Cosmopolitan Musings.No. 80.

By AMOR



THREE of the anxiously looked for Long-York debates have now come off, and attracted each night large audiences. Both the Brisbane Courier and the Observer deprecated the holding of such discussions as tending to no earthly good. Such, as I have before ventured to assert, is not my opinion. I believe that the principle of laissez faire, which would seem to be that advocated by most journalists, is of all principles the one most fatal to the moral and intellectual progress of our race. Like Milton, I find myself continually crying out, "Let truth and error grapple ; whoever knew the first to be overthrown in a fair field ?' Now, I for one, believe that the millions at present under the thraldom of the creeds of Christendom are, de facto, the slaves of Error; and I further believe that the writer or speaker who endeavors, by all means in his power, to liberate them from that error is doing the bravest and noblest work that it is possible for a human being to perform. What first attracted my attention to the NORTHERN MINER was that, in its every issue, it both surprised and delighted me by its very unconventional outspokenness on points on which conventional newspapers are, for fear of offending, cravenly reticent.  E.G. :—" The professors of dogma have been the root and cause of all the wars and massacres, rapines and burnings, that have disgraced the world, for the last eighteen hundred years." The pulpit has in every age proved itself the sycophant of courts, the adulator of power, the ally of tyranny, the enemy of knowledge and pure progress, and the unrelenting and obstinate opponent of science." . . . "Erasmus once asked, Quid sit sacerdos?—what is a priest? and echo answered, Herdos—lucre. Quid sit sacerdotium ? —what is the priesthood? and echo answered, Otium—ease." The above extracts prove that the MINER, like the Sydney. Bulletin, is doing its best to liberate the minds of its readers from the debasing bondage of Sacerdotalism. And verily it has its reward. Only the other day I discovered a friend of mine eagerly copying some lines I years ago cut from the MINER, entitled "Questions for the Orthodox." They were by the late William Denton; and my friend was so impressed with those unanswerable questions, that, as he told me, he felt ashamed that there should be amongst his fellow men any who still believed in those absurd Biblical myths!

The subject of the first debate was—" Is Christian Theism more natural than Atheism or Agnosticism ?" As the defender of Theism, Mr. Long submitted (1) That matter is eternal; (2) That spirit is eternal; (3) That matter and spirit are both eternal. He brought forth the grand argument of design, and claimed logically "that, as there was system, there must be God." When reading this, my mind instantly reverted to what J. S. Mill in his essay on "Nature," says in regard to this "design" argument, which Mr. Long admits to be the most conclusive of all theistic theories. " If there are any marks at all of special design in creation," says Mill, "one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals." So also the author of "The Martyrdom of Man" says:—" The law of murder is the law of growth. Life is one long tragedy; creation is one great crime." Then, as Mr. Long presents his partisans with a God who thinks, wills, and acts, and is worthy of all worship, he must listen to what two of the world's greatest thinkers say of such a Being. Says J. S. Mill : "Though attributing omnipotence to the Creator, the received religion represents him for some inscrutable reason tolerating the perpetual counteraction of his purposes by the will of another Being, of opposite character, and of great though inferior power—the Devil. The only difference between popular Christianity and the religion of Ormuzd and Abriman is that the former pays its good Creator the bad compliment of having been the maker of the Devil, and of being at all times able to crush and annihilate him and his evil deeds—which, however, he does not do."  "The reputed author of the world," says Winwood Reade, " invented not only the good, but also the evil in the world ; he invented cruelty, he invented sin. If he invented sin, how can he be otherwise than sinful? If he invented cruelty, how can he be otherwise than cruel ? From this inexorable logic, we can only escape by giving up the theory of a personal Creator. Those who believe in a God of Love must close their eyes to the phenomena of life, or garble the universe to suit their theory." Dr. York, in refuting Mr. Long's theistic theory, used virtually the same arguments as Reade and Mill. " It (Theism), said York, "involved belief in eternal pain; it dragged God to man's level; it had caused unutterable misery and bloodshed; it claimed that God was all good and all powerful—although so much misery existed upon which he asked the question made famous by Ingersoll, 'Why didn't God kill the devil ?' "I don't know anything about God" humbly said the Agnostic York. On the other hand the Rev. Mr. Long, even as I am writing this (on Sun day) is pretending to his congregations that he does know all about that incomprehensible Power and what he did, and what he said ; and whom he will save, and whom (unless they "repent") he will damn.

One of Mr. Long's assertions must go unchallenged. He claims the late Charles Darwin as a Christian. Such an assertion was, to me, astounding, as I knew it to be untrue. In a letter to a German student—a letter which was refused admission into all the English newspapers, save the Spectator and Pall Mall Gazette, showing, as Charles Bright said, "what conspiracy of silence" is set up when any truly great man speaks out against the popular theology" — Charles Darwin writes :—" Sir,—I am very busy, and am an old man in delicate health, and have not time to answer your questions fully, even assuring they are capable of being answered at all. Science and Christ have nothing to do with each other, except in so far as the habit of scientific investigation makes a man cautious about accepting any proofs. As far as I am concerned, I do not believe that any revelation has ever been made. With regard to a future life, every one must draw his own conclusions from vague and contradictory probabilities." Now, surely the foregoing is the language not of a Christian, but of an Atheist pure and simple. And yet, mirabile dictu, the remains of this great and greatly beloved atheist, whose "grave is the world," now rest in Westminster Abbey! "Twenty—even ten—years ago," says the World, "such a proposal would have been deemed a wild dream ; but science is aggressive now-a-days, and parsons are unable to stem the tide. Accordingly, nobody was astonished to find that the first person to propose that the author of the "Origin of Species " should sleep among dead men, few of whom were as great as he, and many of whom were unworthy to be named in the same breath with him, was Dean Bradley himself."


