A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the many-sided influence of John Stuart Mill, who, beginning by a brilliant System of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less durable exposition of the Principles of Political Economy (1848), became through his shorter works On Liberty and on various political problems one of the most popular of the serious writers of his age. It was not till the posthumous issue of his Autobiography and his Three Essays on Religion (1874) that many of his readers realized how complete was his alienation from the current religion, from his childhood up. In his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), indeed, he had indignantly repudiated the worship of an unintelligibly good God; but he had there seemed to take for granted the God-idea; and save in inconclusive passages in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated no rejection of Christianity. But though the Liberty was praised by Kingsley and contemned by Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less than for tolerance; and his whole life's work made for reason. "The saint of rationalism" was Gladstone's [1996] account of him as a parliamentarian. His posthumous presentment to the world of the strange conception of a limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances--a theorem which meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of the universe nor the worshipper's craving for support--sets up some wonder as to his philosophy; but was probably as disintegrative of orthodoxy as a more philosophical performance would have been. Section 7.--Modern Jewry In the culture-life of the dispersed Jews, in the modern period, there is probably as much variety of credence in regard to religion as occurs in the life of Christendom so called. Such names as those of Spinoza, Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and Karl Marx tell sufficiently of Jewish service to freethought; and each one of these must have had many disciples of his own race. Deism among the educated Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century was probably common. [1997] The famous Rabbi Elijah of Wilna (d. 1797), entitled the Gaon, "the great one," set up a movement of relatively rationalistic pietism that led to the establishment in 1803 of a Rabbinical college at Walosin, which has flourished ever since, and had in 1888 no fewer than 400 students, among whose successors there goes on a certain amount of independent study. [1998] In the freer world outside critical thought has asserted itself within the pale of orthodox Judaism; witness such a writer as Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), whose posthumous Guide to the Perplexed of the Time [1999] (1851), though not a scientific work, is ethically and philosophically in advance of the orthodox Judaism of its age. Of Krochmal it has been said that he "was inspired in his work by the study of Hegel, just as Maimonides had been by the study of Aristotle." [2000] The result is only a liberalizing of Jewish orthodoxy in the light of historic study, [2001] such as went on among Christians in the same period; but it is thus a stepping-stone to further science. To-day educated Jewry is divided in somewhat the same proportions as Christendom into absolute rationalists and liberal and fanatical believers; and representatives of all three types, of different social grades, may be found among the Zionists, whose movement for the acquisition of a new racial home has attracted so much attention and sympathy in recent years. Whether or not that movement attains to any decisive political success, Judaism clearly cannot escape the solvent influences which affect all European opinion. As in the case of the Christian Church, the synagogue in the centres of culture keeps the formal adherence of some who no longer think on its plane; but while attempts are made from time to time to set up more rationalistic institutions for Jews with the modern bias, the general tendency is to a division between devotees of the old forms and those who have decided to live by reason. Section 8.--The Oriental Civilizations We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of India, China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism continue to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious soils of Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too immensely preponderant to permit of any other species of survival. But sociology, while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher life presented by conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the lower, can set no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution. The case of Japan is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators of the formula of the "unprogressiveness of the East." While a cheerfully superstitious religion is there still normal among the mass, the transformation of the political ideals and practice of the nation under the influence of European example is so great as to be unparalleled in human history; and it has inevitably involved the substitution of rationalism for supernaturalism among the great majority of the educated younger generation. The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood; [2002] and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to a naturalist way of thought. That they should revert to Christian or native orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution is seen to be in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of intelligence are probably not relatively more common than among the Japanese. The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social reconstruction and organization; and in the enormous population of China the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is the same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is that of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell more and more on Asiatic life. As to Japan, Professor B. H. Chamberlain pronounced twenty years ago that the Japanese "now bow down before the shrine of Herbert Spencer" (Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898, p. 321. Cp. Religious Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103), proceeding in another connection (p. 352) to describe them as essentially an undevotional people. Such a judgment would be hard to sustain. The Japanese people in the past have exhibited the amount of superstition normal in their culture stage (cp. the Voyages de C. P. Thunberg au Japon, French tr. 1796, iii, 206); and in our own day they differ from Western peoples on this side merely in respect of their greater general serenity of temperament. There were in Japan in 1894 no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803 Shinto temples and shrines; and the largest temple of all, costing "several million dollars," was built in the last dozen years of the nineteenth century. To the larger shrines there are habitual pilgrimages, the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist shrine reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shintô shrine of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about 900,000 each year. (See The Evolution of the Japanese, 1903, by L. Gulick, an American missionary organizer.) Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed "devotional" in the light of a special conception of true devotion. Yet a Christian observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of Nichirenites, "the Ranters of Buddhism," that "the wildest excesses that seek the mantle of religion in other lands are by them equalled if not excelled" (Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, 1876, p. 163); and Professor Chamberlain admits that "the religion of the family binds them [the Japanese in general, including the 'most materialistic'] down in truly sacred bonds"; while another writer, who thinks Christianity desirable for Japan, though he apparently ranks Japanese morals above Christian, declares that in his travels he was much reassured by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling thankful that his hosts were "not Agnostics or Secularists," but devout believers in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through Japan without a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.). A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G. Dixon, while noting a generation ago that "among certain classes in Japan not only religious earnestness but fanaticism and superstition still prevail," decides that "at the same time it remains true that the Japanese are not in the main a very religious people, and that at the present day religion is in lower repute than probably it has ever been in the country's history. Religious indifference is one of the prominent features of new Japan" (The Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The reconciliation of these estimates lies in the recognition of the fact that the Japanese populace is religious in very much the same way as those of Italy and England, while the more educated classes are rationalistic, not because of any "essential" incapacity for "devotion," but because of enlightenment and lack of countervailing social pressure. To the eye of the devotional Protestant the Catholics of Italy, with their regard to externals, seem "essentially" irreligious; and vice versâ. Such formulas miss science. Two hundred years ago Charron, following previous schematists, made a classification in which northerners figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and little given to religion; the southerners as slight, abstinent, obstinate, unwarlike, and superstitious; and the "middle" peoples as between the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The cognate formulas of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism triumphed over Shintôism in Japan both in ancient and modern times precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358-62; Dixon, ch. x; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111; Griffis, p. 166.) But the æsthetically charming cult of the family, with its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to which see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904), seems to hold its ground as well as any. So universal is sociological like other law that we find in Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as among some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for the people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa, "Japan's most representative thinker and educationist," as openly declaring that "It goes without saying that the maintenance of peace and security in society requires a religion. For this purpose any religion will do. I lack a religious nature, and have never believed in any religion. I am thus open to the charge that I am advising others to be religious while I am not so. Yet my conscience does not permit me to clothe myself with religion when I have it not at heart.... Of religions there are several kinds--Buddhism, Christianity, and what not. From my standpoint there is no more difference between those than between green tea and black.... See that the stock is well selected and the prices cheap...." (Japan Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view, however, Fukuzawa did not finally adhere. The Rev. Isaac Dooman, a missionary in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change that was taking place in his views in later life regarding the value of religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: "There was a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate our lower classes; but, after finding out that all Christian countries have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse than ours, I changed my mind." Further reflection, marked by equal candour, may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that nations cannot be led to adore any form of "tea" by the mere assurance of its indispensableness from leaders who confess they never take any. His view is doubtless shared by those priests concerning whom "it may be questioned whether in their fundamental beliefs the more scholarly of the Shinshiû priests differ very widely from the materialistic agnostics of Europe" (Dixon, p. 516). In this state of things the Christian thinks he sees his special opportunity. Professor Dixon writes (p. 518), in the manner of the missionary, that "decaying shrines and broken gods are to be seen everywhere. Not only is there indifference, but there is a rapidly-growing skepticism.... The masses too are becoming affected by it.... Shintôism and ... Buddhism are doomed. What is to take their place?... It must be either Christianity or Atheism. We have the brightest hopes that the former will triumph in the near future...." The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues alternately that the educated Japanese are religious and that they are not, meaning that they have "religious instincts," while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious instinct is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual seriousness. Mr. Gulick's summing-up, as distinct from his theory and forecast, is as follows: "For about three hundred years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human