wives and children inspired the heroes of Thermopylæ to make a stand against six-thousandfold odds. The crimps of the Christian church-despots found no difficulty in foisting their yoke upon the former vassals of the Roman empire, but when they attempted to cross the border of the Saxon Landmark, the kidnappers were slain like rabid wolves; and when the neighboring ruffian-counts, and at last Charlemagne in person, marched to the support of the clerical slave-hunters, they met with a resistance the record of which will forever remain the proudest page in the chronicle of the Germanic races. Cornfields were burnt, villages were leveled with the ground; for hundreds of miles the means of human subsistence were utterly destroyed; but the council of the Saxon chieftains refused to submit, and when the homes of their forefathers were devastated, they carried their children to the inaccessible wilds of the Harz highlands, where they grimly welcomed the aid of the winter snows, and defied frost [98]and starvation, rather than crawl to cross (zu Kreuze kriechen), as their vernacular stigmatized the cowardice of their crucifix-kissing neighbors. And when the Frankish autocrat had shackled their land with a chain of forts, they thrice rebelled with persistent disregard of consequences; nay, after the loss of the last murderous battle, the prisoners of war refused to accept the ultimatum of the conqueror, and rather than crawl to cross four thousand of their captive noblemen mounted the scaffold of the executioner on the market-square of Quedlinburg. The bodies of the heroes were thrown to the birds of the wilderness; but their deathless spirits revived in the philippics of Martin Luther and the battle-shout of Lützen and Oudenaarde, and will yet ride the storm destined to hurl the last cross from the temples of the Germanic nations.

Since the dawn of history the lands of freedom have produced fruits and flowers that refused to thrive on any other soil. For several centuries civilization was confined to a small country of republics: Attic and Theban Greece. “Study the wonders of that age,” says Byron to his friend Trelawney, “and compare them with the best ever done under masters.” Switzerland, in spite of its rocky soil, has for centuries been the happiest, as well as the freest, country of Europe. The prosperity of the United States of America, since the establishment of their independence, stands unparalleled in the history of the last eighteen hundred years; and, moreover, the degree of that [99]prosperity has been locally proportioned to the degree of social freedom, and has begun to become general only since the general abolition of slavery. Freedom blesses the poorest soil, as despotism blights the most fertile, and it is only an apparent exception from that rule that Italy continued to flourish during the first two centuries of the empire. The change in the form of government was at first nominal, rather than real, and under the rule of Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, Rome enjoyed more real liberty than many a so-called republic of modern times. When despotism became a systematic and chronic actuality, the sun of fortune was soon eclipsed, and the social climate became as unfavorable to art and literature as to valor and patriotism.

Personal independence is a not less essential condition of individual happiness. Bondage in any form, and of silken or gilded, as well as of iron, fetters, is incompatible with the development of the highest mental and moral faculties. The genius of Poland and modern Italy has produced its best fruit in exile. The progress of modern civilization dates only from the time when knowledge once more flourished in a Republic of Letters; and for a thousand years the monastery system of medieval literature produced hardly a single work of genius. Within the period of the last three or four generations the sun of freedom has ripened better and more abundant fruit in any single decade than the dungeon-air of despotism during a series of centuries. All foreign travelers agree in admiring (or condemning) [100]the early mental development of American children, who have a chance to exercise their intellectual faculties in an area untrammeled by the barriers of caste divisions and social restraints. They may yield to the pupils of the best European colleges in special branches of scholarship, but in common sense, general intelligence, general information, in self-respect, in practical versatility and self-dependence, an American boy of twelve is, as a rule, more than a match for a continental-European boy of sixteen; and the same holds good of the average intelligence and self-dependence of our country population. With the rarest exceptions the political economists of our Southern states agree that the agricultural negro as a freeman is a more valuable laborer than as a slave, and that emancipation, in the long run, has benefited the planter as well as his serf. I venture even to add the verdict of Professor Hagenbeck, the founder of the great zoölogical supply depot, that menagerie-trainers of the least despotic methods are the most successful. Turf-men know that the best horses do not come from the unequaled perennial pastures of the lower Danube, but from England and Araby, where pet colts enjoy almost the freedom of a pet child.