The Northern Miner 24 June 1886,

THE MORALITY OF SINAI

The Congregational Union has just completed its annual sittings, and the address of the Rev. Mr. James has attracted some attention outside as well as within religious circles on account of references which it contains to certain phases of current social and political life. The range which Mr. James takes is a very wide one. He defines Comtism as teaching that society must pass through three successive stages, the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific; and that the ascendancy of science or positivism will displace and destroy the theological phase. To this the answer is in brief that it "is sufficient to speak of Boyle, Pascal, Newton, and Faraday, as men who at once furnish the highest examples of intense religious belief, and the loftiest science, in harmonious combination." Referring to the principle of natural-selection, the theory of which as announced or Herbert Spencer is:—"That a certain elevated type of human being is produceable, and that the type desiderated is so desirable that the desire to produce it will create the will do do so." He rejoins— "And this pretty theory is broached in the face of day, in the truth of adverse historical testimony. and notwithstanding the absolute contradiction which human nature—with all its complex hopes and fears, its passions and aspiritions, its profound cogitations and untameable will—itself supplies Perhaps it is impossible to bring the physical type to a higher state of development than that which Greece in her palmiest days produced. The men were comely and strong, and the women fair and symmetrical; that their morals, nevertheless, could not be adopted by us to-day without throwing back our civilization in an immeasurable degree."
Communism he speaks of as essentially atheistic "with its travestie of New Testament doctrines, beginning at the wrong end, and yielding to the most reprehensible motives; levelling society, but always levelling it down towards the pit which is bottomless; equalising the various grades of life, but forgetting that until it can equalise character it will only produce a more exacerbating inequality than that which it seeks to destroy; and proving its zeal for the welfare of humanity by killing men without stint or compunction." Agnosticism he states is a "clear outcome of the unbelieving spirit of the age. Practically it has no God, and it therefore the evangel of indifferentism. Its ostentatious dolce far niente tone, its self-contemplation and seductive repose, its bland and egotistic epicureanism; its self-conscious indifference to all that lies beyond the domain of test and experiment; its sensuous limitation to the present and the material; its superfine sense of superiority; and its easy-going but utter ungodliness, indicate with startling plainness what its origin is, what its lotos-like and aimless character, and what its pernicious and destructive consequences must be. It is sceptical, not in the matter of miracles or inspiration merely, but of goodness, and God, and human nature. Having abandoned all faith in the power of high principle, it takes its direction from convenience and expediency; its only piety is the piety of conventional taste —the religion of Tito in Romola, or of Mr. Phœbus in Lothair; and all it cares for is to get along comfortably."
    Nihilism is spoken of as "Agnosticism running its 'natural course.' It is Atheism stripped naked, and standing with menacing attitude and threatening aspect in the pathway of the civilization of the world, denying that civilization further progress,and threatening with strident tones and blasphemous speech to explode and destroy it. It is Agnosticism with this virulent addition, that, while it declines to take note of the great moral facts of the universe it spends its research on negations, and proposes to constitute the future out of the nothings of its non belief." Mr. James says—"Spiritism, so called, is but a cheat both upon the senses and the soul. It professes to be exactly what it is not. 'An evil and an adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.' The truth which admits only of spiritual perception is not enough for it. It will hold only to what the senses can authenticate; its promises are limited by the susceptibility of matter; its ameliorations are confined to what science can supply; its ten commandments are at horrible parody of the clear, just, and eternal morality of Sinai; its gospel leads by scarcely concealed gradations to the brothel and the sty; its god is humanity with a big H; its inverted idolatry is therefore the worship of self; its standard of life is the will and desires of the individual ; and the heaven of its future felicity is only a state wrought out of the more flexible and potent elements of the material universe. Satan can transform himself into an angel of light. Spiritism is spiritual only on the lucus a non lucendo principle— spiritism without a scintilla of spirituality in it! It is the devil's last and highest masterpiece of materialistic atheism." His estimate of our political condition is any thing but flattering to the national vanity. "Our politics could hardly be mere selfish, anarchical, and pagan if they were the politics of a thousand years ago, and we only a disorganised mob, slowly and painfully passing from a state in which the wild justice of revenge was the only law. To me the most appalling feature of our social life, and the final proof of the depravity of man, are our selfish, partisan, and barbarian politics. We have established manhood suffrage—which I hold is man's inviolable right—without making the slightest attempt to define and settle what it is that fairly constitutes manhood. Manhood suffrage in the proper sense of the term we have not. What we really have is numerical suffrage, and that is little better than a monstrous parody of the true thing. The working classes have been long and unjustly excluded from political power. They have been governed from class standpoints, and have had to submit for generations to the inequalities of class legislation. But the still greater injustice has been done them that they have been excluded from the education which alone can fit them to exercise their right with safety, and to the advantage of themselves and others. In this country we have unfortunately reversed the proper and rational order; the cart has been put before the horse with a vengeance. Our system of national education should have proceeded manhood suffrage by at least a clear generation ; but the present mode of popular government has been in full swing for years, and we have not yet satisfactorily settled what form out national education shall take; the consequence of which will be that we shall have to encounter some very stormy times, and any real gain to just and lasting liberal ideas will have to be postponed for some years. Meanwhile, we must wait on the will of mere numbers with the best grace we may."

 The South Australian Advertiser 9 November 1880,

RELIGION IN SCHOOLS

Sir,—I take it that the prime object of discussing the subject of the introduction of religious instruction in the public schools, is to elicit as much light and as little heat as possible, or as it is said the maximum of light and the minimum of heat. Your Allora correspondent gives out more heat than light. It's truth he wants, objective truth—the truth of things as they really are, and their causes and not false conceptions of things and their causes. If he had made himself a little better informed he would not surely have fallen into such gross mistakes. He must think your readers very ignorant of the modern history of France, and the true state of the case with regard to the Atheistical tendency of the Government in that unfortunate country towards religion in general, and education in particular when he attributes the evils to the teaching of the Catholic Church and specially the Jesuits— who are a religious order in the Church. Every educated person knows that secularism in education took its rise in France, and is the first offspring of the French Revolution. It breathes the spirit of the promoters of revolution, whose principles were founded on anarchy, irreligion, and atheism, brought about chiefly by the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists. The exclusion of religion and religious training from the public schools, began in the French Revolution and spread to other parts of Europe, and was adopted in whole or in part in the American States, and later in Australia, and New Zealand. This secular policy of education arose naturally and logically, out of the anti-religious philosophy with which Voltaire, and Rousseau and their school sought to blot out Christianity. The French public school system is secular at present, and has been so more or less since the Revolution , and is, to a deplorable extent, aggressively atheistical, though professedly 'neutral' in religion. It is frankly based upon the principles of the Revolution.

The Rationalist Historian Lecky (no friend of Catholicism), in his "Democracy and Liberty," describes it very plainly; "The law of 1882," (he says), "severely excluded religious teaching from the public schools." "It was a deliberate attempt on part of the Government of a country, to de-Christianise the nation, to substitute for religion, devotion to a particular form of government to teach the children of the poor to despise and repudiate what they learned in Church."  "The system " (he adds), "was both intolerant and demoralising and the lamentable increase of juvenile crime in France is probably largely due to the new system of teaching." To this hour an open or covert propaganda of dogmatic unbelief is carried on in the secular primary schools and departmental training colleges of France, both by text books and oral instruction M. Viviani, Minister for Labour, avowed amidst the cheers of the Government, and its supporters in the Chamber of Deputies .November 8 1900 "All of us together, by our fathers our elders, ourselves, we have devoted ourselves in the past to a work of anti-clericalism, a work of irreligion. We have torn all religious belief from human consciences, we have extinguished in heaven the lights which it will never re-kindle again. Such has been our work, our revolutionary work, and do you think this work is finished ? On the contrary, it is beginning, it is boiling up, it is overflowing. How are you going to respond, I ask you, to the child, now grown into manhood, who has learned from your primary instruction— further completed too as it is by the after school works of the Republic—to contrast his own condition with that of other men? How are you going to respond to a man who, thanks to us, is no longer a believer, whom we have deprived of his faith whom we have told heaven is void of justice— when he seeks for justice here below?" ("Official Journal," 1900) Viviani's speech was placarded all over France, by order of Parliament, at the public expense.

