THE DIVINE BEING.

 A Paper read before the Brisbane Freethought Association, on Sunday, 25th February, 1877, by Mr. Gavin PETTIGREW.

 THE subject which I have undertaken to discuss to-night is one of such a profound nature that I may possibly be considered presumptuous in attempting to deal with it. At the commencement of the inquiry, I may here state that I have no hope of being able to throw any new light on this most mysterious subject ; but if I can only succeed in agitating thought on the question, I hope my effort may not prove altogether valueless.

 The science which professes to teach us about the nature and qualities of the Divine Being goes by the name of Theology. To any one who has studied theology from a disinterested standpoint, there can be little doubt that it has not yet taken its place amongst what are termed " the exact sciences." Whatever progress may be made in that direction in the future, at the present time we find a great variety of theories afloat on the subject of all theological research —the Divine Being.

 It may be urged by these learned “ divines,” who make theology a “ profession,” and live by it, that the facts of theology do not admit of the same kind of demonstration as those of a physical nature, seeing that they are principally of a metaphysical character. This is a fact that meets all honest inquirers after theological truth on the very threshold of their investigations, and if they attempt to proceed by scientific methods of research, they soon find that few, if any, theologic theories can be verified scientifically. Another difficulty is that of being deprived of the use of some of our best logical tools by the exigencies of the case. Reasoning by analogy, for instance, is a comparative failure when applied to theology, as there can be no proper analogy between Finite and Infinite.

 Such being the nature of the difficulties that stand in the path of theological science, we could hardly expect anything else than uncertainty in the region of theology. But, what are the facts? We meet with theologians on every side, differing widely from each other in their teachings, and although, for  the most part, incapable of proving the propositions they advance, yet, at the same time, actually insisting on the absolute truth of all their propositions with a dogmatic certainty and intolerance which professors of the  “exact sciences” would blush to exhibit.

 While the conditions are so unsatisfactory, on which a knowledge of Theology depends, forcing us to the conclusion that, if a science at all, it must necessarily be “the most speculative of any ; " still we find that it has engrossed the attention of some of the most highly developed minds that have lived in the world's history. From the speculations of Job as to the possibility of “ finding out God,” down to the latest cogitations of Herbert Spencer on the same subject, men in all ages and countries have desired to know something about the “ Power” behind the phenomena of Nature. Although we might reasonably expect man's knowledge of this “Power” to increase in proportion to his mental development, yet we find on com paring the theologies of the most ancient nations with these of modern times, that theology, as a science, has made little if any progress in the world during the last three or four thousand years. The theological conceptions of the ancient Brahmins differed very little from the most advanced ideas of God at present existing. In the sacred books of the Hindoos, the deity called Brahma was stated to be "immaterial, invisible, unborn, uncreated, without beginning or ending, and unapprehensible to the understanding.” Surely this “ God idea “ of the Hindoos, propounded probably 2,000 years before the Christian era, is quite as philosophic as that taught by moral philosophers in our age, and will bear favourable comparison with the idea of God presented by the learned “divines” of the orthodox Christian religion.

 Vishnu, alias Brahma, in Hindoo theology, is made to describe himself in the following words : — “I am the soul, O Arjuna, which exists in the heart of all beings, and I am the beginning, and the middle, and also the end of existing things.” Can anything be more comprehensive than that? Compare it for a moment with the Hebrew Jehovah, who is delineated in the Bible as a personal, jealous, and revengeful being, "who visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto these that love Him and keep his commandments," and tell me which is the higher conception ? How comes it that the heathen Hindoos should be in possession of such exalted ideas of God without a special revelation, which orthodox Christians grant only to the Hebrews? The question naturally arises, wherefore the necessity of a revelation from God to man, when man by his own unaided powers can thus acquire as truthful conceptions of the Divine Being as with a revelation ?