The ethics of Anti-naturalism include the Buddhistic doctrine of self-abasement, as an indispensable condition of salvation. That salvation meant extinction, the utter renunciation of earthly hopes and desires, the mortification of all natural instincts, including [101]the instinct of freedom. Abject submission to injustice, the subordination of reason to dogma, the sinfulness of rebellion against the “powers that be,” were inculcated with a zeal that made the church an invaluable ally of despotism. For centuries a scepter combining the form of a cross and a bludgeon was the significant emblem of tyranny. With the aid, nay, in the name, of the Christian hierarchy, the despots of the Middle Ages elaborated a system of subordination of personal freedom to autocratic caprices, which, by comparison, makes the tyranny of the Cæsars a model of liberalism. Every important function of social and domestic life was subjected to the control of arbitrary functionaries, armed with irresponsible power or with a system of oppressive penal by-laws. Censors suppressed every symptom of visible or audible protest. Every school was a prison, every judgment-seat a star-chamber. Peasants and mechanics had no voice in the councils of their rulers. The merit of official employees was measured by the degree of their flunkeyism. But the ne-plus-ultras of physical and moral despotism were combined in the slavery of the monastic convents. The attempt of reviving the outrages which abbots for centuries practiced on the unfortunates whom a rash vow (or often the mandate of a bigoted parent) had submitted to their power, would certainly expose the manager of a modern convent to the risk of being mobbed and torn limb from limb. Novices were subjected to all sorts of wanton tortures and arbitrary deprivation of his scant privileges; they were compelled to perform shameful and ridiculous [102]acts of self-abasement, all merely to “break their worldly spirit,” i.e., crush out the last vestige of self-respect and life-love, in order to prepare them for the consolations of other-worldliness. The moral emasculation of the human race seems, indeed, to have been the main purpose of the educational policy which the priests of the Nature-hating Galilean pursued wherever the union of Church and State put children and devotees at the mercy of their dogmatists.

Voluntary slavery means voluntary renunciation of the chief privilege of human reason: the privilege of self-control. The spendthrift divests himself of external advantages; the miser yields up his life-blood for gold; but he who surrenders his personal liberty has sold his soul, as well as his body. Bondage circumscribes every sphere of activity. Political despotism impedes the progress of industry as galling fetters impede the circulation of the blood. Enterprising autocrats of the Frederic and Peter type have as utterly failed in the attempt of enforcing a flourishing state of commerce, as they would have failed in the attempt of enforcing the growth of a stunted tree by the tension of iron chains. In free America a voluntary pledge of abstinence has accomplished what in medieval Europe the most Draconic temperance and anti-tobacco laws failed to achieve.

The educational despotism of moral pedants has ever defeated its own purpose, and succeeded only in turning frank, merry-souled children into hypocrites [103]and sneaks. The idea that a barbarous system of military discipline could develop model warriors has been refuted on hundreds of battle-fields, where the machine-soldiers of despotic kings were routed by the onset of enthusiastic patriots, half-trained, perhaps, and ill-armed, but assembled by an enlistment of souls as well as of bodies. The unparalleled intellectual barrenness of the Middle Ages was well explained by the indictment of a modern English poet. “The bondage of the Christian doctrine,” says Percy Shelley, “is fatal to the development of originality and genius.” The curse of mediocrity has, indeed, for ages rested upon every literary product devoted to the promotion of clerical interests. The Muses refuse to assemble on Golgotha. Pegasus declines to be yoked with the ass of the Galilean ascetic. Outspoken skepticism is almost as rare as true genius, and it is not possible to mistake the significance of the fact that the great poets and philosophers of the last seven generations were, almost without an exception, persistent and outspoken skeptics. Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Holbach, Leibnitz, Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, Humboldt, Pope, Hume, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Gibbon, Buckle, and Darwin have all inscribed their names in the temple o! Liberalism; and Wolfgang Goethe, the primate of European literature, was at once the most consistent and the most anti-Christian of modern thinkers. “His personal appearance,” says Heinrich Heine, “was as harmonious as his mind. A proudly erect body, never yet bent by Christian worm-humility; [104]classic features, never distorted by Christian contrition; eyes that had never been dimmed by Christian sinner-tears or the apathy of monkish resignation.”

That resignation was for centuries enforced as the first of moral duties; but Nature has had her revenge, and even the fallen hierarchy would hesitate to recover the loss of their prestige by a return to the moral desert which for ages marked the empire of a mind-enslaving dogma.