And, as M. Paul Bert used his official position as Minister of Instruction for the purpose of propagating atheism on the school children of France, so did M. Briand for the purpose of disseminating atheism among the teachers.

As you sow so shall you reap. The French people have allowed the principles of the Revolution to grow in their midst, and has produced a crop of secularists, Socialists, Anarchists, and Atheists, who, though a small minority of the people, have by the covert machinations and manipulations of secret societies more especially Freemasons, honeycombed themselves into the public services and Government positions so that they now hold the reigns of Government in their hands.

They are persecuting the Church and the clergy, and driving the religious orders out of the country out of hatred of Christianity, but their work is sure in God's own good time to recoil upon themselves, and arouse the Catholic spirit of France, for France is a Catholic nation still, though the Government is for the time being held by a handful of secret societies. Pius IX. pointed out the errors and dangers to society and religion arising chiefly out of the principles of the Revolution, and condemned them in his famous "Syllabus of Errors." Among the errors condemned were : Communism, Socialism, secularism in education, and secret societies. His successor, the great Leo. XIII., was assiduous in exposing to the world the same errors and condemning them, and the present Pope Pius X. is no less concerned for the welfare of society and religion in a practical way. Yet, notwithstanding all this, your correspondent says the teaching of the Catholic Church is the cause of all the mischief in France. He says : "For a century, at least, the Roman Church has had the control of the schools in France. They were filled with Jesuit teachers. The children of the country were in their hands. The Bible was only allowed to be read and interpreted under the careful guidance and according to the voice of the Church. This is a simple matter of history (the writer's history), which any man, be he Catholic or Protestant, can test for himself. For generations the schools of France were taught according to the dogmatics and traditions of the Roman Church. We have seen the "sowing," what about the "reaping"? My appeal is not to ancient history, but to the history of to-day. What fruit is the Church of Rome reaping in France to-day as the result of her hundred years' teaching in the schools of that nation? This, for one thing : The French people have cast out the Church; they have closed tho schools, and scattered the Jesuit teachers. Why? Because, in their judgment, Jesuitical teaching is subversive of that which is highest and best in the national life and character (of Freemasons). What is the judgment of the rulers" ? &c. &c. . . . .  .  "With all her dogmatism, with an her jealous supervision of Bible teaching, with all her denials of the right of private judgment and liberty of conscience, the one result of her century's teaching in France is an appalling crop of atheism and indifference to matters of faith in general." It would be hard to beat that for ignorance and error, bigotry and falsehood. It does not square well with the truth on the matter. She represents the tenets and tactics of a small section of Protestants, a very small section, it is to be hoped, for tho honour of our rational nature. The principles of the Revolution spread into the neighbouring countries, specially Holland and Belgium, and established in 1867 a "secular national education" which was at once branded as atheistical. The Dutch Protestant majority then did what the Catholic minority are now doing in Australia—they established schools of their own at their own expense. By 1888 (says Lecky) they had "no less than 480 Bible schools supported by voluntary gifts, with 11,000 teachers and 79,000 pupils. In the battle for religious education the Catholics and Dutch Protestants united and forced the Government to grant State aid to religious schools. In Belgium religious instruction is now obligatory in State aided institutions for primary and secondary education. Germany is very liberal in giving State aid to denominational schools, so is the British Government. In Newfoundland and in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, in Canada, denominational schools (Catholic and Protestant) are maintained out of the public funds. Why cannot Protestants and Catholics unite in Queensland for the same purpose and demand State aid for religious schools? Your correspondent need not worry over the poor benighted Catholics who follow the guidance and authority of the Church in matters of religion, and prefer to hear Her voice when any difficulty arises about the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, and the doctrine contained in them, rather than their own individual reason or fancy. They believe that God meant something definite in His revelation, whether written or unwritten, to mankind : and they believe that the Church was divinely instituted for and is divinely guided by the Holy Spirit in declaring and teaching mankind what that definite doctrine is, as necessary to believe for salvation. God has so appointed it, and so it is. "He that hears you hears Me, and he that despises you despises Me. He that believes and is baptised shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be condemned." They believe also the promise of God to be with the Church for all time to guide her in teaching the truth in faith and morals, so that the faithful may not be obliged to believe what is false. This is the bulwark of the Catholic, relying on which he feels secure in the true freedom in which God has made him free in doing His holy will. The Protestant principle of private interpretation of the Scriptures as the veto of faith, casts its followers on the wide sea of the world, to paddle their own canoe, without helm, pilot, or compass, wafted by every wind, stormed by every passion, and led by every error. For these reasons, Catholics do not believe that the State has any right to give or teach any system of religious instruction in the public-schools; or for that matter any other body of teachers, unless commissioned and authorised by the Church, as far as Catholics are concerned, and without relief to Catholics. The Protestant may glory in his freedom of conscience, but freedom of conscience, like liberty, may be taken in a false sense, and may lead to license and anarchy in the religious order as false liberty leads to license and anarchy in the social order. The cry of the promoters of the French Revolution was "Liberty," which led to anarchy, and all the horrors of the Reign of Terror ; so also did the authors, of the Protestant reformation raise the cry of "freedom of conscience," and "private' judgment," in matters of religion as opposed to the authority of the Church; and we know the results brought about by the endless multiplication of Protestant sects. And it is well known also that the promoters of the French Revolution and the Protestant reformation had very little respect for the liberty of conscience of others who opposed their will. The guillotine, the block, and the hangman's rope was the only hope held out to them. True freedom is founded on the just rights we owe to God and our fellow man ; and true freedom of conscience is founded on the will of God, revealed to us by Himself, and taught by His Church. And when an appeal is made to the traditions of Protestant forefathers, it should not be forgotten that the Catholic Church had a tradition of 1000 years before Protestant forefathers were heard of. She (Catholic Church), has seen the rise and fall of many Dynasties and Heresies, and she is destined, if the word of God goes for anything, to see the rise and fall of them all. Protestantism, at best, is only a break water to rationalism, secularism, atheism, and infidelity. Catholics do not believe in such principles being propagated to the children in the public schools, hence they have schools of their own, where religious teaching may be given in its fulness.—I am, sir. &c.,

JOHN HEGARTY, B.A., The Presbytery, Dalby.   

February 5, 1910.

The Brisbane Courier 9 February 1910, 

PROGRESS OF INFIDELITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

(From the New York Herald, June11.)

We publish two remarkable documents to-day, from two distant organs of infidel parties in the United States. The first article is taken from a small paper published in Springfield, Massachusetts, issued to prove the reality of spiritual communications with the inhabitants of the earth, and is the composition of Andrew Jackson Davis, who originally made his appearance, under the auspices of Mr. Fishbough, at Poughkeepsie, as a clairvoyant author. This man Davis has gone on, step by step, till he has at last produced this Declaration of Independence, as the platform for a new society of infidels, to be called the Harmonial Brotherhood. Tho second article is from the Tribune of this city, the organ of socialism and infidelity—the vehicle of Andrew Jackson Davis's thoughts at various times, and the promoter of the system of impostures known as Rochester knockings, and every ridiculous ism of the day, besides. It is a description, written with rare relish, of the Nauvoo settlement of M. Cabet, the Icarian philosopher, who has transplanted, from the mass of socialists and infidels in France, this colony of strange communists, who are seeking, under their deluded guides, a social system upon earth without a God—without a religion—without an eternity—without an hereafter, or any idea beyond that on a level with the beasts of the field.