 Turning to the Persian idea of God, we find the following “confession of faith” in the Zend Avesta or Persian Bible : — “I ascribe all good things to Ahura Mazda (or Ormuzd) ; he is good, and has good, he is true, lucid, shining, and is the originator of all the best things of the spirit of Nature, of the growth in Nature, of the luminaries, and the self-shining brightness which is in the luminaries.” Zoroaster is generally acknowledged as the “ founder “ of the Persian religion, and it has been ascertained that it was in existence before the conquest of Bactria by the Assyrians, which took place about 1,200 B.C. It has been argued by some theologians that because there is a great similarity between the theology of the Persians and that of the Hebrews, that the former must therefore have borrowed their conceptions from the “ inspired “ writings of the latter. But to the unprejudiced critic the evidence goes to prove the very reverse; as from Jewish history we know that the religion of the Hebrews did not contain any ideas about the immortality of the soul or the existence of the god Satan, until after they had been taken captive to Babylon, some 600 years B C. Besides, it would require a wonderful stretch of the imagination to conceive of a people advanced in numbers and intelligence, as there is evidence of the Persian nation having been, contemporaneously with the existence of the Hebrews as a single family, or a small nomadic tribe, having necessity to borrow their theology from the latter. In claiming goodness as the special attribute of the Persian Deity, Zoroaster, in common with other theologians, had one great difficulty to contend with — to account for the existence of evil in the world. He mastered the difficulty in apparently a very reasonable way, viz., by investing an archfiend (Ahriman) with the power over evil, as Ormuzd had over good. This explained the mystery of evil, but the unity and power of the Divine Being was lost in this dualistic conception. Here, undoubtedly, was the source from which the Hebrews derived their conception of “ the adversary of Jehovah,” called Satan; and from them it has passed to us —becoming one of the chief “corner stones” of the orthodox theology. No doubt it is humiliating to think that this “ devil idea “ of 3,000 years ago, coming as it does from an “ uninspired source,” has been so long perpetuated and lovingly clung to by Christian theologians. To have to acknowledge its Pagan origin can hardly be agreeable to learned “ divines “ of our day, and yet there is no alternative, if history is to be respected at all.

 The “sacrificial idea” was a necessary sequence of such a belief in a God of Evil; and all the cruelties that have been perpetrated in the world with the object of propitiating the god Satan, are referable to this Zoroastrian conception. The “ Saviour idea “ may also be looked upon as the latest and ultimate development of this “ devilish belief.” It will thus be apparent that we are indebted to the Persians for the “ divinely-appointed plan of salvation,” which is amounted the Alpha and Omega of evangelical Christianity, 

Passing to China, that wonderful country, on whose surface are located nearly one-half of the human race, where they claim to have a history reaching as far back as 45,000 years, we find that they have not lived without the “ God idea.” There is evidence that some of their theologians have entertained as sublime conceptions of Deity as ever came from “ inspired penman “ or “ Divine Oracle.”

 In one of the Chinese “ Sacred Books,” called Taó te-King, written by Laotse about 520 B.C., is the following record of a belief in a Supreme Being : “ There existed a Being, inconceivably perfect, before heaven and earth arose. So still ! So supersensible ! It alone remains, and does not change. It pervades all, and is not endangered. It may be regarded as the mother of the world. I know not its name ; if I describe it I call it Tao. Constrained to give it a name, I call it Great ; as Great, I call it Immense; as Immense, I call it Distant ; as Distant, I call it Returning."

 In speaking of the name of the Divine Being, Laotse says : “ It is written Tao ; if it can be pronounced, it is not the Eternal Tao. The Nameless One is the foundation of heaven and earth. He who begins to create has a name ; Tao, the Eternal, has no name.” This conception of the Eternal Being as distinct from the Creator, is perhaps one of the most abstruse conceptions of Deity ever propounded, and nearly identical with that taught by the French spiritists at the present time.

 Lord Amberley, in his work entitled "Analysis of Religious Belief," in referring to the “ Taó-te-King,” says — “That of all sacred books it is the most philosophical ; it stands, indeed, on the borderland between a revelation and a system of philosophy, partaking to some extent of the nature of both." "Other teachers,” he goes on to say, '' have seen God mainly in violent and convulsive manifestations, and have appealed to miraculous suspensions of natural order, as the best proofs of His existence. Not so Laotse. He sees Him in a quiet unobtrusive, unapparent guidance of the world, in the unseen yet irresistible power to which mankind unresistingly submit precisely because never thrust offensively upon them. The Deity of Laotse is free from these gross and unlovely elements which degrade His character in so many other religions.” It seems, therefore, that theology amongst the heathen Chinese has little to be ashamed of by comparison with that of Christendom.

 There is not the least probability that “the special people of God,” who were entrusted with the “ only revelation from God to man,” had ever the slightest dealings with the people of China, and yet, unaided by the "light of revelation,” they were capable of arriving at juster and more philosophic conceptions of Deity than ever the Hebrews were, even with the special manifestations of Jehovah, to assist them. Surely the old apologetic argument of theologians regarding Pagan nations "having to borrow what glimpses of true theology they possess from the sacred writings of the Hebrews,” will not bear a moment's consideration in this case, as the Chinese nation was most probably in a comparatively high state of civilization at the time Abraham left his father's house on that expedition which resulted in the formation of the tribe of Hebrews ; and at the time when Jehovah promised to make of Abraham's seed a great nation, that would be as the sands on the sea shore for multitude, the Chinese must then have been such a nation ; while the Hebrews have never, and in all human probability never will, attain to such numerical strength as the Chinese. 