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 [107]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. [108]

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 [109]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 [110]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.

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.” [111]

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 [112]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?

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 [113]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 [114]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.

In the course of evolution from brute to man some of our organs have been highly developed by constant use, while others have been stunted by habitual disuse. In special adaptations of the sense of touch and sight, for instance, man surpasses all his fellow-creatures, most of whom, in turn, surpass him in the acuteness of their olfactory organs. An analogous result seems to have been produced by the exercise or [117]neglect of certain mental faculties and dispositions. The instinct of enterprise, for instance, has been developed from rather feeble germs of the animal soul, while the instinct of perseverance appears to have lost something of its pristine energy. The African termite ant rears structures which, in proportion to the size of the builders, surpass the pyramids as a mountain surpasses the monuments of the mound-builders. By the persistent coöperation of countless generations the tiny architect of the coral reefs has girt a continent with a rampart of sea-walls. The prairie wolf will follow a trail for half a week. The teeth of a mouse are thinner and more brittle than a darning needle, yet by dint of perseverance gnawing mice manage to perforate the stoutest planks. Captive prairie dogs have been known to tunnel their way through forty feet of compact loam.

An instinct, which one might be tempted to call a love of perseverance for its own sake, seems sometimes to influence the actions of young children. There are boys whose energies seem to be roused by the resistance of inanimate things. I have seen lads of eight or nine years hew away for hours at knotty logs which even a veteran woodcutter would have been pardoned for flinging aside. There are school boys, not otherwise distinguished for love of books, who will forego their recess sports to puzzle out an arithmetical problem of special intricacy.

Our desultory mode of education hardly tends to encourage that disposition which, nevertheless, is now and then apt to develop into a permanent character trait. There are young men who will act out a self-determined [118]programme of study or business with persistent disregard of temporary hardships, and pursue even minor details of their plan with a resolution only strengthened by difficulties. The moral ideals of antiquity seem to have been more favorable to the development of that type of character, which also manifests itself in the national policy of several ancient republics, and the inflexible consistency of their legal institutions.

The advantages of perseverance are not too readily admitted by the numberless victims of that facile disposition that loves to ascribe its foibles to the “versatility of genius,” or a high-minded “aversion to pedantic routine;” yet now, as in the days of yore, life reserves its best rewards for the most persistent competitors. Singleness of purpose, like a sharp wedge, forces its way through obstacles that resist many-sided endeavors. The versatile poets and philosophers of Athens have wreathed her memory with unrivaled laurels, yet in the affairs of practical life her merchants were out-traded, her politicians out-witted, and her generals beaten by men whose nations had steadfastly followed a narrower but consistent policy. “Aut non tentaris aut perfice,” “either try not, or persevere,” was a Roman proverb that made Rome the mistress of three continents. In the Middle Ages the dynasty of the Abbassides, as in modern times the house of the Hohenzollern, attained supremacy by persistent adherence to an established system of political tactics. Even questionable [119]enterprises have thus been crowned with triumph, as the ambitions of the Roman pontiffs, and the projects of Ignatius Loyola. The chronicles of war, of industry, and of commerce abound with analogous lessons. Patient perseverance succeeds where fitful vehemence fails. In countless battles the steadiness of British and North German troops has prevailed against the enthusiasm of their bravest opponents. The quiet perseverance of British colonists has prevailed against the bustling activity of their Gallic rivals, on the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, as well as on the Ganges and Indus. Steady-going business firms, consistently-edited journals, hold their own, and ultimately absorb their vacillating competitors. Dr. Winship, the Boston Hercules, held that the chances of an athlete “depend on doggedness of purpose far more than on hereditary physique.” Even the apparent caprices of Fortune are biased by the habit of perseverance. “In the Stanislaus mining-camp,” says Frederic Gerstaecker, “we had a number of experts who seemed to find gold by a sort of sixth sense, and came across ‘indications’ wherever they stirred the gravel of the rocky ravines. We called them ‘prospectors,’ and the brilliancy of their prospects was, indeed, demonstrated by daily proofs. But at the first frown of Fortune they would get discouraged, and remove their exploring outfit to another ravine. Most of the actual work was done by the ‘squatters,’ as we called the steady diggers, who would take up an abandoned claim and stick to it for weeks. Bragging was not their forte, but at the end of the season the squatter could squat down on a [120]sackful of nuggets, while the prospector had nothing but prospects.”

