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Typos — p. 37: Contributon [= Contribution]; p. 47: psycho-analyists [= psycho-analysts]; p. 49: ill-favourd [=ill-favoured]; p. 50: uniniated [= uninitiated]; p. 61: Puritnaism [= Puritanism]; p. 70: emanicipated [= emancipated]; p. 99: phychological [= psychological]
p. 103: tenour [= tenor]; p. 106: perseverence [= perseverance]; p. 117: favouritsm [= favouritism]; p. 119: auhorized [= authorized]; p. 122: Scopenhauer [= Schopenhauer]
Chapter III Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — I A generation that no longer believes in devils, demons and the demoniacal etiology of disease; that has difficulty in imagining the transfer of devils from two men into a herd of swine, and even more difficulty in believing that these very devils pleaded to be so transferred; a generation that doubts the possibility of parthenogenesis in human beings, and has long ago dropped the practice of "whipping boys", cannot see any sense in vicarious punishment, and is therefore unable to take on trust the story of an Omnipotent Deity who could feel appeased and propitiated for the sins committed by beings he has himself created, by the death in agony of his own beloved and only-begotten son — to such a generation, hardly one aspect of the Christian mythology and the supernatural events it includes appears to have even tolerable plausibility, let alone cogency. It would, therefore, be most astonishing if Christianity, instead of being, as Professor A. N. Whitehead declares "in decay" (R.I.M. Chap. I, 7 and IV, 3), were repeating the giant strides which marked its progress throughout the Middle Ages. "Whence does ecclesiastical authority," Professor McDougalI asks, "derive the views it seeks to impose? — the answer is that they are founded upon alleged historical events of a remote age, This sums up the position very well and, in view of the vast library that now exists on the reasons for Unbelief — books which, from the works of Ingersoll to those of J. M. Robertson and Bertrand Russell, are easily accessible in most of our large towns — it seems unnecessary to dwell on this aspect of the question. The intelligent reader who wishes to become acquainted with the attitude to Christianity of the Rationalists and Agnostics, must however be warned against two forms of attack to which everyone embarking on a course of this kind lays himself open. The first, from the quarter of all Christians, no matter what their denomination, is to charge the budding or accomplished Rationalist with hostility to all religion and with a total lack of any religious feeling whatsoever, as if to be anti-Christian must mean that a man rejects everything that the word "religion" suggests — a charge as impudent and absurd as to accuse a hostile critic of abstract and ultra-modern art of being inaccessible to the appeal of any art at all. An example of this sort of charge may be found to be at least implied in Mr. B. Lund Yates' article on Dr. Buchman's "Contributon to Contemporary Thought" in H. October 1958. The second usually hails from the quarter of highbrow philosophic apologists of Christianity, who are wont to dwell voluptuously on the admitted limitations of scientific knowledge and on all the latest inconclusive researches of scientists into the most obscure problems of life, whether in the realms of physics, astronomy, geophysics, biology or genetics; and who argue as if every scientific failure to reach certainty, which is honestly acknowledged by the scientists themselves, necessarily adds to the score of Christian truths. This form of attack is admirably denounced by Professor J. B. Pratt as follows: "Nor should we easily be driven, by the temporary failure of science, into the arms of the supernatural. . . . So great have been the achievements of science in the past, so repeatedly has she brought forward explanations of the seemingly inexplicable for those who Meanwhile, these same apologists do everything possible and use every debating room device, to obfuscate and bewilder the aspiring Rationalist by means of torrents of more or less incomprehensible verbiage, aimed at discrediting scientific discoveries and theories, and defending the more obscure and more assailable tenets of the faith. Take, for instance, the churchmen's defence of the doctrine of Atonement. I have already indicated the incredible features of this doctrine which today seems even more extravagantly fantastic than it did in 1889, when Bishop Lyttleton tried by the sweat of his brow to make it look like sense (see L.M.). For to us of the twentieth century, removed by well over two thousand years from the age when the ancient Israelites, believing in the principle of vicarious suffering, practised animal sacrifice to propitiate God for their sins, there is something so alien to common sense in the notion of an all-powerful deity being able to derive any satisfaction from whipping-boy blood rites of this kind, and above all in his feeling placated by them, that, not our reason alone, but every one of our sentiments as civilized moderners, revolts against the whole conception of the Atonement as a relic of savage superstition. We even wonder whether a man like St. Paul, in the first century of our era, could have been altogether sane when, addressing the Romans, he said: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath sent to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forebearance of God". (Romans iii, 23–26). This extraordinary doctrine is more lucidly and succinctly stated in the latter part of the second of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England as follows: "Christ, very God, and very man, who truly suffered, was crucified dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to It is referred to again in Article XV, where we read of Jesus: "He came to be the Lamb without spot, who, by sacrifice of himself once made, should take away the sins of the world." In Article XXVIII, we read that the Lord's Supper is a sacrament "of our redemption by Christ's death", whilst in Article XXXI we are told that "The offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world both original and actual". The fact that this doctrine has been embarrassing churchmen more and more with every fresh advance, however slight, of that enlightenment which has been one of the few real blessings of the last hundred years, may be gathered from the spate of treatises which, ever since the middle of last century, have been produced to defend and rationalize it where it clashes most violently with modern conceptions. Of these defences, it would be impossible here to sketch even the barest summary; but the book by the Right Rev. A. C. Headlam, late Bishop of Gloucester (The Atonement, 1935), is worth reading as exemplifying the extreme difficulty modern theologians obviously experience in trying to explain away the redemption of human sin as traditionally related by St. Paul and the Church, and also their habit of baffling the potential Rationalist with reams of more or less relevant verbiage in defence of their doctrines. "It seems very difficult to accept a theory", says Bishop Headlam, "which seems to represent the loving kindness of the Son appeasing by his sacrifice the wrath of the Father" (Chap. II, 1). Yes, indeed! though what the Bishop really means is that whereas centuries ago it was child's play to gain acceptance for such a theory, today it is not so easy; and he admits that "there have been more theological differences" on this matter "than on any other Christian doctrine" (Introduction). Yet, in spite of 191 pages of the most painstaking and tortuous pleading, it cannot be said that the Lord Bishop extricates himself with much success from the awkward net of improbabilities. He never attains to the straightforward clarity of F. J. Sheed, for instance, who, in Theology and Society (1947, Chap. XVIII, 1), says outright that Jesus "offered himself as a sacrifice to God for the sins of the race"; and after reading and rereading the more important "The Atonement through Christ was the revelation through the cross, and in no other way could it be accomplished save by the sacrifice of love and obedience as revelation of the nature of God; it was the only power through which sin could be taken away and therefore it was propitiation for sin, and therefore Christ died for our sins and bore the whole weight of our sins upon the cross" (Chap. III, 5). I hope many, more acute and intellectual than I can claim to be, will also find it hard to grasp the logical justification of these two "therefores". Surely it is this sort of vague, confusing verbiage that has done most to discredit theology in the minds of sensible folk. The fact of the crucifixion is not disputed, the further fact that it was a propitiation for sin is also not contested by the learned prelate. The logical conclusion must therefore be what Bishop Headlam and others like him do their utmost to circumvent — namely, that some authority, presumably God the Father, required to be appeased and propitiated for the sins of man by the death of his beloved and only-begotten son on an ancient Roman torture machine. Professor W. H. Griffith Thomas, D.D., for instance, in a chapter on the second of the Thirty-nine Articles, acknowledges that "expiation" seems "to be decidedly truer to the Biblical conception" of the crucifixion than mere communion (The Principles of Theology, 1930). But if this is so, some authority must have required expiation for men's sins. Who was this authority? And how did Christ's death constitute the expiation, unless it was a vicarious form of punishment that was thought necessary? Is not the straightforward answer to this that God himself required the expiation and consequently it was to propitiate him that it was done? Why not admit it? Because these theologians know that modern thought can no longer accept it — that's what explains their tortuous, prolix and mostly obscure spates of verbiage. Another typical instance of the same kind is an earlier work by Canon B. H. Streeter, called Reality (1929). He, too, tried to explain away the palpably incredible aspects — to the modern mind at least — of Christ's death on the cross to save mankind from the consequences of their sin. Evidently aware of the great difficulty intelligent contemporaries must have in accepting the Finally, after having reached no conclusion which a fair minded reader could reasonably judge as at all illuminating, Canon Streeter makes the very self-revelatory and, I submit, significant statement: "The simple Christian", he says, "who is content to look on the sacrifice of Christ as just a 'mystery' is here wiser than the theologian who insists on analysing its intellectual content. Such a conception, if true at all, is so because of the truth of quality it represents; and the more it is envisaged, not as logic, but as a picture, the richer the truth it will convey" (Chap. VIII). It is very sensible of this divine, to leave the matter unsolved in the hands of the "simple Christian". It was certainly the best escape, although it will be noted that even to the very end, when he has contrived this release for himself, he is still incapable of clear unequivocal