beings.... The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian classics was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine beings and their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into Japan.... Complete indifference to religion is characteristic of the educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners, Christians and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnosticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old agnosticism is merely reinforced by ... the agnosticism of the West" (The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286-87). This may be taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author's paper on "Freethought in Japan" in the Agnostic Annual for 1906. Professor E. H. Parker notes (China and Religion, 1905, p. 263) that "the Japanese in translating Western books are beginning, to the dismay of our missionaries, to leave out all the Christianity that is in them." But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of Japan has been of late set up by a new application of Shintôism, on the lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent pamphlet by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a New Religion (R. P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese temperament is so far from being "essentially" devoid of devotion as to be capable of building up a fresh cultus to order. It appears that since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when the Imperial House, after more than two centuries of seclusion in Kyoto, was brought from its retirement and the Emperor publicly installed as ruler by right of his divine origin, the sentiment of religious devotion to the Imperial House has been steadily inculcated, reaching its height during the Russo-Japanese War, when the messages of victorious generals and admirals piously ascribed their successes over the enemy to the "virtues of the Imperial Ancestors." In every school throughout the Empire there hangs a portrait of the emperor, which is regarded and treated as is a sacred image in Russia and in Catholic countries. The curators of schools have been known on occasion of fire and earthquake to save the imperial portrait before wife or child; and their action has elicited popular acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers and pupils assemble, and passing singly before the portrait, bow in solemn adoration. The divine origin of the Imperial House and the grossly mythical history of the early emperors are taught as articles of faith in Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis has been taught for ages in the schools of Christendom. Some years ago a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon which the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher who declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript was dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from the fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become that some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile it with Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-worshippers at the same time. [2003] All creeds are nominally tolerated in Japan, but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial House is a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to suspicion of treason. The new religion, which is merely old Shintôism revised, has been invented as a political expedient, and may possibly not long survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late emperor, who continued throughout his reign to live in comparative seclusion, and has been succeeded by a young prince educated on European lines. But the cult has obtained a strong hold upon the people; and by reason of social pressure receives the conventional support of educated men exactly as Christianity does in England, America, Germany, and Russia. Thus there is not "plain sailing" for freethought in Japan. In such a political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has a good prognosis; and if it be not changed for the better much of the Japanese advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale is always a product of culture; and culture for the mass of the people of Japan has only recently begun. Down till the middle of the nineteenth century nothing more than sporadic freethought existed. [2004] Some famous captains were irreverent as to the omens; and in a seventeenth-century manual of the principles of government, ascribed to the great founder of modern feudalism, Iyéyasu, the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their lords are denounced, and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the burial of effigies in substitution. [2005] But, as elsewhere under similar conditions, such displays of originality were confined to the ruling caste. [2006] I have seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire, apparently a product of mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist shrine-making; but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can stand only for that measure of freethought which is never absent from any society not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old Japan, with its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette, exhibited the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the intellectual vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was hardly in evidence; and the ethical literature of native inspiration is of no importance. [2007] To this day the educated Chinese, though lacking in Japanese "efficiency" and devotion to drill of all kinds, are the more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incomparably destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that only in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer step is the independent development of the speculative and critical intelligence; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to economic conditions. A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-day Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have been noted in the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the Mohammedan peoples of India; and at the present day the thought of the relatively small educated class is undoubtedly much affected by the changes going on in that of Europe, and especially of England. The vast Indian masses, however, are far from anything in the nature of critical culture; and though some system of education for them is probably on the way to establishment, [2008] their life must long remain quasi-primitive, mentally as well as physically. Buddhism is theoretically more capable of adaptation to a rationalist view of life than is Christianity; but its intellectual activities at present seem to tend more towards an "esoteric" credulity than towards a rational or scientific adjustment to life. Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah, where it has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given in the work of H. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its best the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is interwoven with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 207-211; Max Müller, Anthro. Rel., P. 132). Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different times attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious thought--e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century; but these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya preached a "surrender of all to Krishna," very much in the manner of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified by his followers. (Müller, Nat. Rel. p. 100; Phys. Rel. p. 356.) More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set up among the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history runs, by Nanak, who had been influenced both by Parsees and by Mohammedans, and whose ethical system repudiated caste. But though Nanak objected to any adoration of himself, he and all his descendants have been virtually deified by his devotees, despite their profession of a theoretically pantheistic creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 659-62; Müller, Phys. Rel. p. 355.) Trumpp (Die Religion der Sikhs, 1881, p. 123) tells of other Sikh sects, including one of a markedly atheistic character belonging to the nineteenth century; but all alike seem to gravitate towards Hinduism. Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists in their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise; and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye, Manual, pp. 557-63; Rev. J. Robson, Hinduism, 1874, pp. 80-86; Tiele, Outlines, p. 141. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj movement of the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in the way of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 224-46; De la Saussaye, pp. 669-71; Tiele, p. 160). The principle of the interdependence of the external and the internal life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened Turks, [2009] had no justification in social science, though bad politics may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although Turkish freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage, [2010] and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity, [2011] which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so much tends to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational and political conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to the observed laws of all civilization. It may be that a result of the rationalistic evolution in the other European States will be to make them intelligently friendly to such a process, where at present they are either piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely self-seeking as against each other's influence on Turkish destinies. In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate Greek priests glory in their ignorance, "asserting that a more liberal education has the effect of making atheists of the youth." He adds that he has "known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens] that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion," and would gladly have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood. [2012] But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek priesthood was "in general at once the most ignorant and the most vicious portion of the community"; [2013] and it remained socially predominant and reactionary. "Whatever progress has been made in Greece has received but little assistance from them." [2014] Liberal-minded professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted students, [2015] a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching "atheistic doctrines," and found guilty with three of his followers, died of jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending. [2016] Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of instructed freethought; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony, school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the exclusion of religious teaching from the schools. [2017] Despite the political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece from the main currents of European thought and commerce is probably the most retardative of her conditions; and it is hard to see how it can be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating with original life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a renascence of Mohammedan civilization or a great political reconstruction such as is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East may take a new departure; and in such an evolution Greece would be likely to share. CONCLUSION Any fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening growth of rational thought among all classes of the more advanced nations, and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The retrospect of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which in the twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before. There has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a measure of rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in the sphere in which it could perhaps least confidently be expected--to wit, that of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find a great orthodox poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as Christian; and Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (to name no others) in their various ways baffle the demand of faith. Latterly, the sex which has always been reckoned the more given to religion has shown many signs of adaptation to the higher law. In Britain, as in France, women began to appear in the ranks of reason in the eighteenth century. [2018] In the nineteenth the number has increased at a significant rate. Already in the fierce battles fought in the time of reaction after the French Revolution women took their place on the side of freedom; and Frances Wright (Madame d'Arusmont) played a notable part as a freethinking publicist and philanthropist. [2019] Since her day the names of Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell of the continual gain of knowledge; and women rationalists are now to be counted by thousands in all the