Now these two documents cannot be carefully read, without satisfying any person of ordinary judgment that there is danger to the young and ardent imaginations of both sexes from the promulgation of such socialistic and infidel theories— theories which appeal to the sense strongly, and which teach insubordinations to the restraints of society and religion. The Nauvoo settlement, and the proposed Harmonial Brotherhood of the man Davis, are based on identically the same philosophical principles. Whatever may be the casuistical distinctions—whatever may be the kind of deism advocated—or of the atheism inculcated—one thing is certain, that the precepts and practices of Christianity are repudiated as worthless—as the source of all the evils of society, and utterly fit only to be condemned by the superior faith in man and woman, which is to banish all creeds that recognise God and the revelations of the gospel. Men are taught to isolate themselves from the great currents of eternity, to overturn the laws which regulate the legitimacy of offspring, and to change their affections at will, to suit their own spirit of licentiousness. In fact, the utmost latitude proposed by Fourier is recommended ; and if these evil spirits of reform are permitted to proceed with their projects, we may have again springing up around us, more of those Fourierite phalansteries, which eight years ago were established to the number of twenty. Of those first communities only one now exists—that in new Jersey, which struggles on by means of subscriptions and donations and which, left to ordinary consequences, would share the fate of that of Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the others in various places in New England.

Ordinarily, institutions so repugnant to the delicacy of the softer sex, and so at at variance with man's love of his own offspring, as well as opposed to those equitable rewards of labour which form the true enjoyment of life—would be scoffed at by persons of the slightest intelligence. Allurements, however, to dispositions of an erratic kind, and for characters in the process of formation, are held up by the interested and selfish leaders of these communities—who eventually retire with a fortune, when the lands and tenements are sold out—and these promising inducements swell the number of proselytes. The infection is always spreading ; and the fact that at Springfield, Massachusetts, a newspaper devoted to reporting spiritual knockings is supported, shows that New England contains a large number of those who are opposed to Christianity, and in favour of any delusion, however absurd. Look at the ideas of the man Davis in his Declaration of Independence. Was there ever a more preposterous system proposed for the government of mortals than that which he now sets up ? He has concentrated all the vapors and dreams of the pagan philosophers into his system of political harmonies, in the hope to draw capital enough to his aid to establish himself as perpetual dictator of the Harmonial Brotherhood. Like every other impostor, he professes to receive revelations from mesmeric power, and to be superior to, and purer than those around him. He walks the earth a self elected god in his own esteem, or, if not in his own esteem, with a desire to be so reputed by others. And, singularly enough, there are persons so ignorant as to rely upon the matter which he has filtered from the works of the heathen philosophers—from Plato, and Solan, and Epicurus—and from the modern dreamers, Swedenborg, Fourier, Mesmer, and the whole catalogue of authors of the French revolution of the last century and of that of 1848, together with Miss Martineau and other English atheists, who acknowledge no God but nature—no nature but universal licentiousness.

It is not the least remarkable fact accompanying the presence of these avowals of infidelity—of these attempts to return to the phallic system, in practice, of primeval races—that those who propound and propose such disgusting principles are bred under the very caves of the many churches which mark every locality in New England. In Springfield the people are intelligent, reputable, and religious ; yet there we find a nest of philosophers whose souls are devoted to the knees and toes of a set of rapping impostors, who wickedly avow that they are media between heaven and earth—between the spirits of the dead and those of the living. The tendency of all this is towards infidelity. True religion has no part in it, but rank imposture has everything to do with it. It is the beginning, middle, and end of the whole system; and while such papers as the Tribune can be found to support such mockery and delusion, young minds will be carried away from the paths of decency, morality, and Christianity. In fact it is now understood that, like anti-masonry, infidel socialism is to form a portion of the political platforms of parties. The man Davis is of the anti-slavery party, according to his own avowal, and will give his support to that faction. Where will all this folly terminate ?

Empire 26 September 1851, 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STUART MILL.

....Although it is obvious from the fact that John Stuart Mill was the oldest of the family, and there were others, sons and daughters, that his mother must have been alive long enough for him to know her, there is no mention of her whatever in these pages, nor does she appear to have taken any part at all in the formation of her son's character. To this significant circumstance we may add another, which will help to explain much of Mr. Mill's character. The father, James Mill, held religion to be not only false, but demoralising. Concerning the origin of things, beheld that "nothing was known," and that "the ne plus ultra of wickedness was embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity."

"l am thus," says Mr. Mill, "one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it ; I grew up in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact. This point in my early education had, however, incidentally one bad consequence deserving notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father thought it necessary to give it as one which could not prudently be avowed to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself, at that early age, was attended with some moral disadvantages ; though my limited intercourse with strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to me on religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of avowal or hypocrisy."

As to the morality of concealing his atheistic views, Mr. Mill gives an opinion which will hardly be accepted as sound even by those who may prefer to be classed among his disciples. What the world cannot forget is, that during the whole of Mr. Mill's career, even during that part of it when he was before the public as a politician, not a single hint was given of the total infidelity here avowed, and we cannot help saying that it would have been better for Mr. Mill's reputation had the avowal been made during his lifetime. The rule which he lays down himself he certainly did not comply with :—

From the propriety of the principle of concealing religious views Mr. Mill expresses his dissent in the following terms :—

" It is the duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature consideration satisfied themselves' that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known ; at least, if they are among those whose station or reputation gives their opinion a chance of being attended to. Such an avowal would put an end, at once and for ever, to the vulgar prejudice that what is called, very improperly, unbelief, is connected with any bad qualities either of mind or heart. The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments —of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete sceptics in religion ; many of them refraining from avowal, less from personal considerations than from a conscientious, though now in my opinion a most mistaken apprehension, lest by speaking out what would tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by consequence (as they suppose) existing restraints, they should do harm instead of good."

As to morality, this was the kind of thing taught by the elder Mill :—

" My father's moral convictions, wholly dissevered from religion, were very much of the diameter of those of the Greek philosophers ; and were delivered with the force and decision which characterised all that came from him. Even at the early age at which I read with him the Memorabilia of Xenophon, I imbibed from that work and from his comments a deep respect for the character of Socrates ; who stood in my mind as a model of ideal excellence : and I well remember how my father at that time impressed upon me the lesson of the ' Choice of Hercules.' At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard exhibited in the writings of Plato operated upon me with great force. My father's moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the ' Socratici viri ;' justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labour ; regard for the public good ; estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern reprobation and contempt.".......

The Argus  31 December 1873, 

THE VARIETY OF ISLAM.