language. No reader who turns to the books I have quoted will, I believe, find that I have misrepresented them; and anyone who ventures, as I have done, to consult other cognate works, will I think discover little to modify in the claim I have made that today churchmen are not only deeply embarrassed by the traditional view of the Atonement as set forth by St. Paul and the second of the Church of England's Thirty-nine Articles; but, despite the most strenuous efforts, are also at a complete loss to make any sense of it, or at least to make it appear sensible to the modern enlightened mind. Thus, when St. Paul told the Romans: "God commendeth his When with deep disappointment we turn the pages of the learned treatises where the Christian myths and doctrines, which once seemed unobjectionable and eminently credible, are polished up, refitted and chastened by skilful experts to attract a more enlightened and critical generation, we have the uncomfortable feeling that, instead of a conspiracy of silence, a conspiracy of noise and blustering verbosity is under way, and that its object is less to illuminate, elucidate and explain, than to give the impression that such is being done; for, to the simple man and woman. Canon Streeter's "simple Christian" in fact, it must seem that such volumes of verbiage cannot possibly be without substantial content. Even when they fail to see it, they feel persuaded that some unmistakable and satisfying conclusion must be lurking somewhere amid all those words, and therefore that none of their confidence need be forfeited. This is the snare against which aspiring Rationalists have to be warned. Not that one fails to sympathize with these desperate apologists of a creed which, according to B. Lund Yates, is "crumbling" (H. October 1958. Article: Dr. Buchman's "Contribution to Contemporary Thought"). On the contrary! As one reads these panting paragraphs, in which theologians, on the point of exhaustion from their fruitless labours, try by piling up words and endlessly analysing side issues to give the impression that they are offering a plain answer to a plain question, it is impossible not to feel rather sorry for them. Nevertheless, when we compare the "explanation" of the Atonement by a divine, such as the Rev. and Hon. Arthur Lyttelton, which covers thirty-nine pages of (L.M. Chap. VII), with the later and more sophisticated explanations just examined, we are at once struck by the greater naïveté and frankness of the former — probably an indication of the fact that the writer in Lux Mundi, some seventy years ago, was less acutely aware than are our Thus the Rev. Arthur Lyttelton openly acknowledges the connection between Christ's sacrifice on the cross and "the ideas inspired by the [Mosaic] law" — i.e. "the sacrificial system of the Old Testament". He also acknowledges its propitiatory character. But because for some reason which he does not clarify, "as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion [with God] the Atonement must come from without and cannot be accomplished by those who themselves have need of it", the sacrifice must be vicarious. The propitiatory sacrifice", he says, "which is to effect our reunion must, for we are powerless to offer it, come from without." Then he adds, "If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies these conditions it is evident that it is not a simple but a very complex fact." Very true! And he honestly concludes, "that of this complex fact no adequate explanation can be given". Nevertheless, he makes no attempt to dodge the issue. He admits that "The death of Christ is, in the first place to be regarded as propitiatory". "On the one hand", he says, "there is man's desire, natural and almost instinctive, to make expiation for his guilt [is this instinctive in Man? Surely only in a few men in the civilization of the West!]: on the other, there is the tremendous fact of the wrath of God against sin. The death of Christ is the expiation for those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt upon the human soul and it is also the propitiation of the wrath of God." So here we have a full and complete admission by an eminent Church of England divine, writing in 1889, of all I have claimed about the Atonement, and what follows in his argument really does not alter the matter. It is merely the usual rather lame, circumlocutionary rigmarole with which theologians try to make the Atonement appear sensible. Still, the contrast between the Rev. Arthur Lyttelton's frank admissions in 1889 and the wriggling and writhing apologetics of more modern divines who are probably more alive to the revolt felt by twentieth-century minds against the whole idea of an omnipotent God needing, and being propitiated by, a vicarious sacrifice for human sin — surely this contrast is very revealing. Meanwhile, those members of the public who are still faithful The more vulgar, though not the less ardent believers in the "orthodox" view, sing with louder voices: "Whiter than the snow! Whiter than the snow! Wash me in the blood of the Lamb And I shall be whiter than the snow." Be this as it may, my object in making this long digression on the subject of the Atonement was less to expose the doubtful aspects of the doctrine in question, than to show by means of a striking example the way in which the pleadings of modern theologians may baffle and bewilder the potential Rationalist by the sheer weight of words alone, and give him at least the impression of having been offered a satisfying answer to his more awkward questions.
These features alone, by dating much of the appeal of these "sacred writings" and restricting their credibility to an age much more primitive than our own, seem to dispose at once of the claim that they have divine authority; and that this claim is indeed made, is shown by the Church's denial of this authority to the so-called "apocryphal" books. In view of the many treatises, including above all Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, in which the innumerable Biblical errors, whether in astronomy, geophysics, biology or physiology, are exposed, further examples of the kind seem unnecessary here. But the sort of howlers that are much less often exposed by Rationalists — if at all — are the more interesting and, as reflecting on the alleged divine provenance of the Bible, more damaging psychological ones, which recent discoveries have helped to reveal, but which are glaring enough to have struck intelligent readers at any time. It is indeed surprising that thinkers like Montaigne and Voltaire should have failed to notice this kind of Biblical error, especially as the major instances of it are allegedly perpetrated by God the Father and his Son. To save time and space I shall confine myself to these. Their importance will relieve me of the necessity of dwelling on the discrepancies usually adduced by Rationalists. The first important instance occurs in the fifth commandment: "Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Here the howler consists in ascribing to volition an attitude of mind unamenable to the will and only the reaction to a suitable stimulus. Honour can no more be summoned at will than admiration or respect. One may pretend to comply with the command and go through the motions displaying admiration or respect; but the effort is only histrionic, and the same may be said of honour. Thus, in order to ensure the end this commandment contemplated, it should read, "Parents make yourselves honourable in the sight of your children, that they may honour you." Difficult as this achievement may be, it is at least possible, whereas the other behest cannot possibly be obeyed when its appropriate stimulus is lacking. If, therefore, the commandment was accurately reported by Moses (which Christians may say is not The same comment applies to God's commandment to the Israelites in Deuteronomy vi. 5, which reads, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." Now, in Mark xii. 30 and 31, Jesus, in what he calls the "first commandment of all", repeats his father's psychological error and, in his second commandment, adds an error of his own, which I shall explain in a moment. But, before doing so, it is essential to discuss the error common to both of these commandments. I have commented on the error of supposing that people can be commanded to honour a fellow-being. But in the case of love, the inefficacy of any command to generate the required feeling must be even more apparent. For, besides embodying honour, love is a feeling of much greater depth and range. It involves above all a sense of attachment, of devotion, reciprocity and warmth, of which honour may be destitute without injury. Therefore, to assume that it can be evoked by a behest is a psychological error even more elementary than that already noted in regard to honour; and it at once disposes of any attempt to establish the divinity of him who could be guilty of it. But what is not so immediately apparent is the tragic amount of misery and misunderstanding which this major error in psychology has been causing ever since it was first preached to Europeans, stamped with the exalted authority of their God. For, when once we are told that love is volitional, we naturally regard any diminution, any cooling off, and above all any cessation of it, in a friend, relative, or spouse — which, especially in married couples owing to the normal abatement of passion, is the inevitable sequel to extravagantly overrated attachment — as a deliberate act, as an intentional withholding of a feeling which, if the inconstant person liked, could be continued at white heat. Very naturally, therefore, it is interpreted as a wanton insult, a personal injury, the outcome of malice prepense. And that is precisely how today every Western man and woman regards any decline in love which may unwittingly occur even in wholly admirable and normal folk. Nor, if love is thought of as a product of the will, is it anything but understandable that any sudden or insensible abatement of it, should seem an affront and a heartless attempt to wound the once loved fellow-being. Average men and women cannot be expected to judge matters of psychology accurately, let alone objectively, and if from childhood they have been led to believe on the highest authority of all that love is an emotion that can be conjured up at will, they are unlikely to view with complacency its gradual or sudden withdrawal by one who has hitherto professed it for them. As that astute psychologist, Stendhal, so aptly observed, "L'amour nait et s'éteint sans que la volonté y ait la moindre part" (De l'Amour, 1822, Chap. I. "Love is born and dies without the will playing the smallest part in the matter"); and thirty years later, Proudhon echoed the point of view when he said, "L'amour est entièrement soustrait à la volonté de celui qui l'éprouve" (Amour et Mariage, 1860, Chap. II. ix. "Love is wholly independent of the will of him who feels it"). Less explicitly, but issuing from the same idea, Shakespeare makes Julia remark that "love will not be spurn'd to what it loathes" (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act V. Sc. II). But it would be unfair to expect commonplace folk so completely to overcome