The ambition of the ancients was encouraged by the conviction that life is worth living, and that all its social and intellectual summits can be reached by the persistent pursuit of a well-chosen road. But the basis of that confidence was undermined by a doctrine which denied the value of earthly existence, and made the renunciation of worldly blessings the chief purpose of moral education. The pilgrim of life who had been taught to spurn earth as a vale of tears, and turn his hopes to the promises of another world, was not apt to trouble himself about a consistent plan of secular pursuits, which, moreover, he had been distinctly instructed to trust to the chances of the current day: “Take no thought for the morrow;” “Take no thought for your life, nor yet for your body … for after all these things do the gentiles seek.”

Indecision, inconsistency, fickleness of purpose, vitiated the politics of the Christian nations through-out the long chaos of the Middle Ages, and in their features of individual character there is a strange want of that moral unity and harmony which the consciousness of an attainable purpose gave to the national exemplars of an earlier age.

The Rationalistic reaction of the last two centuries has greatly modified the moral ideals of the Caucasian nations; the legitimacy of secular pursuits is more generally recognized, but still only in a furtive, hesitating [121]manner, and the glaring contrast of our daily practice with the theories of a still prevalent system of ethics cannot fail to involve contradictions incompatible with true consistency of principles and action.

For thirteen hundred years the importance of perseverance in the pursuit of earthly aims was depreciated by the ethics of Antinaturalism, and the word Failure is written in glaring letters over the record of the physical, mental, and moral enterprises of all that period. The nations of northern Europe, whom the prestige of Rome surrendered to the power of popish priests, were giants in stature and strength, and the love of physical health was too deeply rooted in the hereditary constitution of those athletes to be at once eradicated by the machinations of spiritual poison-mongers. Yet the poison did not fail to assert its virulence. Athletic sports were still a favorite pastime of all freemen; but the gospel of the Nature-hating Galilean insisted on the antagonism of physical and moral welfare; penances and the worship of cadaverous saints perverted the manlier ideals of the masses, the encouragement of ascetic habits and the enforced inactivity of convent life undermined the stamina of the noblest nations, and in the course of a few orthodox generations the descendants of the herculean hunter-tribes of northern Europe became a prey to a multitude of malignant diseases.

The love of knowledge still fed on the literary treasures of antiquity; the flame of philosophy was now and then rekindled at the still glowing embers [122]of pagan civilization; but the doctrine of other-worldliness denounced the pursuit of worldly lore, and science degenerated into a medley of nursery-legends and monkish fever-dreams. Men walked through life as Sindbad walked through the perils of the spirit-vale, in constant dread of spectral manifestations, in constant anticipation of ghostly interference with their earthly concerns, the pursuit of which all but the wisest undertook only in a desultory, tentative way, haunted by the idea that success in worldly enterprises could be bought only at the expense of the immortal soul.

And how many thousand wanderers of our latter-day world have thus been diverted from the path of manful perseverance, and almost directly encouraged in the habit of palliating inconstancy of purpose with that “dissatisfaction and weariness of worldly vanities,” which the ethics of their spiritual educators commend as a symptom of regeneration! The voices of re-awakened Nature protest, but only with intermittent success, and the penalty of vacillation is that discord of modern life that will not cease till our system of ethics has been thoroughly purged from the poison of Antinaturalism.

Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of [138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.

But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be [139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even [140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.

Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the [141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.

King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.

The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium, [142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”

The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.

Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its [143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a [144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.

Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the [145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.

Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.

“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. [146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.

The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.

The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming influence of theological education. The baseness of the “unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;” and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities [149]of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.

But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps be the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless candor of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children antedates all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based merely on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with the problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform, falsehood is complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is unstable, fragile, and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the difficulties of plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread the risk of incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and mental reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in conforming to the conventional customs of social hypocrisy and polite prevarication.

“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his mother in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use asking her to call [150]again and stay for supper? She could not help seeing that we were tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult her, you know.” “Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she cannot believe?”

That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms of Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well as unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of its choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that cant, and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach the degree of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of an orthodox creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by happening to overhear the recess comments of our American Sabbath-school youngsters.