It is usual to hear of the unchanging rigidity of the Mussulman's religion and yet (the "Spectator " writes) no creed has passed through a stranger variety of phases and developments than Islam, and the differences between some of its sects have been, and still are, so wide that save for a common reverence for Mohammed and the Unity he preached in the Koran it would puzzle one to trace their relation to each other. In one sense, indeed, Islam may be considered rigid. There is an Islam of the Book, a religion founded literally on the Koran and the Suuna or Traditions of the Prophet, as interpreted by a jealously select series of orthodox divines— fathers of the Moslem Church—which has changed but little in history, and is practically the same in all the Colleges of the East. This is Sunni Islam, the doctrine of the "Ulama of Constantinople, Damascus, Cairo, and Lahore—what may be called analogically the old high-and-dry or cathedral creed ; and this is undoubtedly the nearest approach to the religion as taught and understood by its founder. But the simple, austere, faith proclaimed by the camel-driver at Mecca was carried east and west over an empire greater than that of Rome, and in the course of its migration it came into contact with many strange and subtile influences which inevitably modified the conquering creed. It has been cynically said that there are always three forms of a religion—the form believed by the villager, the form professed by the learned, and the original form which nobody believes. In Islam the distinction between the creed of the learned and that of the people is often curiously marked, but this is largely due to opposite causes. In its spread over foreign countries Mohammedanism came into contact with two widely different forces. On the one hand, on leaving Arabia it was brought into touch with those primitive beliefs of other races which we somewhat superciliously classify as folk-lore, but which underlie all formal creeds and modify and react upon them in various incalculable ways. Early gods disguised as local saints, ancient pagan customs coloured with Islamic rites, gradually intruded themselves into the simple cult of Mohammed and Egyptian peasants continued the immemorial festival of Bubastis under the cloak of a moolid of the Seyyid-el-Bedawy. In every part of the Mohammedan world folk-lore— i.e., primitive belief—has hybridised Islam, chiefly among "the vulgar," for whom ancient ritual and what we call superstition have more value than philosophic abstractions. On the other hand the more refined and spiritual minds were subjected to an influence even more penetrating. The mystical spirit, whether permeating Persia in a wave from Buddhist India, or infected in the very soil of Egypt and Syria by the teaching of the neo-platonic school, offered to the imagination a tempting escape from the dry formalism of Arabian Islam. Mysticism, with political and race divisions, and the eternal antagoism between the ideals of a theocracy and of a temporal State Church combined to develop the many strange varieties of Islam which are known under the names of Shitah sects, the fanatical adhesion to the house of Ali, the Sufi mystics, the Assassins of the Crusading epoch, the pantheists of the school of Jalal-ed-din Rumi, the corybantic ecstatics of Barbary , the marabuts of Algiers, the Sanusi missionaries of the Soudau, and the various orders of dervishes who constitute what may be called the Salvation Army of Islam, attacked fresh fields where the orthodox Ulama never ventured, and form the impulse of that extra-ordinary revival of Mohammedan energy in Africa which has been one of the most remarkable religious events of the past century.

The orders of dervishes are among the most interesting and illogical developments of Islam. The word " dervish " (or " darwish ") in Persian means a poor beggar, but the dervish orders are by no means poor, and are in the habit of holding stated audits for the examination of their ample finances. They represent the popular, as opposed to the scholastic, element in Islam yet, while titillating the ignorant with charms and talismans, jugglery, and dances, they have a system of gradual initiation which leads up through carefully regulated stages to a culminating perfection of spiritual adeptness in which it is not easy to distinguish a single trace of the original creed. In the final stage the dervish has been termed a gnostic, a pantheist, and an atheist, according to the writer's point of view ; at least he may be said to be a philosopher, and certainly anything but a Moslem. Yet the dervishes claim to be orthodox they interpret the Koran in their own allegorical fashion, and very ingenious it is; but the Koran is still their Bible, Mohammed their Prophet, and his true representative (no temporal caliph) their Imam or spiritual master. Undoubtedly the Sheykh es-Sanusi, whilst believing in special revelations from God to himself, and holding the mystical doctrines of the Kadiriya dervishes, regarded himself as an orthodox follower of Mohammed, and with his army of missionaries he wrought an extension of Islam such as has not been known since the first triumphant rush of the seventh century :—

" Without shedding blood or calling in the aid of any temporal ruler, by the energy and force of his character he raised up in the Ottoman Empire and its adjacent lands a theocratic system which is almost, if not quite, independent of any political power. His great object was to restore the original Islam and to revive the religious and moral laws of the Prophet. This being the attitude of his mind, he naturally opposed all modern innovations in Turkish rule, and life, and wished to raise an insuperable barrier against Western civilisation and the influence of the Christian Powers in Moslem lands. He had been influenced by the earlier Wahhabi revival, for he followed that sect in its vigorous prohibition of many harmless things. At the same time, with all this stiffness of thought and life, he as the head of the Darwish Order, introduced a mystical element into all that he thought. "

The result of this combination of dervish mysticism and austere orthodoxy in the hands of an able administrator was the foundation of monasteries of the order in Arabia, Egypt Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, Senegambia, all over the Soudan, and even in the Eastern Archipelago. The Sanusiya claim no fewer than 8,000,000 members of the Order—8,000,000 preaching friars—and the success of their missionary work in Africa has been unique.

The Sanusiya is the most remarkable modern development of dervishism ; but there are 88 religious orders in Islam and most of them are worth study. Mr. Sell, whose "Faith of Islam " is almost a classical text-book of Mohammedan belief in usum populi, has made another interesting contribution in his "Essays on Islam," and his choice of the dervish orders for his principal subject shows his appreciation of their importance in the future of Islam. The essays deal with the Mohammedan mystics the pathetic history of the Bab in Persia, the religious orders, the Khalif Hakim and the Druses, the status of the Zimmiss (or non-Moslem subjects), Islam in China, the Recensions of the Koran, and the Hanifs.

The Sydney Morning Herald 4 December 1901, 

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN CHARACTER.

(From the Spectator.)
THE DARK SIDE.