more civilized countries. The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism; but the facts were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to Fox; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolution, as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi [2020] in Italy, and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers; Lincoln and his opponent, Douglas, were deists; towards the close of the century, in New Zealand, Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance, avowed rationalists, were among the foremost politicians of their generation; and in the English Cabinet rationalism began to be represented in the person of Lord Morley. While such developments have been possible in the fierce light of political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition has proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned a singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches dogmatic belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling: and "Christianity" is made to figure more and more as an ethical doctrine which has abandoned its historical foundations, while preserving formulas and rituals which have no part in rational ethics. The mythical cosmogony out of which the whole originally grew is no longer believed in by any educated person, though it is habitually presented to the young as divine truth. Thousands of clergymen, economically gripped to a false position, would gladly rectify their professed creeds, but cannot; because the political and economic bases involve the consent of the majority, and changes cannot be made without angry resistance and uproar among the less instructed multitude of all classes. The Protestant Churches collectively dread to figure as repudiating the historic creed; while the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the situation, maintains a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum standard of instruction for its adherents, counting on holding its ground while the faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the silent alienation of the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the priesthood can the show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the Catholic pale. In all orders alike, nevertheless, the "practice" of religion decays with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to justify their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works: no other plea passes as generally valid; and it is only by reason of a general transference of interest from religious to social problems that the decay of belief is disguised. "Piety," in the old sense, counts relatively for little; and while orthodoxy is still a means of advantage in political life, religion counts for nothing in international relations. In the war of 1899-1902, "Bible-loving" England forced a quarrel on the most Bible-loving race in the world; and at the time of the penning of these lines six nations are waging the greatest war of all time irrespectively of racial and religious ties alike, though all alike officially claim the support of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular preacher edifies great audiences by proclaiming that "God is not neutral"; and his Emperor habitually parades the same faith, with the support of all the theologians of Germany--the State supremely guilty of the whole embroilment, and the deliberate perpetrator of the grossest aggression in modern history. On the side of the Allies "Christianity" is less systematically but still frequently invoked. On both sides the forms of prayer are officially practised by the non-combatants, very much as the Romans in their wars maintained the practice of augury from the entrails of sacrificed victims; and "family prayer" is said to be reviving. Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how in the "ages of faith" deadly wars were waged for whole generations in the very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes neither control for the present nor solution for the future; and that the hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to human standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold are those of fellow-citizenship. There can be no doubt among rationalists that if modern civilization escapes the ruin which militarism brought upon those of all previous eras, the principle of reason will continually widen its control, latterly seen to be everywhere strengthening apart from the dangerous persistence of militarist ideals and impulses. When it controls international relations, it will be dominant in the life of thought. In the words of a great fighter for freethought, "No man ever saw a religion die"; and there are abundant survivals of pre-Christian paganism in Europe after two thousand years of Christianity; but it seems likely that when the history of the twentieth century is written it will be recognized that what has historically figured as religion belongs in all its forms to the past. The question is sometimes raised whether the age of decline will be marked by movements of active and persecuting fanaticism. Here, again, the answer must be that everything depends upon the general fortunes of civilization. It is significant that a number of clerical voices proclaim a revival of religion as a product of war, while others complain that the state of struggle has a sterilizing effect upon religious life. While organized religions subsist, there will always be adherents with the will to persecute; and from time to time acts of public persecution occur, in addition to many of a private character. But in Britain public persecution is latterly restricted to cases in which the technical offence of "blasphemy" is associated with acts which come under ordinary police jurisdiction. After the unquestionable blasphemies of Arnold and Swinburne had to be officially ignored, it became impossible, in the present stage of civilization, that any serious and decent literary indictment of the prevailing creeds should be made a subject of persecution; and before long, probably, such indictments will be abandoned in the cases of offenders against police regulations. The main danger appears to lie in Catholic countries, and from the action of the Catholic hierarchy. The common people everywhere, save in the most backward countries, are increasingly disinclined to persecution. In Ireland there is much less of that spirit among the Catholic population than among that of Protestant Ulster. But the infamous execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain, in 1909, which aroused passionate reprobation in every civilized country, was defended in