The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain qualifications; but it is more than probable that perfect prudence would insure a voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most aggressive form the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary interests of the aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth is the path of safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and physical universe conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud. [151]

Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception, with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out of plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their turn must yield to the test of time.

Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like honesty, is in the long run the best policy. Abstinence from insidious poisons is easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience have at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of our fellow-men that consistent abstinence from the vice of hypocrisy is preferable to any compromise with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical, and almost Agnostic, education of the American wilderness seems to favor that type of moral teetotalism, and among the hardy hill-farmers of our New England highlands, and Southern mountain states, one may find men almost constitutionally incapable of conscious deceit in deed or word, and practicing veracity without the least pretense to superior saintliness, in a quite untheological and often, indeed, decidedly profane medium of speech. They stick to truth from habit, rather than from moral principles, yet among their simple-hearted neighbors they enjoy a respect withheld from unctuous hypocrisy, and in emergencies can always rely on the practical value of a life-long reputation for candor. Their word is sufficient security; their denial of slanderous imputations is accepted without the aid of compurgators.

The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a similar disposition, and on the [152]Austrian-Turkish frontier the word of a Mussulman generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On the Indian ocean, too, the verdict of international opinion favors a preference for Unitarian testimony. “Wish to heaven we could fall in with some Acheen fishermen,” Captain Baudissin heard his pilot mutter among the reefs of the Sunda Islands, “it’s no use asking such d—— liars as those Hindoos and Chinese.”

The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of professional hypocrites, as in the case of that curate mentioned by the German Freethinker, Weber (author of the philosophical cyclopedia, “Democritus”). Professor Weber passed his last years in the retirement of a small south-German mountain village, where his undisguised skepticism made him the bugbear of the local pharisees; yet on moonless evenings he was more than once honored by the visits of a neighboring village priest, who risked censure, and, perhaps, excommunication, for the sake of enjoying the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant of his colleagues, and devoting a few hours to intellectual communion with a champion of Secular science.

Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than fiction, and there is no doubt that even in the midnight of the Middle Ages the gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often cheered by the secret visits of some intelligent Christian whom the thirst for truth impelled to defy the vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an intellectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum [153]alley to a feast in the banquet hall of a Christian prelate.

“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize the advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated. “They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the simplest countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction from the language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to appreciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,” confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately hinted that they could tell it every time.”

Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators, as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author, who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the fairness of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has succeeded in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his adversaries. For similar reasons our “Christian” temperance societies can date their triumphs only from the time when they frankly repudiated the sophisms of their predecessors, who hoped to reconcile the lessons of science with the teachings of the alcohol-brewing Galilean. For truth [154]prevails against half-truth, as well as against absolute untruth.

Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to renounce the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the promptings of his physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of ludicrous sophisms to palliate the antagonism of two ever irreconcilable principles:

and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance, and can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not only of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a world-renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic a systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life subverted the basis of physical health. [155]

says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into disease or candor into hypocrisy.

The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on mental prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and inculcating the merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-insulting doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly blow at the instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations actually succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental constitution of their victims.

“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the seventeenth century, every mental disposition which philosophy pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research was almost uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly intellectual vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues.… In a word, there is scarcely a disposition that marks the love of abstract truth and scarcely a rule which [156]reason teaches as essential for its attainment that theologians did not for ages stigmatize as offensive to the Almighty.”

And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the wretched superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of witches and tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the evidence of his own senses and was naturally driven to complete his mental degradation by an absolute surrender of common sense to dogma. The history of Christian dogmatism is the history of an eighteen hundred years’ war against Nature and Truth.

The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign. It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.

Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs and paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox [157]neighbors to take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones, crosses, and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip the Second paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St. Laurentius, and having been informed that a complete skeleton of the same saint was for sale in the south of Italy, he at once ratified the bargain and blessed heaven for having favored him with a duplicate of the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were tried and executed on a charge of having taken an aerial excursion on a broomstick or a black he-goat; of having caused a gale by churning a potful of froth and water; of having turned themselves into foxes, wolves, and tomcats.

The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of the forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-mongers to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly biographies and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name of historical records insanities too extravagant even for the readers of a modern nursery-tale.

The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists, astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days of Horace and Pliny would [158]have been thought disgraceful to the obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the face of the entire Christian world.