Mr. CARLYLE, with his peculiar views as to liberty and government, is not the only man of our generation who is troubled with melancholy forebodings for humanity. Amidst the universal clack of progress, there are plenty of indications of a bitter feeling that progress in knowledge and the mechanical arts, and even in the wide diffusion of the education which has given birth to that progress, is no guarantee for progress in what men hold to be highest of all,—that strength and depth and nobility of character which have so little necessary connection with either wide knowledge or multiplied enjoyments. Is there not lurking in thousands of minds a fear that the sciences and arts may prove to be too strong for man almost precisely in the sense in which we say that the vitality of Nature as seen in the tropical vegetation of the Amazon is too strong for man?—that knowledge may prove power indeed, but in some sense a power too great for the strength of those who wield it,—a power by the side of which moral power will lose its head, feel itself bewildered, paralyzed, without compass and, worse still, without nerve? There are those who are already beginning to say in their heart "There is no God," not because they know so little, but because they know so much of their own little knowledge. They are, perhaps, as the Psalmist calls them, in one sense fools, but certainly they are not fools for want of education, or of all sorts of accomplishments. It is rather that, seeing the threads of scientific investigation branching out in so many different directions, and knowing that they can never grasp one hundredth part even of the conclusions arrived at, the sense of utter helplessness, of incapacity to know anything but the smallest fraction of this labyrinth of universal laws, fosters in their minds a keen sense of the uncertainty not only of all except demonstrative evidence, but of all mental and moral impressions, however deep, not supported by this kind of evidence,—a sense of uncertainty from which the springs of faith never again recover. Even those who feel most deeply the truth of God's personal love and providence, and of His revelation of Himself in Christ, are not without a vehement and almost passionate feeling that this age needs a new incarnation, if only to tell us how the Light of the World would reconcile this new flood of intellectual processes with the personal life in the Father which He revealed. There is the profoundest danger of the collapse of that highest personal life the glory of which has been shown us, before the confusion of the half lights and half shadows of the new era. Complexity of every kind is the great condition of the new life, shades of thought too complex to yield up definite opinions,—shades of moral obligation too complex to yield up definite axioms of duty, —shades of insight too various to yield up definite sentences of approval or condemnation for the actions of others. On all subjects not strictly scientific, on all those mental, and moral questions which determine conduct and action, the growing sense of complexity and difficulty is rapidly producing a relaxing effect upon the force of individual character. In some sense men are blinded by excess of light. The simple old moral law, " Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal," " Thou shalt not commit adultery," " Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's goods," is apt to lose half its meaning before multitudes of distinctions which gradually shade off forbidden acts into the most praiseworthy and delicate sentiments, and leave you wondering where the spirit of the law ends and the letter begins. Still more difficult does it seem to reconcile the old divine liberty of life in God with the new human liberty of life in science—the spiritual attitudes of mind which recognise that every wave in a storm, every waste shot from a gun that strikes a passing bird, is the direct issue of a Father's will, with the laws of tides and air currents, of atmospheric rarefaction and condensation with which modern science is every day familiarising us more. Harmonise as we will, under our present lights the personal life in God which our Lord revealed fits very awkwardly into the grooves of the scientific conception of order ; and every generation, as it accumulates fresh illustrations of the scientific method, is more and more embarrassed how to piece them in with that far grander and nobler personal discipline of the soul which hears in every circumstance of life some new word of command from the living God. We do not affirm, we do not in the least believe, the two modes of apprehension to be inconsistent. We do say that to help us in reconciling them we seem to need some new act of revelation—that he who taught the old personal unscientific world how to live in God, should yet reconcile for us the floods of new light. He has poured upon our understandings and outward life, with the greatest of His lessons taught to a very different age by the shores of Galilee and in the darkness of Gethsemane. If "progress " go on as heretofore, without any new light from the divine side, the old, strong, simple, ethical, and spiritual conception of life may die away, and there may grow up in its place a spurious compound of misty science and feeble sentiment out of which no strength can come. Compare the old Catholic saints, or the old Puritan saints, it matters little which, with the modern " religious man;" compare Luther with streaming eyes praying for the Church, and telling God with the familiarity of Abraham or Elijah that, if He will have a Church at all, He must look after it Himself, "for we cannot look after it, and if we could we should be the proudest asses under heaven," with our modern Bishops sending forth a soft encyclical almost destitute of meaning—the highest praise falsely awarded to which has been that there was no harm in it,— to "the faithful in Christ Jesus." To the faithful indeed! They meant "to those who made no difficulties in Christ Jesus." Yet the difference is not merely and simply in the men. Luther had re-discovered pure and unalloyed the possibility of free, simple, personal life with Christ. The Bishops have inherited a world of intellectual compromises, and doctrinal subtleties, and scientific discussions which stand between the soul and this straight-forward life. The spirit of the age is complicated with truths (as well as falsehoods), which are bewildering and distracting to this attitude of mind, and which yet insist on recognition. The mere development of the existing law of progress, as it is usually understood, so far from securing all that is expected of it, cannot fail, we think, to do more in relaxing the highest inward life of man, than even in beautifying and humanising its external features.

It is another aspect of the same tendency that, with the new flow of sciences and arts into the world, the tendency to indifference on almost all great non-scientific subjects, politics and theology alike, has so much increased, especially among the young, and that the highest culture has scarcely taught anything beyond that despair of complete truth, and consequent disposition to deprecate severe struggles for it, which was so remarkable a feature of the Roman world at the beginning of our era, and which always probably leads the majority to the doctrine, " Enjoy what you can while you can, for all remote spiritual attitudes are unsuited to the constitution of such beings as we are in such a world as the present." There is, at all events, an immense growth of this spirit, not amongst those who have most hardship and suffering, but who have least,—amongst those who have chiefly reaped the advantages of the new sciences and arts in easy life, pleasant tastes, languid hopes, and feeble faiths. The fear is, that if civilisation succeeds,—and we trust it will succeed, —in raising the mass of men to the same level of comparatively satisfied material and intellectual wants, there will be the same disposition to subside into the limited life of small attain- able enjoyments, and to let alone the struggles for perfect freedom and perfect life in God. There can be no doubt that what we call our middle class, as a whole, and especially the younger members of it, have lost greatly in sympathy with these struggles among other peoples. Mr. Carlyle's teaching about slavery—earnest in its own immoral kind —has not truly convinced half as many as it has given an excuse for refusing to interest themselves on the side of the victim,—for insisting on judging of the American War, for example, by canons of mere taste. That there is nothing of the heart in middle class politics that there was a generation ago, the history of the recent Reform Act would alone prove. The languid desire of all parties not to be bored with the question any longer, did infinitely more to ensure its passing than any conviction. Indeed, the party which passed it have, in their newspaper press, been busy ever since in crying down, just after the old fashion, the very class whom they have enthroned. " We will give you power over us, if you please, for it is too much trouble to resist longer, and the Whigs would do it if we didn't, but nothing shall induce us to like you, or to think you anything but low fellows," is the general Tory verdict on what has happened. And the younger men turn away from politics, with which they profess themselves disgusted, to the easy study of technical pursuits and the indulgence of more or less refined amusements. They smile languidly at the "fuss " about politics, and only become earnest in discussing what is Philistine in taste, and whether Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Carlyle has exploded the larger number of antiquated prejudices on political subjects and "the Semitic principle." It is the same with religious life. Some of the younger generation profess a passive scepticism, not an eager, anxious prosecution of doubt, and some lean to the aesthetic practices of the High Church school. But the main point is that in both classes alike the dim, vague faculty called Taste has assumed so much importance in late years, not by reason of its own growth, but through the undermining of all surer, deeper, and more laborious passages to truth. We seem to be rapidly approaching in the middle class,—and will the working class, when it has gained as easy a hold of life, save us from going further in the same road ? —to that condition of things, that attenuated faith, those petty momentary interests, that hopeless vision of the excessive complexity of truth on all high topics, which drove the Roman world into despair at the beginning of our era,—a despair from which a simple belief in a simple revelation of divine acts alone saved it. Mr. Arnold has finely said of it:—

" Like ours it looked in outward air,
Its head was clear and true,
Sumptuous its clothing, rich its fare,
No pause its action knew.