what they have imbibed about will and love at Sunday school, as to reach similarly sound conclusions. This does not mean, however, that it would be unfair to expect a deity to arrive at them. But Jesus's second commandment — "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" — is open to a further criticism; for it assumes that the love of self may be postulated of everyone, which is quite untrue. Indeed in times when much defectiveness, morbidity, deformity and failing stamina is rife, self love is extremely rare; and it might well be argued that misanthropy The alert observer of mankind knows that what causes the cripple, the incurable invalid, and all defective and very ugly people, to feel bitter about humankind, to be difficult to live with, and to burst with resentment at the slightest provocation, is at bottom their invincible dissatisfaction with themselves. Bacon was aware of this; but by applying his observations only to the deformed he appears to limit them only to extreme examples of subnormality, although we know that to a lesser degree resentment of a kind is likely to be felt even by less ill-favoured creatures (see his essay on Deformity). His accurate reading of the mind of the deformed, however, shows him as belonging to an age of far deeper psychological insight than our nineteenth century, in which a Charlotte M. Yonge had the intellectual perfidy to depict her defectives and incurables as saints (see, for instance, her Pillars of the House and other novels). The heartache felt by the afflicted, even when they are most cultivated people, inevitably generates feelings of envy if not always of resentment, and as they are denied self-contentment and self-love, it is difficult for them to feel benevolent to others. De Quincey was well aware of this, for he remarked of Gifford, "a deformed man with the spiteful nature sometimes too developed in the deformed" (Posthumous Works, 1891, XIII). In deference to popular sentiment, he is careful to say "sometimes"; but, had he known Adler's thesis, he would probably have omitted it. Thus, by neglecting human biological realities and thereby promoting the multiplication of the ill-favoured, the beliefs that have governed European conduct for two millenniums have created conditions which deprive man of the capacity for self-love and hence of the very velleity to the love of his neighbour. Goethe knew this and, referring to the European's general lack of goodwill towards his neighbour, and of love and kindliness in social intercourse, he said, "How can anyone have kindly feelings for others and behave kindly to them when he is ill at ease with himself?" (G.G. 12.3. 1828. "Wie soll einer gegen andere Wohl- Thus, apart from the misery Western beliefs have caused, by the legion of defectives they have fostered and bred, we have to reckon with the misery resulting from the malaise every ill-favourd creature inevitably feels. When, therefore, Jesus said, "Love thy neighbour as thyself", he not only failed to appreciate that love cannot be enjoined, but also failed to foresee that, by linking this teaching with the racially lethal precepts of the decadent Greek, Socrates, his followers would one day make his command doubly unrealizable by debilitating the creatures to whom it was addressed. In this way the religion that enjoined love of the neighbour upon its believers, ended in ensuring nothing but hate. This, however, in no way completes the charge of deficient psychological insight against the holy family; for we have yet to consider Jesus's attitude to the child. Indeed, for many years it has been my private opinion that most of the mischief due to excessive child adulation and child spoiling, which has at last culminated in well-nigh suppressing discipline in all Christian communities, has sprung from Jesus' alleged remark in Matthew xix. 14: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." To the faithful, who could hardly be expected to dismiss it as a young, inexperienced bachelor's shot in the dark, this remark has meant centuries of the most disastrous misunderstandings and distortions of juvenile psychology. Narrowly scrutinized by anyone with a tolerably retentive memory, it reveals itself at once as an amiable fiction; for, if the traditional view of the Thus the human world could only accept Jesus's statement about children as true, if it had utterly forgotten the period of its immaturity. Given some knowledge of the new psychology and the present scientific view of children, we must conclude that when Jesus spoke about children's fitness for the kingdom of heaven, he was either utterly ignorant of children's true nature, or else had in mind a region completely abandoned to amorality — i.e. where everyone displayed habitual aggressiveness, sadism, duplicity, cunning, obscenity, sexual curiosity and play, hate, vindictiveness and homicidal jealousy, compounded with egoism, egotism, mendacity and the reckless exercise of the will to power-not to mention coprophilia, coprolangia and other strange traits, all of which normal (not merely average) children are known to display. Nor am I here referring to mere infants, but to children up to seven or eight years of age, in whom scientific psychology has found all the above-mentioned traits more or less conspicuously manifested. (For abundant scientific documentation of these statements which, to the uniniated English reader will seem at least startling, if not actually malicious, see my The Child: An Adult's Problem, 1948.) We have therefore to choose between accepting the view of a kingdom of heaven as a repository of souls anathematized by all we know of traditional Christian morality, in which case Matthew xix. 14 has some validity; or else as a place fit only for the haute volée of Christian "good people", in which case Matthew xix. 14 is nonsense. Unfortunately for the Christian world, it appears from the earliest days never to have understood Jesus as holding the first view, which is the only one that would have made sense of his remark. On the contrary, inferring from the fact that Satan had been fired from the kingdom of heaven, that it could be no place for creatures anything like him, Christians everywhere favoured the second view and consequently concluded that children must be, if not actually saints, at least angelic enough to be candidates for canonization. It is true that Augustine in his Confessions admits having seen some disquieting traits in children, incompatible with Jesus's estimate of them. He therefore tries to smooth over the difficulty by suggesting that the popular idea that children are "innocent" was to be understood, not as a disinclination to hurt and harm, but as a physical, or merely muscular, inability to implement the inclination to hurt and harm. And he supports this suggestion with evidence that might have been lifted almost word for word out of works by Aichhorn, Miss Susan Isaacs, or Freud himself (see translation by William Watts, 1912 Loeb Classical Library, Book I. Chap. VII). But St. Augustine is an exception among the Church Fathers and even among Christians in general, and we can only assume that his surprising honesty accounted for unguarded remarks of the kind I have quoted. In any case, the Christian world that has had access to the Holy Scriptures very naturally argued as follows: "As heaven is a place whither only the pure and the rigid observers of Christian morals can expect to go, children who, according to Jesus, are its natural personae gratae, must be spotless and innocent." This conclusion was certainly contingent on completely forgetting one's own childhood and one's childhood's contemporaries. But bad memory for unpleasant truths is not uncommon and, as psychological insight is a rare gift, it is not astonishing that Jesus's remark about children should have grown by tradition into meaning that children are morally superior to adults — a belief still widely held by English spinsters in particular (unconsciously revealed by the awed tones with which they usually address young children) and by all puritans. For Jesus's statement appears to such people to be abundantly borne out by the single fact that children are supposed to know nothing of our "dirty secrets". In any case, Wordsworth, like the whole of his generation, was completely hoodwinked by Jesus's remark and, in his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1806), Thirty-three years before Wordsworth's famous poem was published. Dr. Johnson, thanks probably to his prodigious memory, had all in vain flatly contradicted Jesus's dictum and thus, by anticipation, denied the Wordsworthian view of children (B. 14.9.1773). But, for some reason or other, nobody appears to have taken the slightest notice of Johnson's remark. It is even possible that, when he made it, even he himself was unaware of having joined issue with the founder of his religion. Not until some threescore years after Johnson's death did a shrewder reader of the human, and above all of the child's, heart than ever Wordsworth was, openly contradict the latter, although he too did so in vain; for the reading public in every age asks only for the confirmation of its many illusions and superstitions. Thus, when Browning published his Soul's Tragedy, even the bare handful of English readers of poetry were not moved to modify their assumptions about children. Besides, how in 1846 could Browning, unsupported by the scientific psychology that has since established his point of view, avail against Wordsworth standing on the New Testament? Spencer in 1861, in Chapter III of his Education, certainly lent Browning powerful support; but at a time when psychological insight was perhaps at its lowest ebb, what could he do against Jesus and Wordsworth? It was probably about the same time, or only a very little later, that Eugène Delacroix in Paris, voiced much the same view as Johnson, Browning and Spencer about children and, although we know the French to be gifted psychologists, Delacroix no doubt owed much of his psychological flair to his father, Talleyrand, just as Browning probably owed his to his German mother. At all events, Baudelaire quotes the famous French painter as saying: "Je me souviens fort bien que quand j'étais enfant j'étais un monstre . . . ce n'est que par la douleur, le châtiment, et par l'exercice progressif de la raison que l'homme diminue peu à peu sa méchanceté naturelle" (L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Commenting on this passage, Baudelaire says, "ainsi, par le simple bon sens, il faisait un retour sur l'idée catholique, car on peut dire que l'enfant en général est relativement à l'homme en général, beaucoup plus rapproché du péché original" (Ibid. "Thus, by sheer common sense, he [i.e., Delacroix] reverted to the Catholic point of view; for it may well be said that children in general, compared with men in general, stand much closer to Original Sin"). It is impossible now to dwell on the enormous amount of injury the divine error in psychology which we have been considering has done to social life, especially in England and America. Suffice it to say that, by making children sacrosanct and representing them as morally superior to adults, whereby the adult's sense of authority has