For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and imposture almost annulled the value of contemporary records. Travelers and chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated the popular taste by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles; witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill and physical prowess, giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of spectral manifestations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a period of more than nine hundred years the dogma of the Galilean antinaturalist systematically favored the survival of the unfit, by offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common sense a capital crime.

The wanton disposition of young children, like the mischievousness of our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests, has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome [161]child, like a playful monkey, is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are, in fact, almost invariably intended as a protest against acts of injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number of babuinos hasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar long-drawn wail of a young [162]capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to succor a distressed fellow-creature.

That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and execrations for having killed a young Roussette—some sort of frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”

“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors, inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by wrestling and pummeling each other, and [163]then shaking hands again. A similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles. Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a fellow-creature.

A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agricultural Indios of Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the [164]frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.

The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming an other-worldly chance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.

But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved disguise of polite formalities.

A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits. Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian, [165]mentally perhaps the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews and Moriscos in an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.

Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.

A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were, [166]with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the harmony of Nature.

The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul. “Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to their afflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal practice of altruism (i.e., the subordination of personal to alien interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition of that result would have been only an additional motive in recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,” was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce! renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness, in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all [167]earthly interests whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his enemies also bids him hate his father, mother, sister, brother, and friends.

“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once the rationale and the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance, [168]acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed to the devil.”

The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor, and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,” says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of human misery in all its forms, the [169]catechism of such a religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic colleges.”

Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel, death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.

“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful.… The clergy looked on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong.”

The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of escape from the horrors of existence.

Philosophers of the utilitarian school have begun to reëstablish the long-forgotten truth that Materialism is the indispensable root of the plant which bears its flowers in spiritual aspirations. The consequence of universal practice is the best test of a dogma, and if all men were to divest themselves of their earthly possessions and devote their lives to the hyperphysical vagaries of the Galilean messiah, there would soon be neither crops to harvest nor bread to eat, and unworldly saints would starve as surely as ungodly sinners. “Ideality” may be the crown of the brain, as the brain is of the body, but the organs of the mind cannot dispense with the aid of the alimentary organs; the pinnacle of the social fabric needs intermediate supports. Education has to secure the welfare of the body before it can successfully cultivate the faculties of the mind; and it is not less certain that a man has to be a good patriot before he can be a worthy cosmopolitan, and a good friend before he can be a good patriot.

In the progress of individual development the instinct of friendship asserts itself at a very early period. Its recollection hallows the memory of the poorest childhood. The shepherd-boys of the upper Alps travel dozens of miles over cliffs and rocks to meet their friends at a salt-spring; on the shores of the Baltic the boys of the lonely fishermen’s cabins [173]frequent their trysting-places in spite of wind and weather. Early friendships throw the charm of their poetry even over the dreary prosa of grammar-school life; the fellowship of school-friends forever endears the scenes of their sports and rambles, and for many a poor office-drudge the recollection of such hours “holds all the light that shone on the earth for him.” True friendship smoothens the rough path of poverty, while friendlessness, even in the gilded halls of wealth, is almost a synonyme of cheerlessness:

says Goethe. “To be alone in paradise would be the height of misery.” Friendship will assert itself athwart the barriers of social inequality, and its germs are so deeply rooted in the instincts of primitive nature that, in default of a communion of kindred souls, the bonds of sympathy have often united saints and sinners, nay, even men and brutes. The traditions of Grecian antiquity have preserved the possibly apocryphal legend of a dolphin that became attached to the company of a young fisherman, and after his death left the sea in search of its friend, and thus perished; but the story of Androcles was confirmed by the experience of Chevalier Geoffroy de la Tour, a crusader of the thirteenth century, who was charmed, but finally distressed, by the affection of a pet lion that followed him like his shadow, and at last fell a victim to his attachment by trying to swim after the ship that conveyed his master from Damascus to Genoa. The traveler Busbequius [174]mentions a lynx that set his heart on escorting a camp-follower of a Turkish pasha; and Sir Walter Scott vouches for the touching episode of the Grampian Highlands, where a young hunter met his death by falling from a steep cliff, and was found, months after, half covered by the body of his favorite deerhound, who had followed his friend to the happy hunting-grounds by starving to death at the feet of a corpse.