" Steel was its arm, each pulse and bone
Seemed puissant and alive,
But, ah ! its heart, its heart was stone,
And so it could not thrive."

If it were true that with the beating back of great physical wants, the deepest hunger of human nature is to be laid to sleep, and life to be frittered away in small enjoyments, no one could look upon human destiny without a sigh.

Perhaps it may be thought almost an answer to this fear to point out that with the growth of the self-indulgent spirit there is very apt to grow also a very strong feeling of the worthlessness of life,—a feeling that nothing enjoyed is worth the cost of obtaining it, that life itself is a doubtful good, that,"the spring and elasticity of youth once over, and the sense of duty smothered in a sea of speculative doubt, it is rather from indolence than from love of life, that men prolong the dreary monotony of unsolved problems and ungranted prayers. That high culture has led many of the highest minds of our age to the very verge of a despondency that is little short of despair, we scarcely needed that grand expression of this feeling in incomparably the finest poem of our own day, Mr. Clough's Easter Sunday soliloquy at Naples, to tell us. It will be said that the very sense of utter weariness and nothingness which life without faith carries into the highest minds, is itself the surest proof that we need not fear any real collapse of society into atoms of individual self-indulgence. And we believe this because we believe in God. But, judging by the merely human symptoms of the day, one would say that the collapse of faith which brings the highest minds nearly to despair, brings ordinary minds to weary satiety, indifference, ennui,—that condition, in which no end of life is thought worth earnest exertion, and yet for want of earnest exertion no higher estimate of the ends of life can be formed.

To sum up, then, those influences which, inhering as they do in the very grain of civilisation, seem to us to threaten far more evil in the future than the more or less removable mass of physical misery, ignorance, and want, with which politicians are wisely making war, there is, first, a tendency in the very accumulation of the intellectual sciences to perplex and relax the fibres of moral and intellectual conviction, a tendency, in fact, to drown purpose and volition in the flood of intellectual alternatives which are proposed to our thought. Again, the very growth of the arts in staving off the ultimate necessities of man, and multiplying immensely the small enjoyments of life, has a great tendency to increase, and has increased, the spirit of petty indulgence, of small self-gratification, of indifference to all great and grave struggles. Finally, this predominance of small and brilliant certainties amid the growth of great and vague doubts, while it makes the highest minds pine passionately for more light, fosters in common minds the tendency to cry, " Who will show us any good?" and to doubt secretly whether any attainable end in life is worth the trouble of attaining it—a state of mind which has been common in the stationary East for centuries, and will grow even in the progressive West just as rapidly if the faith in Christ could ever die out.

THE BRIGHT SIDE.

Were the preceding article a complete statement of the facts, civilisation would seem on the eve of stereotyping itself, and the destiny of man would appear to he sterile indeed, but it is not complete. There are facts to he recorded as bright as these are gloomy. Amid the decay of the creeds and the roar of petty conflicts, under the complex network of doubts which seem to shut in men, each to his little plot of obvious duty, as a few red threads will shut in a stag to a half-rood of grass, we seem to perceive at last the rise of new and tremendous forces which will once again retone the heart, rebrace the mind, and at last reinvigorate or, to speak even more frankly, re-create faith in the souls of men. Education does not only pulverise. Things are still in their germ, but we think we see one change, perhaps the greatest of all, coming over the spirits of civilised men, a thirst for truth by itself, a sovereign, driving faith in that, an utter indifference to and contempt of the results of that, which is absolutely new in history, and which of all the intellectual passions tends most to clear and strengthen the mental blood. The love and admiration of scientific processes, the hunger, sometimes almost brutal, for realism in art, and literature, and life, the weary carelessness for things which used to inflame mankind may be, certainly seem to this writer to be, mere symptoms of this new impulse, just as hunger, and peevishness, and a tumult of the blood are often the first symptoms of returning convalescence. No influence save faith alone tends so directly to strengthen the character as this single-eyed passion, none enables men to walk with so decided a step, and none frees them more rapidly from the bondage of the webs woven, as the preceding writer says, by the new consciousness men have of the complexity of all things. Once hold truth invaluable, and doubt loses its paralysing force. Moreover, the hunger for truth which in science, or history, or theology, always begins by killing faith, always ends by serving as a base for a new structure, would, we believe, re-animate Christianity—now supposed to be dying, because for the third time it is stripping itself to put on its new armour—even without another and yet stronger impulse now rising among men. This is the spirit which, for want of a better word, we must call Sympathy, the spirit Shakspeare called Mercy, and the author of " Ecce Homo" styles the " enthusiasm of humanity," a spirit born within the last hundred years, which has in it the capacity of becoming a motor, a fanaticism, even in certain exceptional situations a destroying force, a spirit which seventy years ago produced Robespierre, which in our own day has yielded John Brown and Mazzini, a spirit which is the secret force of that otherwise anarchical tendency we call Democracy, and the mainspring and sustenance of "the Revolution," which is already acting as the solvent of all old laws, institutions, and crystallisations of society. This sympathy with man as man, absolutely new, is becoming a mighty operative force. There are no fanatics like those who are possessed by it. There are no changes so vast as those which they suggest; no lives so arduous as those which they will lead. Force of character, quotha! Has it ever been shown more grandly than by the Abolitionists, infidels half of them, but men borne on by this new impulse to face torture, and contempt, and death, the scorn of wise men, and the hatred of worldly men, as the purest Christians alone have ever had force to do. Wherein was Cromwell so much stronger than John Brown, Huss than Garrison, Xavier than Howard, Wycliffe than many a man among us who, unable to bear the torment of his pity for the misery of men, of his sovereign sympathy with wretchedness, has, half mad, gone out from his old beliefs, stripped himself naked of ideas, and so, amidst the shocked scorn of friends, and families, and comrades, declared war to the knife on all that exists, but existing, does not remove his horror. He is wrong enough usually, but how weak ? And remember, as this passion of sympathy spreads, and deepens, and clears itself, as men grow to sympathise with humanity in all its misery, in its sinfulness as in its pain, as they come to war against moral as they now war on social suffering, so must the one figure, in whom and through whom alone their ideal is completed, regain its power over their imaginations, their hearts, their lives. In the Man-God alone is philanthropy, the love of man, seen perfect. Half the best warriors in the social war are "infidels," men who cannot bow down to the authority which has left the world to groan ; but to them, above all, will come first the conviction, that strain on as they will, they cannot love man as He loved, that their endurance is weak beside His, that their tolerance and mercy and pitifulness—things which are but names for the one quality of sympathy—are imperfect, lustreless, wanting in breadth, and depth, and coherence, beside the perfect fulness of His love. It is from the lower side, from the human side, from the long-delayed recognition of Christ as the completion of the highest ideal of man—recognition prevented for ages by the wicked theory of an averted vengeance—that we look for the second revival of that true and only Christianity which believes, as it believes in the axiomata of mathematics, that Christ, God and man, died for the human race. In men in whom the love of truth is as a flame, in whom sympathy is illimitable, and in whom faith has once more grown up from below, there will be no lack of force. That the character of the great men of the next generation will be like the character of the greatest in the past, we by no means affirm. Probably it will not. Out of that sense of the vast complexity of all things there should grow, will grow in the minds reillumined by faith, enlarged by sympathy, made single by love of truth, a mighty tolerance, a patience, a calm serenity, to which our greatest have often been strangers. The warrior element will not be so all-pervading, the uniform will be exchanged more often for the ermine. There will be serenity in these men, but serenity is not weak. We look as one of the blessings of the future for the recovery of the one lost blessing of the old Pagan world—the blessing which philosophers call unconsciousness, calm, capacity of enjoyment, and Christian childlikeness ; the nature we see dimly through the ages in the best of the Greeks, see plainly even now sometimes in a few old men and women, upon whom a living faith and a serene life have impressed that stamp of saintliness which, of all the aspects of human nature, has in it most of softness, and least of feebleness or indecision. Weakness of character! Imagine Calvin with Melanchthon's heart, and we are near the ideal to which the world tends, and which, be it what it may else, at least is not weak, not the character which subsides into a search for physical comfort. Men tell us who have studied Americans, Germans, and Europeans free of the tyranny of convention, that they see among their best specimens, among farmers in the West like Lincoln, among professors like Carl Ritter, among workmen—take Nadar— dim foreshadowings of men like this, men whose characters are of iron in their self-dependence, men like Jacobins in the strength of their convictions, yet with hearts absolutely irradiated with sympathy for man and faith in God's love men whom nothing resists successfully, yet who have recovered a power of childlike gladness, a capacity of serenity such as man in this century has sold,—the purchase-money for his victories over opposing Nature.