been undermined, it has led to scandalous excesses in paedolatry and child-spoiling, with the result that an end has been put to all proper discipline both in the home and elsewhere. For the discoveries and doctrines of modern psychology, with their confirmation of Johnson, Browning, Spencer, Delacroix and Baudelaire, and their refutation of Wordsworth, have not yet spread beyond a limited circle; and meanwhile every puritan in England and America, like every ignoramus elsewhere, continues to look on Jesus's misleading view of the matter as final and conclusive. Perhaps the oddest feature of at least the English situation in regard to this capital error about the child, is the fact that Wordsworth actually described his great but wholly mistaken poem as written "From Recollections of Early Childhood"; so that he added the faults of a feeble memory to the cardinal psychological fault of his deity. Be this as it may, it can hardly be claimed that psychological insight is a strong point with the Holy Family, and although this aspect of Christian myth and teaching is never dwelt upon by Rationalists and Agnostics, it surely cannot be denied that the few grave errors in psychology which I have shown to have been committed by the Christian gods constitute, apart from any other considerations, a serious objection to the claim that Christianity has been supernaturally revealed. But, however ready we might be to concede this point when the errors in question are traceable to human ignorance, we surely cannot do so when these errors are, as I have shown, not only those of the divine source of the alleged revelation itself, but have also formed an essential and precious part of the very teaching peculiar to the religion founded by that divine source. To this the reader may object that even the errors which I have here attributed to the deity and his putative son, might also be human in origin and result from either false reporting or inaccurate transcriptions of reports. True enough! But, in that case, there is an end to scriptural authority for any doctrine whatsoever, and we can no longer rely on the accuracy of any statement attributed to the deity himself, whether compatible or not with modern knowledge; and the claim that our religion and the scriptures constituting its authority are revealed ceases to have any validity. Since, moreover, James never specifies the sort of errors that fall short of discrediting the claim that a book has been supernaturally revealed, and certainly makes no allusion to the psychological errors on the part of the Holy Family, to which I have called attention, his plea may safely be dismissed as unimportant except as it relates to the kind of errors in Holy Writ to which Rationalists chiefly allude. Chapter IV Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — II A long acquaintance with such people who, nowadays in England at least, are preponderatingly "lower middle class", compels the conclusion that with them, as with the sophist, Socrates, morality is an obsession. It provides them with an ideal cathartic for relieving their unconscious, pent-up hatred and envy of their fellow-men; a weapon with which to torment them without incurring the risk of retaliation. For even at the hands of an onlooking crowd, a moral persecutor of his neighbour runs little risk of either censure or abuse. Thus Puritans can bask securely in the glow of social approbation whilst freely venting man's common but secret hatred of mankind. For, as Pascal once observed: "Tous les hommes se haïssent naturellement" (P. Ière Partie, Article IX. ix), and many years later Hume remarked, "In general it may be affirm'd that there is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind" (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, Sect. I). No wonder Puritans Aware of this unpleasant feature of Puritanism, Macaulay denied that Puritan wrath at bear-baiting was prompted by humanitarian feeling. Puritans hated it, he says, "not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators". (History of England, Ed. 1849, Vol. I. Chap. II). Despite what has often been alleged about Puritan hypocrisy and insincerity, moreover, Puritans as a body were not invariably two-faced in their insistence on their self-denying moral code. Apart from a few Tartuffes, on the whole they practised what they preached and were as painstaking in blighting their own as other people's lives. And this is still so, as may be seen, above all, in their own sex-relations. For the fact that, in their restrictive lusts as occult misanthropists, they naturally pay most heed to man's deepest and most urgent passion, cannot have escaped anyone familiar with their character. Indeed, the very word "Puritan" has now come to bear a chiefly sex-phobic connotation. Seizing on those features of Christianity which suggest hostility to sex, they use them to thwart and harass their fellows where they know frustration most hurts, and in this they usually exceed the severity with which they restrict gastronomical and other pleasures. Yet when we study their own way of life we have to acknowledge that, in the choice of their partners in sexual pastimes and in the choice and preparation of their food, they spare themselves as little as they do their fellow-men. From the time of Cromwell the inferiority of their culinary arts has been proverbial (see A Short History of Social Life in England, by M. B. Synge, 1906, Chap. XVI), and the Englishwoman's black record as a cook may perhaps with justice be ascribed to the fact that in England the moral climate has for centuries, independently of denominational differences, been tainted with Puritanism. The self-denial in venery, which the Puritan tries to force on his fellow-men, however, he imposes no less rigorously on himself. Indeed, few who have lived among low church. Nonconformist and dissenting communities in England, can have failed to notice the painful regularity with which the men choose their spouses less for their sex-appeal than for their qualification to wean them from venery altogether. It is as if the Puritan, obsessed with the Lord's disapproval of sexual intercourse, hoped Be this as it may, whilst Christian doctrine, except according to James, the Jansenists and Protestants in general, can hardly be held directly responsible for the prevalent view, in countries professing the Reformed Faith, that religion is only morality, no doubt whatsoever exists about the deep Christian roots of the sex-phobia that has polluted Western civilization for the last two thousand years. Indeed, this charge is among the more prominent that modern historians and sociologists usually bring against the religion; and although, as we shall see, it may not be the gravest, it is sufficiently important and peculiar to Christianity to justify, by itself alone, serious doubts concerning the alleged supernatural provenance of the religion. When Nietzsche declared that Christianity had "made something impure of sexuality and defiled the very source and quintessential condition of our life" (The Twilight of the Idols, Sect. 10, 4), he said no more than the plain truth. Bertrand Russell, referring to the consequences of Christianity's sex-phobia, observes, "Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboos on sex knowledge when he or she is young" (Rationalist Annual, 1930). Heine, from whom Nietzsche undoubtedly obtained many a valuable hint concerning this and other aspects of Christianity, says of it: "Being unable to do away altogether with material and earthly things, Christianity has everywhere tarnished and defiled them. It has disparaged and slandered the noblest pleasures, so that mankind's sensuality, obliged to dissemble, led to the birth of falsehood and sin. . . . According to the Christian standpoint the material side of life is evil per se, which, after all, is veritably not only slander but hideous blasphemy" (D. Buch II: "Das Christentum, unfähig die Materie zu vernichten, hat sie überall fletriert, es hat die adelsten Genüsse herabgewürdigt, und die Sinne müssten heucheln, und es entstand Lüge und Sünde. . . . Nach ihrer Weltanschauung ist die Materie an und für sich böse, was doch wahrlich eine Verleumdung ist, eine entsetzliche But the witnesses to this prurient and negative character of Christianity are legion and the charge they make now is a commonplace. Yet many English divines and Christian apologists, staking on the ignorance and gullibility of the majority, have in recent years striven anxiously to defend Christianity against the charge. Aware of the marked change that has come over public opinion during the last few decades, precisely on the proper attitude to the sexual life — a change to no small extent due to the wide dissemination of the new psychology, supported by a general revolt against the Puritanism of Victorian England — these divines and Christian apologists, wishing to shield the Church and its faith from the unpopularity likely to be incurred by a continued enforcement of Christianity's traditional sex-phobia, have for many years now had the disingenuousness to maintain that no religion on earth has been more consistently broadminded and liberal concerning sexuality than Christianity itself. A typical example of these intrepid, last-minute efforts to rescue the faith is Christopher Dawson's Christianity and Sex (1930), where the championship of Christianity against Bertrand Russell's attacks, though unlikely to impress anyone except a fanatical partisan, is undertaken with all the resources of a skilled debater, conscious of addressing a none too learned or critical audience. Another is G. W. Coutts's The Church and the Sex Question (1926), in which the author tries to dodge the whole issue by concentrating on Jesus's ipsissima verbs alone. But even were we ready to debate the point with Mr. Coutts on his own chosen ground and abide strictly by what Jesus is reported to have said, the argument in his book would receive but scant support; for, on the authority of St. Matthew (xix. 12), we are assured that Jesus once said, "There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake." Dr. Cyril Alington is another who labours to persuade us that Christianity beams benignly on human sexuality, and, in replying to the charge of sex-phobia against his religion, says in effect: "Nonsense! That is all vieux jeu. Christianity now takes a wholly different view." Then, rather disingenuously, he sums up his denial by saying, "No sane Christian today shares the horror of any sexual relationship" (The Fool Hath Said, 1933, pp. 124–125). Then are we to assume that most, if not all, Christian missionaries are insane? For we should have liked to ask Dr. Alington when this alleged Christian volte-face took place and on whose authority it was performed. Turn to the reports about missionaries now engaged in spreading the very creed your Alingtons, Inges, Couttses and Dawsons try to defend, and you find that no matter what may be the attitude of apologists arduously striving to acquit their religion of the charge of sex-phobia, their attitude is certainly not shared by their representatives abroad, who still cling fanatically to at least that aspect of sex phobia made up of an abhorrence of the organs