Among the ancestors of the Mediterranean nations the betrayal of a friend was deemed an act of almost inconceivable infamy; friends and friends engaged in a pledge of mutual hospitality, which was held sacred even in times of war; and among the natives of the South Sea Islands a similar brotherhood of elective affinities existed in the society of the Aroyi, or oath-friends, who held all property in common, and in times of danger unhesitatingly risked their own lives in defense of their ally’s. Professor Letourneau has collected many curious anecdotes of that devotion, which should leave no doubt that altruism in its noblest form can dispense with the hope of post-mortem compensation, and, indeed, with all theological motives whatever.

Unselfishness is the soul of true friendship, yet it nevertheless remains true that all instincts are founded on the experience of benefits or injuries. During the rough transition period from beasthood to manhood, when our uncivilized ancestors roamed the forests of the foreworld, it must have been an [175]incalculable advantage to the individual hunter or herder to secure the coöperation of a trusty companion, whose watchful eye would double his chance of finding food or avoiding danger, whose stout arm might parry a blow which unaided strength would have failed to avert. As in other circumstances of natural selection, those who most successfully availed themselves of such advantages had a superior chance of survival and consequently of transmitting their disposition to subsequent generations, and the habit of friendship thus became a hereditary instinct.

The social system of civilized life has since devised manifold substitutes for the coöperation of elective affinities, but various unalienable advantages of the primitive plan have been more or less clearly recognized by all nations, especially by the manful and nature-abiding nations of pagan antiquity. The benefits secured by the mutual aid of sympathizing friends are not limited to the guarantee of civil rights, but extend to the realization of individual hopes and the indulgence of personal inclination and predilections, as well as to the higher privileges of a mental communion for which the panders of selfish wealth have as yet devised no equivalent. The power of approbativeness, the main stimulus of ambition, is infinitely intensified by the emulation of noble friendship, which, in the words of an ancient philosopher, “inspires to deeds heroic, and makes labor worth the toils that lead to success.” Such friendship inspired the heroism of Theseus and Pyrithous, of Harmodius and Aristogiton, of Nisus and Euryalus, and recorded its experience in proverbs which have few parallels in [176]the languages of the Christianized nations: “Solem e mundo qui amicitiam e vita tollunt”—“They deprive the world of sunshine who deprive life of friendship.” “Amicum perdere damnorum est maximum”—“To lose a friend is the greatest of losses.” “Amicus magis necessarius quam ignis aut aqua”—“A friend is more needful than fire or water.”

In times of tribulation, when the fury of party-strife overrode all other restraints, friendship has more than once proved its saving power by averting otherwise hopeless perils. Diagoras was thus saved from the rage of allied bigots, Demetrius from the dagger of a wily assassin, the elder Cato from the rancor of political rivals. Without the aid of a friend Cicero would never have survived the intrigues of Catiline. Epaminondas made the approval of friends the sole reward of his heroic life, and vanquished the enemies of his country by the enthusiasm of the “sacred legion” of mutually devoted and mutually inspiring friends. Mohammed the Second yielded to the prayer of a humble companion what he refused to the united threats of foreign embassadors, and Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America, often confessed that he owed his triumphs to the counsel of private friends rather than to the suggestions of his official advisers.

The blessing of friendship, “doubling the joys of life and lessening its sorrows,” could not fail to be specially obnoxious to the moralists of a creed that seeks to lure its converts from earth to ghostland, [177]and depreciates the natural affections of the human heart. The gloomy antinaturalism of the Galilean prophet has been glossed over by the whitewashing committee of the revised Bible, but is too shockingly evident in the less sophisticated version of the original text to mistake its identity with the moral nihilism of the world-renouncing Buddha. The phil’adelphia, or “brother-love,” of the New Testament, is, in fact, merely a “fellowship in Christ”—the spiritual communion and mutual indoctrination of earth-renouncing bigots. With the joys and sorrows of natural friendship their prophet evinces no sympathy whatever. “I am come,” says he, “to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, … and a man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” “He who hates not his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple.” “And the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son.”