And then, too, there is another force, almost new, also at work. We are about to say what will probably excite in half of our readers a sense of the ridiculous, but still it is to be said, if our conviction is to be fully expressed. Hope is becoming once more a motive power. It is a singular fact in the Christian psychology that hope, which the Apostles regarded as a virtue,—an executive force, a motive power, has ever since that time been degraded in men's ideas into a mere quality very lightly esteemed. A hopeful man is, in the parlance of to-day, a sort of fool. Hope, nevertheless, is once more regaining her power ; so completely regaining it as not unfrequently to be mistaken for her strong sister, Faith, is influencing the souls of men, is strengthening them to try unknown paths, untrodden ways, to work for ends which but for hope they would scarcely even desire. The passionate belief that Utopia maybe attained, that we may yet reach a land where all shall be free and instructed and good, where the human race shall "have its fair chance," is exciting men afresh, is stimulating them to endure, is helping them to dare. It was but a hope, a dream, a "utopia which sustained the North in its tremendous struggle, but then the force which sustained it is neither feeble nor worthy of contempt. Men as the old creeds vanish are ceasing to despair, and in morals as in politics courage is the essential basis of all vigorous or successful action. A good deal of the despairing indifference mentioned in the preceding article is the result of hope, of the new conviction or impression that higher things are not unattainable. If nothing but bread is attainable—one fights for bread, but if one clearly experiences the hope of meat ? We do not wish to push this argument too far, partly because hope at last is only a result of faith; but still the development of this faculty is to be reckoned among the brighter gleams in a picture which might otherwise be dark.

And finally—for we can neither hope to state, nor even to indicate, the infinite details of this side of the argument—it is necessary to adduce one negative argument. The crave for comfort has an aspect the pessimists never acknowledge it is one form of victory over the body. The highest thinkers of all ages have acknowledged that this victory must be gained, and as the Stoics held the road to it was contempt for the body, and the monks subjugation of the body, so the moderns hold unconsciously that the swiftest path is the silencing of the body. The modern thinker seats himself in an easy chair, not in order to enjoy the easy chair, but in order that the nobler part of him may be free from the consciousness of the inferior—may not be worried by its claims, disturbed by its remonstrances, fretted by its complaints. It is not luxury he is seeking, but mental freedom, the freedom the Stoic sought when he chatted in the rain as if the sun had shone, and held it beneath him to pay attention to the chill. The modern man is not less desirous of that liberty of scorn for the clouds, but to get it, instead of stripping, he invents a waterproof ; he silences the body by content, instead of by control, reigns as a Caesar instead of an ancient absolutist. We like neither regime, but it is not weakness of character, but misdirected power of character, which produces the second —a misdirected power which, more wisely used, may make the mind and the soul more genuinely free, and therefore more genuinely strong than they have been. The highest song of suffering ever sung was penned by a king, and fortitude, endurance, strength in all forms, are the qualities which, from the days of the Roman patrician, the aristocrats have not lacked. It is not in the luxurious, but in those who are hankering for luxury, that feebleness is found.

s.m.h. 27 January 1868, 

Bakunin on free will

Free Will

The term "free will" either has no meaning at all or it signifies that the individual makes spontaneous and self-determined decisions, wholly apart from any outside influence of the natural or social order. But if that were so, if men depended only upon themselves, the world would be ruled by chaos which would preclude any solidarity among people. Millions of free wills, independent of each other, would tend toward mutual destruction, and no doubt they would succeed in achieving it were it not for the despotic will of divine Providence which "guides them while they hustle and bustle," and in abasing them all at the same time, it establishes order in the midst of human confusion.

That is why all the protagonists of the doctrine of free will are compelled by logic to recognize the existence and action of divine Providence. This is the basis of all theological and metaphysical doctrines. It is a magnificent system which for a long time satisfied the human conscience, and, one must admit, from the point of view of abstract thinking or poetical and religious fantasy, it does impress one with its harmony and grandeur. But, unfortunately, the counterpart of this system grounded in historic reality has always been horrifying, and the system itself fails to stand the test of scientific criticism.

Indeed, we know that while Divine Right reigned upon the earth, the great majority of people were subjected to brutal, merciless exploitation, and were tormented, oppressed, and slaughtered. We know that up to now the masses of people have been kept in thralldom in the name of religious and metaphysical divinity. And it could not be otherwise, for if the world —Nature as well as human society— were governed by a divine will, there could be no place in it for human freedom. Man's will is necessarily weak and impotent before the will of God. Thus when we try to defend the metaphysical, abstract, or imaginary freedom of men, the free will, we end up by denying real freedom. Before God, the Omnipotent and Omnipresent, man is only a slave. And since man's freedom is destroyed by divine Providence, there remains only privilege, that is, special rights vouchsafed by Divine Grace to certain individuals, to a certain hierarchy, dynasty, or class.

Socialism, based upon positive science, rejects absolutely the doctrine of "free will." It recognizes that all the so-called vices and virtues of men are only the product of the combined action of Nature and society....All men, with no exceptions, at every moment of their lives are what Nature and society have made them.

 

The Political Philosophy of Bakunin. 1953