of sex. They still teach the innocent savage to feel ashamed of the procreative organs given him by the God he is invited to worship. They still teach the women of Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia to conceal the breasts given them by the Christian God to suckle their offspring — "Cachez ce sein que je ne saurais voir. Cela fait venir de coupables pensées!" And this teaching is so consistent that, More recent testimony to the same effect will be found in Blackwood's Magazine for October 1958, where in an article entitled "The Fort", by Surgeon Commander A. G. Bee, we are told that, "Missions are horrified by nakedness." The author says, "I do not know why"; but if he had studied Church history and its long record of sex-phobia, he would have understood. Referring to the mission of Iambi, he says, "One day the missionaries sent word to the chiefs that every adult, male and female, must buy a yard of 'Americani', American cloth, and wear it in Christian decency. The chiefs took necessary action, and everyone bought a length of cloth. Coming proudly to the mission upon occasions, each wore a smart turban and every part except the head was bare, every charm exposed both fore and aft, jingling with rings to give them emphasis." This testimony, read in conjunction with Dr. Alington's cry of "vieux jeu!" shows to what desperate shifts Christian apologists are driven, even before an ill-informed gallery, when trying to exculpate their faith of the charge of sex-phobia. If capable of thought at all, theirs could be but slovenly; but if capable of anything better, they must deserve a more damaging charge; because, apart from the evidence of the Scriptures, even a superficial acquaintance with European history can leave no one in any doubt that Christianity has always frowned on sex and sexual intercourse. From the story of the Fall of Man to the idea of the Immaculate Conception as related in the New Testament, we are repeatedly made to feel that sexual intercourse is rather disreputable, impure, not to be tolerated for the procreation of any creature reputed to be holy. As Dr. J. F. Hecker remarks, There can be no doubt that organized religion knows itself to "Behold I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me" (Psalm li. 5). Whether David wrote this or not is immaterial, for what concerns us is to note the strong strain of sex-phobia that informs the passage. But if David did write it, it is such a gratuitous vilification of human procreation — because as far as we know David was the child neither of a common prostitute nor of a debauchee father — as to compel the inference that Puritnaism was an early manifestation among the people from whom the Founder of Christianity derived. Nor can the fact that Christianity ultimately inherited this Semitic Puritanism be denied by any candid churchman. John Cowper Powys maintains that the Old Testament "suggests no ascetic implication that the pleasures of sex are unlawful" (P.O.L. Chap. "The Bible as Literature"). He evidently had forgotten both the story of the Fall and Psalm 51, to mention no other passages. Logan Pearsall Smith records that his great-great grandmother, who had nine children, wrote in her diary in the years 1760–62: "If it is a sin to get children, how comes so much of it is done? It is a great mystery to me" (Reperusals and Recollections, 1936, Chap. VIII). Her hardly surprising perplexity reveals the extent to which verse 5 of Psalm 51 expresses a sentiment evidently widely inculcated in Christian England of the eighteenth century. "It is good for a man not to touch a woman", said one of Christianity's earliest saints; "it is good for a man to remain a virgin", and "he who gives a woman in marriage does well; but he who gives her not in marriage does better". (I Corinthians vii. i, 26, 32). St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (A.D. 340–397), solemnly declared that, "Every married woman knows she has cause to blush with shame" (quoted in P. J. Proudhon's Amour et Mariage, 1860, Dixième Étude, Chap. V. XLV). So deep is Christianity's sex-phobia, that even the custom of eating fish on holy days and fast days owes its existence to the fact that, as fish do not copulate, they are held to be free from the foulness that pollutes all animals quae copulatione generantur. Thousands of early Christians, moreover, who took Jesus's Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Pation of Barcelona — all regarded St. Paul's sentiments in Romans viii. 6 and 8, as essential to a proper Christian attitude of mind. Sextus Philosophus, of the third century, openly recommended castration to everybody, and as late as the twelfth century, Robert Pulleyn, Peter Lombard and Pope Innocent II followed Augustine in holding that concupiscence was the root of all evil. The Council of Trent (1545–63) settled the matter for the whole future of the Catholic Church when it set virginity and celibacy above matrimony (see Canon X). Nor did Protestantism improve the position. On the contrary, it made it worse; for, in its ugliest creation, the Puritans, it produced a sect whose most bitter regret was that, at the creation, they had not been at God's side to suggest a more drawing-roomy method of propagating species than the one he proposed to use. Indeed, Martin Luther's poor opinion of this aspect of the creation found emphatic expression, for on one occasion, he said, "Had God consulted me in the matter [of human procreation] I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them with clay in the way Adam was fashioned" (T.T. DCCL. II. p. 307). This one feature of Christianity, as Bertrand Russell implies, wrought untold havoc in the Western world. Besides causing widespread individual misery and frustration, it has filled our Chapter V Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — III As many of the reasons advanced to support this most serious charge may strike the average reader as strange and not even adumbrated by the generally familiar attacks made by the Rationalists, the present argument may suffer from all the drawbacks which naturally attend the uncustomary and unprecedented. For, in the history of anti-Christian thought, various forms of hostile criticism are found, not all of which have reached the general public of any civilized country, and some of which appear for the first time in these pages, or in works of mine already published (see, for instance, my Choice of a Mate, 1935; and Enemies of Women, 1948). The best-known form of attack, popularized in innumerable publications throughout the nineteenth century, especially during its latter half and after, is that adopted by Thomas Huxley in his controversy with Dr. Wace. It confines itself to casting doubt on the authenticity of the Scriptures, on Christian dogma and legends, and concludes by stating why Agnosticism is the only honest and tenable attitude towards transcendental problems. Incidentally, it denies the divinity of Jesus (some Rationalists, including J. M. Robertson, deny even his historicity) without, however, adducing many of the compelling reasons which I have already stated in Chapter III supra; and questions all the alleged miraculous events connected with his name, including, of course, his birth and resurrection.
In other words, despite their unbelief, Rationalists, like churchmen, take the morality of Christianity for granted as the only morality. So deeply ingrained have become the impulses, judgments and prejudices conditioned by two millenniums of Christian indoctrination, that they tend to infer from their subconscious readiness to think and feel in a Christianly moral manner that Christian morality is self-evident and needs only to be placed, as Professor Corkey says, on "sure foundations" in order to become acceptable to all mankind. To this extent was Macaulay justified when he said, "To almost all men the state of things under which they have been used to live seems to be the necessary state of things". (Essay on Southey's Colloquies on Society, 1830). But the reader may object that, if Macaulay is right in this, why were even the supernatural and mythical aspects of Christianity assailed? This was most probably owing to the fact that whereas recent scientific discoveries, popularized in thousands of publications, have informed modern mankind of the increasing incredibility of the lore and myth of Christianity, no equivalent scientific discoveries have so plainly exposed the doubtfulness of either the authority, validity, or desirability of Christian morals. Thus the task of recognizing and upholding this form of scepticism was necessarily left to thinkers penetrating and independent enough to approach Christian morals, unin- "It was unlikely that much harm could overtake people who cared to believe in fairy-tales. Provided they could keep sane, where was the danger in believing — say, in a Holy Ghost, in the Holy Trinity, in Jesus's virgin birth, in his divinity and resurrection, and in an almighty, all-knowing God, whose anger over the sins of his own creatures could be appeased by the death after prolonged torture of his beloved and only-begotten son? If they did not adversely affect his conduct, what harm could such beliefs possibly do a man?" "But was the case the same with Christian morals? Could mankind with the same impunity believe in and practise them? Were these morals conducive to human prosperity and to the perpetuation of humanity in a desirable form? Or did they affect humanity unfavourably? If they did, then all the pother about the supernatural aspects of the creed was insignificant compared with the more vital question concerning the wisdom and safety of continuing to believe in and practise Christian morality." Among the first to argue in this way was Heinrich Heine, and although he never stated it as explicitly as it is stated in the foregoing paragraphs, he set forth its essentials plainly enough to enable others to follow his lead. (see D. Erstes Buch, where he animadverts on the unwholesome stress Christianity lays on the attributes of the "soul", its corresponding neglect of bodily considerations, and the general "hospital atmosphere" — Lazarethluft — it has consequently spread throughout Europe). What, above all, he placed on record as early as 1834 was his discovery that the Rationalists were really barking up the wrong tree and, whilst busily discarding one transcendental feature of Christianity after another, continued to cling tenaciously to its least desirable aspect — its morality. (D. zweites Buch, where in discussing Christianity and the Rationalist attitude to it, he says: "Zuerst wurde ihr [i.e., Christianity] zur Ader gelassen, alles abergläubische Blut wurde ihr langsam abgezapt; um mich bildlos auszudrücken, es wurde der Versuch gemacht, allen historischen Inhalt aus dem Christentume heraus- These pioneer criticisms of the Rationalist attitude on Heine's part are worthy of the highest praise; for he blazed a trail which it would have been well for Europe and, above all, for England to have followed. Unfortunately, it was not until Spencer (who as far as I know had never read Heine) appeared in England, and Nietzsche (who had both read Heine and pillaged him without acknowledgment) appeared in