England and elsewhere with extravagant baseness by Catholic littérateurs, who, with their reactionary priests, are the last to learn the lesson of tolerance. The indignation everywhere excited by the judicial murder [2021] of Ferrer, however, gives promise that even the most zealous fanatics of the Catholic Church will hesitate again to rouse the wrath of the nations by such a reversion to the methods of the eras of religious rule. NOTES [1] Stow's Annals, ed. 1615, pp. 570, 575. [2] Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Nares, ii, 179; iii, 289; Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848-54, ii, 100. [3] The Marian persecutions undoubtedly did much to stimulate Protestantism. It is not generally realized that many of the burnings of heretics under Mary were quasi-sacrifices on her behalf. On each occasion of her hopes of pregnancy being disappointed, some victims were sent to the stake. See Strype, ed. cited, iii, 196, and Peter Martyr, there cited; Froude, ed. 1870, v, 521 sq., 539 sq. The influence of Spanish ecclesiastics may be inferred. The expulsions of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain were by way of averting the wrath of God. Still, a Spanish priest at Court preached in favour of mercy. Lingard, ed. 1855, v, 231. [4] The number slain was certainly not small. It amounted to at least 190, perhaps to 204. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 596-98. Under Mary there perished some 288. Durham Dunlop, The Church under the Tudors, 1869, p. 104 and refs. [5] Soames, as cited, pp. 213-18, and refs. [6] Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1870, x, 545 (ed. 1875, xi, 199), citing MSS. Ireland. [7] Gloss to February in the Shepherd's Calendar, Globe ed. pp. 451-52. [8] Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Arber's reprint, pp. 140, 153. That the reference was mainly to Oxford is to be inferred from the address "To my verie good friends the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford," prefixed to the ed. of 1581. Id. p. 207. [9] Id. p. 158. [10] Id. pp. 161, 166. [11] Essay Of Atheism. [12] Lecky, Rationalism, i, 103-104. Scot's book (now made accessible by a reprint, 1886) had practically no influence in his own day; and King James, who wrote against it, caused it to be burned by the hangman in the next. Scot inserts the "infidelitie of atheists" in the list of intellectual evils on his title-page; but save for an allusion to "the abhomination of idolatrie" all the others indicted are aspects of the black art. [13] "No woman ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion" (Green, Short History, ch. vii, § 3, p. 369). [14] Cp. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 225. Yet when Morris, the attorney of the Duchy of Lancaster, introduced in Parliament a Bill to restrain the power of the ecclesiastical courts, she had him dismissed and imprisoned for life, being determined that the control should remain, through those courts, in her own hands. Heylyn, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. 1849, pref. vol. i, pp. xiv-xv. [15] See above, vol. i, pp. 435, 446, 459. [16] Collier's Reprint, p. 190. [17] Camden, Annals of Elizabeth, sub. ann. 1580; 3rd ed. 1635, p. 218. Cp. Soames, p. 214. [18] Hooker, Pref. to Ecclesiastical Polity, ch. iii, § 9, ed. 1850. Camden (p. 219) states that the Dutch teacher Henry Nichalai, whose works were translated for the sect, "gave out that he did partake of God, and God of his humanity." [19] See above, i, 458, as to a much more pronounced heresy in 1549, which also seems to have escaped punishment. Camden tells that the books of the "Family of Love" were burnt in 1580, but mentions no other penalties. Stow records that on October 9, 1580, "proclamation was published at London for the apprehension and severe punishing of all persons suspected to be of the family of love." Ed. 1615, p. 687. Five of them had been frightened into a public recantation in 1575. Id. p. 679. [20] May 13, 1579. The burning was on the 20th. [21] Stow's Annals, ed. 1580, pp. 1, 194-95. Ed. 1615, p. 695. [22] Stow, ed. 1615, p. 697; David's Evidence, by William Burton, Preacher of Reading, 1592 (?), p. 125. [23] Stow, ed. 1615, p. 696. [24] Burton, as cited. See below, pp. 7, 12, as to Kett's writings. [25] Art. Matthew Hamond, in Dict. of Nat. Biog. [26] Art. Francis Kett, in Dict. of Nat. Biog. [27] Prof. Storojenko, Life of Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. of Greene's Works, i, 42-50. It is quite clear that Malone and the critics who have followed him were wrong in supposing the unnamed instructor to be Francis Kett, who was a devout Unitarian. Prof. Storojenko speaks of Kett as having been made an Arian at Norwich, after his return there in 1585, by the influence of Lewes and Haworth. Query Hamond? [28] In Pierce's Supererogation, Collier's ed. p. 85. [29] Rep. of Nashe's Works in Grosart's "Huth Library" ed. vol. iv, pp. 172, 173, 178, 182, 183. etc. Ed. McKerrow. 1904, ii, 114-129. [30] MS. Harl. 6853, fol. 320. It is given in full in the appendix to the first issue of the selected plays of Marlowe in the Mermaid Series, edited by Mr. Havelock Ellis: and, with omissions, in the editions of Cunningham, Dyce, and Bullen. [31] Act II, sc. i. [32] Grosart's ed. in "Temple Dramatists" series, 11. 246-371. There is plenty of "irreligion" in the passage, but not atheism, though there is a denial of a future state (365-70). The lines in question strongly suggest Marlowe's influence or authorship, which indeed is claimed by Mr. C. Crawford for the whole play. But all the external evidence ascribes the play to Greene. [33] Tamburlaine, Part II, Act II, sc. ii, iii; V, sc. i. [34] Writing as Andrew Philopater. See Dict. of Nat. Biog., art. Robert Parsons, and Storojenko, as cited, i, 36, and note. [35] Translated into Latin by Henri Estienne in 1562. [36] Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. 1657, p. 123. [37] Bk. i, ch. i, sec. 11. [38] Bk. ii, ch. i, sec. 7. [39] Essay on the Prometheus. [40] Art. Raleigh, in Dict. of Nat. Biog., xlvii, 192. [41] Id. pp. 200-201. [42] Report in 1736 ed. of History of the World, p. ccxlix. "Harpool" seems an error for Harriott. Cp. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1868, i, 432, 436. It is after naming "Harpool" that the judge says: "Let not any devil persuade you to think there is no eternity in heaven." [43] Ed. cited, p. xxviii. [44] Id. p. xxiv. [45] Id. p. xxii. [46] Id. p. xvi. [47] Cp. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, 10-vol. ed. i, 132-35; iii, 150, 152. [48] Ed. cited, p. xxii. [49] Title of verses appended to trans. of Achilles Shield,