By that test of moral merit the obligation of natural affection counted as nothing compared with the duty of theological conformity. “Verily, I say unto you, there is no man that has left brethren or sisters or father and mother for my sake and the gospels’, but he shall receive a hundredfold,” etc. “He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” “And another of his disciples said unto him: Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said unto him: Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.” “For if you love them which love you, what reward have ye?” [178]

The conversion of Rome, which theologians are fond of representing as the crowning miracle of Christianity, was a natural consequence of its pessimistic tendencies, which could not fail to recommend themselves to the instincts of a decrepit generation. “Worn-out sensualists consoled themselves with the hope of a better hereafter. Cowards pleased themselves with the idea of fulfilling the duty of meek submission to the injustice of the ‘powers that be.’ Monastic drones denounced the worldliness of industrial enterprises. Physical indolence welcomed the discovery that ‘bodily exercise profiteth but little.’ Envious impotence insisted on the duty of self-abasement. Transgressors against the health-laws of Nature relied upon the efficacy of the prayer-cure. Stall-fed priests sneered at the lean philosopher who wasted his time upon laborious inquiries, while he might wax fat on faith and the sacrifices of the pious. The demon-dogma was a godsend to the spiritual poverty of the elect. The so-called scholars of the Galilean church, who could not encounter the pagan philosophers on their own ground, found it very convenient to postulate a spook for every unknown phenomenon.… Despots before long recognized the mistake of persecuting a creed which inculcated the duty of passive submission to oppressors” (Secret of the East, p. 54).

They also recognized the advantage of a spiritual excuse for the infamy of their ingratitude to the secular benefactors of mankind. Cæsar and Trajan [179]treated the humblest centurion as a friend rather than as a servant. Constantine and Justinian treated the ablest ministers like slaves who can be forced to toil, and turned out to starve after having worn out their strength in the service of the Lord’s anointed. Belisarius, after repeatedly saving his master from well-deserved ruin, was sacrificed to the spite of a crowned harlot, and left to beg his bread in the streets of the city which his valor alone had for years protected from the rage of hostile armies. Aetius, who had saved all Europe by stemming the torrent of Hunnish conquest, was treated like a rebellious slave for refusing to betray his brave allies, and the stipulated pay of his veterans was squandered on pimps and clerical parasites. Charles Martel, whose heroism turned the scales against the power of the invading Moriscos, was openly reviled by the very priests who owed him the preservation of their lives, as well as of their livings; his image was dragged in the mire, his soul consigned to the pit of torment—all for having defrayed the costs of his campaign by tithing prelates as well as laymen. Columbus was loaded with chains by the pious prince whose castles he had filled with the treasures of a new world; the philosopher Vanini was betrayed to death by a Christian spy who had for years enjoyed his confidence and his hospitality. John Huss was surrendered by the imperial priest-slave whose own hand had signed the document of his safe-conduct. The earl of Stafford was sacrificed by the crowned Jesuit who divided his time between prayers for the theological interests of his subjects and plots for the [180]subversion of their political liberties. The dogma of self-denial has not prevented our financial pharisees from amassing fortunes that would dwarf the spoils of a Roman triumphator; but the hospitality of Mæcenas has not survived the religion of Nature. Our philosophers have to study the problems of life in a personal struggle for existence; our poets have to choose between starvation and hypocrisy. Patriots are left to the consoling reflection that virtue is its own reward. The endowers of theological seminaries seem to rely on the mercy of Christ to cancel the odium of their shortcomings in the recognition of secular merit. Kepler, Campanella, and Spinoza perished in penury. Locke and Rousseau, the recognized primates of the intellectual world, were left to languish in exile, admired and neglected by a host of “friends”—Christian friends—in every city of the civilized world. Schubert, Buerger, and Frederick Schiller, the idols of a poetry-loving nation, were left to fight the bitter struggle for existence to an extreme of which all the records of pagan antiquity furnish only a single parallel. Anaxagoras, the founder of a philosophic school counting its disciples by thousands, was left to languish in exile, till the rumor of his extreme distress brought the most illustrious of those disciples to the sick-bed of his neglected teacher. “Do not, do not leave us!” he cried, in an agony of remorse; “we cannot afford to lose the light of our life!”

“O Pericles,” said the dying exile, “those who need a lamp should take care to supply it with oil!”

But how many lights of our latter-day lives have [181]thus been extinguished before their time! Not one of the plethoric British aristocrats who spiced their leisure with the sweets of poetry ever dreamed of relieving the cruel distress of Robert Burns, or of cutting the knot of the financial embroglio that strangled out the life of Sir Walter Scott.