Germany, some forty to fifty years later, that Heine's valuable hints bore any fruit. Spencer was certainly the first Englishman who, whilst undoubtedly belonging to the Rationalist school, yet had enough originality to question those elements in Christian morality which, by neglecting biological considerations, placed those ulteriorly endowed on an equal footing, as regards worthiness, with the superiorly endowed, and thus inaugurated the principle of sacrificing the greater to the less. Because, in the end, this policy did in fact burden the biologically superior with the dead weight of human defectives and unfortunates of all kinds. In addition, by elevating, promoting and cherishing them at the cost of the sound and biologically desirable, this policy naturally helped the undesirable to survive and multiply. Perceiving this deplorable consequence of Christian morality, which the Rationalists, far from recognizing and condemning, actually defended. Spencer at least sounded a warning note. It was not a rousing call, calculated to summon his generation to reluctant but instant attention, and its importance has not been appreciated by the majority even to this day. But, considering the age in which it was uttered, it was a courageous pronouncement and may account for his not having been buried in Westminster Abbey. That it was allowed to pass unnoticed shows how deeply subconscious two thousand years of Christian indoctrination had caused Christian modes of reasoning and judging to become in the people of the Western world. So spontaneous and impulsive are such modes of reasoning and judging in modern men and women, that when an unusually profound anti-Christian note happens to be struck, hardly anyone ever catches, understands, or attempts to act upon it. In the 'seventies of last century. Spencer wrote: "Any arrange- The fact that the maxim Spencer here condemns is now put into practice by all societies observing Christian morals, and nowhere with greater recklessness than in present-day England, and the fact that the source of the said maxim lies in the over-emphasis Christianity lays on "soul", at the cost of body attributes, makes this passage in the Synthetic Philosophy one of the boldest pioneer assaults on Christian morality. For, in applying the principle of disregarding bodily attributes in assessing human worth, Christianity tends to promote policies which, by furthering the welfare and multiplication of the biologically ill-favoured and unsound, in the end cause the deterioration of human stocks. Because, even if the presence of the army of defectives does not contaminate and infect the sounder elements (which is doubtful), it handicaps them, imposes limits on their capacity to multiply, and thus jeopardizes their survival. The insensible decline of Christianity as a living faith, into a mere moral influence signalized chiefly by exorbitant benevolence towards the bungled and the botched, is probably what Macneile Dixon had in mind when he wrote: "Christianity or what remains of it . . . is fast melting, if it has not wholly evaporated, into humanitarianism." (T.H.S. Chap. II). Spencer recognized this evil and tried in vain to rouse indignation about it. As this was a century ago, and its effect on the thought and sentiment of the English people has to this day remained undetectable, we obtain some idea of the grip one of the most harmful of Christian influences has fastened on the minds of civilized mankind. For, in this connection, it is important to remember that millions of the very people who today may be classed as unbelievers, nevertheless profess their whole-hearted approval of the maxim Spencer selects for his particular reprobation. To this extent have the morals of Christianity By diverting the eye and the taste of mankind from the visible attributes of a fellow-being, and by minimizing the significance of these visible attributes, the insistence on soul qualities alone necessarily protected the ill constituted from the aloofness, not to say the repudiation, which, both in ordinary human intercourse and, above all, in matrimony, would otherwise have caused them to be eschewed as procreators of the race. One has but to observe the marked frequency with which "love" today stages dysgenic and obviously undesirable matings, in order to appreciate the extent to which the undue stress on soul qualities numbs modern people's sensibilities towards all those physical stigmata, blemishes, defects, which, under a wholesome regimentation of taste and judgment, would provoke aversion and repugnance. Among the most disastrous results of Christianity's disregard of biological attributes in the estimation of human worth, has been Western mankind's adoption of the exact converse of the farmer's point of view and practice. Instead of uprooting and discouraging the weeds and noxious growths in order to spare, protect, and avoid the sacrifice of the nobler more valuable plants, we allow the weeds to flourish and multiply, always at the cost of the more desirable and more promising denizens of the human garden. We have conditioned our natures to react compassionately to what is misshapen, inferior and defective. Never do we dream of extending "pity" to those fast-diminishing stocks in the population, which, owing to their biological superiority, constitute the only guarantee we have of our race being able to survive in a desirable form. The very idea of championing these all-too-rare superior stocks as the husbandman champions his more valuable plants, because of the dangers and burdens threatening them from the quarter of weeds and fungi, would evoke no more than a puzzled stare, even if it did not actually provoke a laugh. Yet if we ask why, by what sophisticated reasoning on justice, it should have become an accepted The same remarks apply to the principle of sacrifice. Why should it be regarded as right and de rigueur always to sacrifice the greater and more precious to the less, rather than the other way round? Can it be that Christianity's most sacred symbol — the god nailed to the cross for the sake of the mob — has, as a spectacle contemplated for twenty centuries, at last made Western humanity accept as incontrovertible and self-evident the principle it thus gruesomely illustrates? In his essay (E.E.) Thomas Huxley asks: "What would become of the garden if the gardener (acting on the 'golden rule', Do as you would be done by) treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated if he were in their place?" (Prolegomena, IX). But, in replying to his own question, as we shall see, he displays so limited an understanding of the means whereby, in our advanced civilization, the husbandman's and the gardener's solicitude for their nobler plants might be applied to humanity without any of the violence which he thinks indispensable to such a policy, that he hardly rises above the level of the classical Rationalist, of whose restricted vision enough has been said already. Deeply absorbed by the purely economic condition of the population, and the charitable and legislative measures adopted to allay distress — measures admittedly due to Christian agitators and reformers — the modern world, although emanicipated by Science and Rationalism from the thraldom of superstition, never thought of that other form of charity which would have consisted in relieving posterity of the burdens, unwholesome influence, and depressing spectacle, of human morbidity, defectiveness and ugliness, which every generation now shamelessly bequeaths to its successors. Even the thought that this duty entails preventing sound and desirable people from being I have already mentioned that it was only with the appearance of Nietzsche's works that, after a time-lag of some forty-five years, Heine's valuable hints concerning the danger of Christian morals were effectively taken up; for even if we must deny Nietzsche originality in this matter, it was he, more than any other European, who clearly perceived the serious menace to humanity which, as Heine had pointed out, lurked unrecognized by the modern world in the morality of Christianity. With extraordinary vividness he grasped that when once unseen and often merely presumed attributes are allowed to eclipse and supersede visible attributes in assessing the worth of a human being, the doors were opened wide to every possible deterioration of human stocks. Henceforward all the tainted, the unwholesome and morbid of the world would be held equal or actually superior to the sound and biologically desirable. Henceforward the measure of a man's worth would not be the promise he gave of being able to perpetuate the race in a form desirable from both the mental and physical point of view, but the degree of his conformity to certain "soul" standards, arbitrarily established without any reference to biological quality. In stirring language, Nietzsche denounced this topsyturvification of all mankind's healthiest instincts and impulses, and with exceptional brilliance and an un-German absence of sentimentality, he called Europe's attention to the danger of a morality consistent with, if not authorized by, St. Paul's ill-considered utterance in Chapter IV of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians: "We [i.e., the Christians] look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen; for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." Although conditions in respect of health and stamina were already alarming enough in his day, Nietzsche did not live to see the high incidence of morbidity, physical defect and insanity now "We must not embellish or deck out our Christianity," he exclaimed, "it has waged a deadly war against the higher type of man; it has set a ban upon all the fundamental instincts of this type. . . . Christianity has taken the pan of everything weak, low and ill-favoured; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative impulses and promptings of vigorous, healthy life" (The Antichrist, 5). Elsewhere he says: "The sickly are the great danger of man: not the wicked, not the beasts of prey. They who are ill-shaped, prostrated and wrecked from birth, they, the weakest, are the people who most undermine human life, who most dangerously poison and question our confidence in life, in man, in ourselves" (Genealogy of Morals, III, 14). In Thus Spake Zarathustra (XVI; Neighbour Love), the thought of what mankind's future must be if Christian morals were to continue dominating us, he expressed as follows: "Do I advise you to love your neighbour? . . . Higher than love for your neighbour is love of the most remote man of the future; "It is the more distant (your children and your children's children) who have to pay for your love of your neighbour!" And he concludes his long indictment of the old religion by declaring: "this eternal accusation of Christianity I would fain write on all walls, wherever there are walls. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and quintessential perversion. . . . I call it the one immortal blemish on mankind" (The Antichrist, 62). But it would be a grave error to suppose that Nietzsche's lucid demonstration of Christianity's rôle in favouring the multiplication of the ill favoured and biologically corrupt, and in thus plotting the deterioration of all human stocks, was taken up with any eagerness — at least in England. Sentimentality, the power of the churches, the indoctrination of centuries, and the influence of the sickly and defective themselves, were too formidable. The Incidentally, I may mention that when, some three or four decades ago, I was invited to join the society in question and I declined, I gave as my reason that I saw no chance of realizing the society's aims so long as its council could retain Dean Inge on its board. Here and there, thinkers have appeared far-seeing enough to recognize the urgency of questioning Christian morals; but they have been too few to make much impression, and, except for Bradley, their protests have been too timid and lacking in candour. Margaret Mead, for instance, in Male and Female (1949, Part II, Chap. IV), acknowledges that "We are trained by our society to keep our bodies out of our minds". But it is significant that she should say "by our society" and does not dare to mention the exalted religious source and authority for this training. Dr. G. A. Dorsey is certainly a little more outspoken; for, thirty one years after Nietzsche's death and a century after Heine published his Deutschland, he said of the Christians: "their religion was incompatible with mens sana in corpore sano. They exalted faith in God above such human qualities as health, loveableness, etc." (C. Chap. IX, v). But by far the most remarkable and penetrating attack on Christian morals was that made as long ago as 1894 by that most brilliant of English philosophers, F. H. Bradley. "When we modify and depart from the workings of natural selection," he said, "I urge that we ought at least to proceed on some kind of principle. . . . The laws of past progress must, I admit, be qualified through progress itself, but it is not likely that these laws have become wholly invalid. And, at any rate, to assume this without grounds seems plainly absurd. But in our morals and politics this absurdity is dominant. . . . We compel the higher type to stand by helpless and to be outbred by the weaker and the lower, and we force it to contribute itself to the process of its own extrusion . . . on the main point, the suppression of undesirable types, we appear ready to entrust our destinies to Providence. . . . And we ourselves deliberately, we know, may When we reflect that this was written by an erudite Englishman who, as far as I am aware, had never heard of Nietzsche's expression of the same sentiments in similar language, it seems incredible that today, sixty four years after Bradley wrote this notable essay, the vast majority of even educated English people should still feel no misgivings about the dangers of Christian morality. For — to single out but one of the old religion's disastrous features — the cruelty perpetrated against posterity and the biologically superior that still manage to survive, by Christian pity for the defective, the biologically shoddy of all kinds and the demented; surely this cruelty should suffice to make all rational humanitarians at least dubious about the religion. There have of course been others who have voiced views similar to Bradley's; but none who has equalled, much less surpassed, the cogency and passion of his protest. The nearest approach to his sentiments is to be found in Professor William McDougall's R.S.L. written exactly forty years after the essay on Punishment. In Chapter IX of this book McDougall says: "At the present time the State not only does nothing to promote a relatively rapid multiplication of the intrinsically superior elements of the population, but it actually maintains an extensive and unjust system by which it restricts the multiplication of these elements." It is, however, typical of modern scientific publicists that even when they are in favour of reforms antagonistic to the sentiments established by Christian morals, and even when their erudition leaves us in no doubt concerning their awareness of the source of the evils they expose, they are usually scrupulously careful to avoid any direct allusion to it. In regard to the foregoing quotation from McDougaIl, for instance, it will be noticed that, just as The objection usually raised, especially by Englishwomen of all classes, to any eugenic policy or any suggested modification of the present practice of favouring the biologically unsound at the cost of the sound and promising, is generally expressed by exclaiming, "Ah, poor things! They can't help it!" So often have I had this plea addressed to me when I have been lecturing on the physical deterioration of the English people, and it is so likely to be on the tip of many of my readers' tongues, that it cannot be left unnoticed, especially as it reflects in a striking manner on the character of our present-day morality. The objection, framed more carefully, is as follows: "Although it is admitted that the diseased, defective, demented and deformed are now a severe burden on the sane, hale and hearty in the nation, gravely deplete the latter's resources, restrict their ability to multiply and to regenerate the country's population, and, by constituting foci of further racial pollution and corruption, exercise a twofold dysgenic influence on society, it must nevertheless be conceded in all fairness that, after all, it is not the fault of these unfortunates that they are thus ill-favoured. They cannot help being biologically shoddy and depraved." Now the remarkable and arresting feature of this objection, with its implied defence of a form of parasitism which presents the gravest problems for the future, is that in our civilization it is raised only and exclusively in respect of the sickly, the degenerate and the physiologically bungled and botched. It is never even whispered in any other connection. One never sees the members of any women's organization, chaining themselves to railings, destroying old masters in the National Gallery, stopping Royal horses at the Derby, or heckling and assaulting Cabinet Ministers (after the manner of the Suffragettes fighting for the futile Vote), in order to call Government attention to the appalling loss of child life on our roads every year. One never hears such women protesting that little children cannot help being little children and that therefore it is inhuman to allow lethal machines like modern road vehicles to One never hears anyone, man or woman, protesting that lambs, sheep, pigs and bullocks cannot help being what they are and should therefore be accommodated on our hearth-rugs as pets, instead of being wantonly butchered. Nor, during the two world wars, did I ever hear any Englishwoman, however sentimental, protest that our sound and healthy young men could not help being what they were, and therefore it was unfair to pack them off to the Front to face the enemy's light and heavy artillery. Indeed, during World War I, despite the appalling loss of young male life, the women of England, as I have already shown in many of my most unpopular publications, were, to the astonishment of men like John Cowper Powys, Norwood Young and Arnold Bennett, not only busy pressing their men friends to get into khaki, but were actually unanimous in wishing to prolong the war "to the last young man". The most egregious of these ardent sacrificers of sound young men was Christabel Pankhurst and the disgraceful audiences she used to address every week at the Pavilion in Piccadilly. When did anyone during World War I hear the sort of woman who most vociferously champions what Bradley called "lower human types", express the kind of horror felt by Bertrand Russell at the slaughter of sound, healthy English youth on the Western Front? "I used to watch," he says, "young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on the Somme because Generals were stupid. I felt an aching compassion for the young men" (H. Oct. 1958). I never heard any such remark from a woman during the whole of World War I. Yet, when it is a matter of sacrificing the unsound, the tainted, the sickly, the defective and the deformed, for the good of those of their contemporaries who in their persons present some promise of perpetuating the race in a desirable form, there is not a woman in the whole length and breadth of the land, and not a man debilitated by female influence, who, in anguished tones will not expostulate: "Ah! poor things! They can't help it!" The gratuitous and arbitrary reservation of this compassionate plea for the least precious specimens in the nation, is surely suspicious, and should open the eyes of impartial judges to the powerful hold Christian morality has fastened on the impulses Chapter VI Christianity Not the Thoughtful Man's Religion — IV We have but to look at the present cost of our National Health Service which, in the twelvemonth 1957–58 amounted to £585,000,000, i.e. £50,000,000 more than the previous year (B.M.J. 23.8.58), and to learn that even twelve years ago it was already dispensing 228,879,170 prescriptions, whilst its dentists, in the five years between 1947 and 1952, distributed 10,500,000 dentures; in order to appreciate the magnitude of the morbidity we have now reached. With about 280,000,000 work days lost every year through illness (The Times, 6.9.57), and the incidence of sickness increasing every year, the question arises whether, apart from the matter of our future as a race, we shall be able to carry on at all in a few years time. We are told, for instance, that the number of patients treated in hospital rose by some 54,000 to 3,793,000 in 1957, and yet by the end of the year about 490,000 — 9,000 more than in the previous year — were awaiting admission. The question regarding the future is all the more pressing, seeing that the figures quoted not only exclude the vast population of defectives, cripples, incurables and insane now housed in private institutions, but also give no complete idea of the total In Dr. Stokes's survey, it was found "that but of 100 persons complaining of some illness during an average month, 77 of them did not visit a doctor. "It is evident," he concludes, "that with less than a quarter of sick persons visiting their doctor in a month, only an incomplete picture of total morbidity can be obtained from medical records" (Studies in Medical Population Subjects: Study No. 12, 1957, and Study No. 2, 1942). But when we reflect on the chronic invalidism and morbidity hidden away in private houses, in nursing homes and similar places, we appreciate that official records of illness and defect furnished by the Health Service, even when the picture they present is amplified by such surveys as those above-mentioned, still give us only an inadequate idea of the nation's total ill health and biological abnormality. We know that blindness, deaf-mutism and mental defect are everywhere increasing; whilst downright dementia, even if only of a temporary kind, is becoming every day more general. Over twenty years ago. Dr. Frances Harding declared that "if the growth of insanity continues at its present rate every man, woman and child will probably be mad by the year 2039" (Daily Press, 8.11.36); whilst Dr. A. J. B. Griffin, the Officer of Health of Worcester, in his report of 23rd September 1958, said that soon "it will be a distinction not to have at any time been an in-patient in a mental hospital" (i.e., the modern euphemism for a "lunatic asylum" adopted in order to spare the tender feelings of our gullible masses, high and low). In view of these and many similar facts that could be adduced, is not the complacency of the authorities and the general public astonishing? How is it to be explained? For we surely need little I speak of evidence officially furnished, but which of us who keeps his eyes and ears alert requires documentary proof of our deplorable condition? Do we need more than a few minutes of careful attention wherever our fellow men and women congregate, in order at once to be convinced that sickness, disease, defect and deformity today pass for the ordinary, customary — aye! expected, lot of all human beings? With endless queues waiting for beds at all our hospitals and with our lunatic asylums scandalously overcrowded, who can doubt our parlous condition? "At present," Allendale Sanderson writes, "there are 20,000 more patients in mental hospitals than they should hold," and, as one small fact illustrating the burden now thrust on the sound and healthy by the biological scum of our society, he mentions that the present cost of caring for 150,000 mental patients and 60,000 mental defectives in the 400 mental hospitals in the United Kingdom, is £1,000,000 per week (T.M. May 1956; article: Mournful Numbers). Nor is there much of a prospect of any alleviation of this burden; for, according to R. C. Cook (Human Fertility: The Modern Dilemma, 1951, Chap. XII), "The present pattern of reproduction, if continued for another generation, may halve the number of scholarship ability and double the number of feeble-minded." The talk of every couple, of every group, in train, coaches, buses, streets, halls and private houses, is always about the illness, operation, defect, or at least hospitalization, of some relative, friend, acquaintance, or of the speaker him- or herself. Yet nobody turns a hair! It is all taken for granted. Least of all is it ever felt as shameful, or nauseating. How many of us can truthfully claim that we know one — only one — thoroughly healthy person, including ourselves? According to the B.M.J. (29.2.36), the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham, carried out a survey which revealed that 90 per cent of persons over 25 years of age in the families of the artisan class investigated, had some physical defect. Yet, very seldom does any leading politician or scientist commit himself to a public expression of his alarm at this state of affairs. Even when he does, however, his remarks are so temperate and indicative of his "sense of humour", that they leave things as they are and confirm the public in their comfortable blindness. Is this craven restraint deliberate? An example of it is to be found —Yes! But there follows no hint about the moral doctrines fostering all this human uncomeliness and defect; nor, in view of the urgency of reforming our sentiments, can Dr. McDougall's statement be regarded as very challenging. What can explain this relative equanimity among our leaders and the masses, high and low, and the unshaken self-esteem of the English generally, in the presence of all this visible, audible and importunate human morbidity and abnormality, unless it be the habit of mind inculcated upon all by centuries of Christian teaching, that the body and its conditions matter so little compared with the soul, that all of us have become insensitive, indifferent, to human repulsiveness and biological depravity? "D'où vient qu'un boiteux ne nous irrite pas," Pascal asked, somewhere about the middle of the seventeenth century, "et qu'un esprit boiteux nous irrite?" (P. Ière Partie, Article VIII, ix: "How is it that the halt and the lame do not annoy us, and that the halting and lamed mind does"?). Pascal's answer is fanciful; for the truth is that even in his time, three centuries ago, the European's habit of mind had already been conditioned to take human physical defects, however repulsive, for granted, and to regard only so-called "spiritual" ones as worthy of censure. It is conceivable, apart from the prevalence today of what might be termed merely "medicated survival", that one of the more important factors, next to centuries of Christian indoctrination, which may account to some extent at least for the strange indifference of the British public towards their prevailing morbidity and abnormality, is the prominent rôle that improved transport facilities have played in the last century and a half throughout In the course of hardly a century and a half, however, such marked and steady progress has occurred in all kinds of mechanical transport, and the present age has seen such a spectacular and wide distribution of both public and private conveyances that enable the feeble, the decrepit, and even the incapacitated, to travel at speeds which, little more than half a century ago, were confined to the railways, that the inevitable result has been a successful, but nevertheless insidious, masking of most physical failings, feebleness or bodily flabbiness. And this mitigation of subnormality or morbidity, which formerly hampered mobility and could not escape attention, is nowhere more effectual and more deceptive than in the use of the "internal combustion engine"; for here, the dizzy speeds which can be attained even by the most debilitated and cachectic of drivers, merely by pressing the accelerator, gives the person at the wheel a sense of power and efficiency so illusory, so spurious, that a totally false picture of his or her condition is impressively and constantly presented. The high speeds attainable in a car may be the principal factor, not only in masking the prevailing morbidity, but also in relieving the pullulating feelings of inferiority which naturally afflict a people riddled with organic defects. This was certainly the view of Dr. Lampériere who, in a discussion with other doctors, said that the desire for speed was among other things "a compensation for feelings of inferiority and of inadequacy in adults" (B.M.J. 8.9.56); whilst Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge, speaking of the modern man and his car, says, "With such power at his disposal, the weakest feel strong, and the poorest-spirited, formidable" (T.T. Chap. IV, vii). Thus, it seems legitimate to conclude that, among the less thoughtful members of the populations of the West, which are the great majority, a false sense of self-satisfaction arises. At the very least, they have their attention powerfully and constantly diverted from their physical shortcomings, including their failing stamina, by the profusion of mechanical aids now put at their "Then what is your remedy?" the reader asks; and, in the defiance of his tone, I sense his assumption that he knows my answer and has the appropriate retort ready. What he expects me to say is, "A lethal chamber for the human rubbish we are salvaging at the cost of the dwindling minority of the sound and promising," and if I hint at such a thing, he is prepared at once to retort that the decent English public would never tolerate such "Nazi" or "fascist sadism". Incidentally, it should be noted that when the average person formulates this sort of reply, he not only shows himself incapable of going further back in history than World War II — as if thought on this question began then — but also betrays his expectation of immediate applause from every moron in the nation, whose alleged inability to suffer the violent elimination of even selected lower-grade defectives, is compounded with the patient, not to say, cheerful, endurance of the death of thousands of quite unselected and presumably sound adults and children on our highways every year. — No wonder a thinker like Macneile Dixon, comparing the suspicious fortitude of the public in regard to the slaughter on our roads with the hysterical fuss made over the deaths due to war, felt compelled to exclaim, "Will someone be good enough to tell me why the one kind of killing is condoned, the other condemned?" (T.H.S. Chap. IX). But let that pass, for I have no intention of proposing to the English public, corrupted by centuries of Christian sophistries, anything so painful to their tender sensibilities and so welcome to their dialectical powers, as a lethal chamber for the most hopeless of our hospitalized population. I am too well aware that if this were the only alternative to their present policy of laisser aller, it would but rivet them more tightly to their determination indefinitely to postpone all attempts at grappling with the problem, especially along such lines as the compassionate farmer follows to protect his more precious plants. It is, therefore all the more surprising that thinkers like Thomas Huxley and F. H. Bradley should both have had only some such remedy in mind when, confronted with the mounting Thus, in discussing the conflict of Christian morality with Nature's wholesome practice of sloughing off from the main body any diseased or rotten member, Huxley had to face the question how the present tendency to preserve and foster the defective and ill-favoured may now be corrected. Unable to grasp the iniquity of withholding all pity and protection from the meagre minority of the sound and promising, whose multiplication and very existence are imperilled by the soaring claims of the biologically depraved, he plunges immediately into a discussion of the possible moral consequences and repercussions of such a method, as they would affect the character and the domestic and social virtues of any population that adopted it. "I do not see," he says, "how such selection could be practised without a serious weakening, it may be the destruction, of the bonds which hold society together. It strikes me that men who are accustomed to contemplate the active or passive extirpation of the weak, the unfortunate, and the superfluous; who justify that conduct on the ground that it has the sanctity of the cosmic process, and is the only way of ensuring the progress of the race [why did he not say, "the preservation of the race"?] . . . on whose matrimonial undertakings the principles of the stud have the chief influence; whose lives, therefore, are an education in the noble art of suppressing material affection and sympathy, are not likely to have any large stock of these commodities left" (E.E. Prolegomena, XII). The argument against the violent extirpation of tainted, defective and ill-bred human beings, including monsters and raving maniacs, could hardly be stated with more vigour and less judicial impartiality; for, apart from the fact that Huxley adduces no evidence to show that sympathy and the bonds holding society together were destroyed by the ancient Spartan custom of hurling ill-favoured infants into the place called Apothetae, a deep Nor is it either fair, realistic, or even logical, to assume that because a couple marry only after careful enquiry and scrutiny have shown them to be sound and free from defect, that therefore their union must of necessity be destitute of affection and mutual devotion. Such expressions as "principles of the stud", which, as Huxley well knew, suggest the breeding of pigs an |