Confucius, the Chinese sage, although the founder of a religion, was a moralist in contra-distinction to a theologian. Like Buddha in India, he aimed at practical religion, rather than speculative theology. As theology is the question in hand, I cannot at present deal with the religions of these most ancient nations. Through the researches of philologists and antiquarians, we are now in possession of a vast amount of knowledge in regard to the history and theology of nations, which, till lately, has been to us a " sealed book ;" and I am glad to know that researches of this kind are still being prosecuted with vigour. The diffusion of knowledge of this particular description cannot fail to teach us that theology is of human origin as much as any other product of the human mind, and it is eminently calculated to remove the prejudice existing in regard to the current Judaised-Christian religion, accounted orthodox, in which its theology is looked upon as “a patent right,” originally secured by the Hebrews.

 Amongst the ancient Egyptians theologic conceptions seem to have been rather vague ; while there is evidence that an unseen God was worshipped in Egypt more than 3,000 years before the Christian era, there is also the clearest proof that they were at a later period idolaters, worshipping different animals. The Egyptian mind seems to have been more distinguished for scientific investigation than theologic speculation. Ancient Greece doubtless derived its theology from Egypt, as its Polytheism abundantly shows. Although the Grecian Deities were often endowed with beautiful qualities, they were always human and imperfect.

 Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, partook of the essentially selfish nature of that most narrow-minded and exclusive section of the human race. He was jealous, cruel, changeable, and vindictive in His dealings with man, seeking His own glory, and the aggrandisement of His "special favourites" (the Hebrews) at the expense of other peoples. Although we find in the Old Testament Scrip tares many passages conveying grand and elevated conceptions of Deity, still the persistent idea which crops up, over and anon, throughout the whole Book, seems to be this — That Jehovah was the God of the Hebrews only ; that His principal attention was devoted to their welfare, and that all the other nations of the earth might go to chaos for aught He was likely to do to prevent such a catastrophe.

 The millions of human beings in China and India seem to have been as nothing to Jehovah, when “ weighed in the balance " against a few thousands of the descendants of Abraham.

 Plainly enough Jehovah was too partial in His affections to be any one else's God than the Hebrews. He was not universal in His sympathies, as the Hebrews were a mere fraction of the human race.

 That Jehovah was a Deity made in the image of man, is most offensively apparent in different parts of the Bible; as for instance, in the beginning of the Book of Genesis, where we are told that He "rested on the seventh day,'' as if He were a being apart from the forces of Nature, and might allow the world to go on without Him. He is also described as walking in the Garden of Eden, " in the cool of the day,” just as a man with the common ideas of personal comfort would do. We are also told that on one occasion Moses "saw Jehovah's backparts."

 We smile when we read the descriptions given by antiquarians of the Assyrian Gods. Some of whom were "in the habit of sneezing,” while others were often so much affected as “to cause tears to roll down their cheeks,” but is not the God of the Hebrews quite as ridiculously human ? That such a God should be the popular conception of the Divine Being in this enlightened age, can only be accounted for by the extraordinary influence possessed by "professional" theologians, whose self-interest consists in maintaining supernatural religion in spite of reason and common sense. The theology of Jesus, which has been grafted on the old stock of Judaism, was doubtless a great improvement on the old system. It teaches that God is a father whose principal attribute is love. It is pleasing to know that this conception of the Divine Being is growing, and that the old conception of “ Omnipotent tyranny” is gradually losing ground.

 Leaving the fields of " theology proper,'' let us briefly consider the subject of Deity from a metaphysical standpoint.

 While personality is mostly implied in all " theologies," it is a noted fact the metaphysicians have generally concurred in attributing impersonality to the Divine Being.

 Spinoza, (one of the most profound thinkers that ever lived on this planet), after years of speculation on the nature of Deity, came to the conclusion that God and Nature were respectively, '' The Eternal Cause and the Everlasting Effect.” Hegel, the great German philosopher, defined Deity as “the sum of all reality.” Herbert Spencer, after a lifetime of philosophical research, uses the term “ Unknowable" to designate that ''persistent force," or formative principle, which he finds evidence of behind all phenomena ; while the famous Matthew Arnold evidently thinks he has made a step in the right direction, when he defines God as “ the power not ourselves, which maketh for righteousness.”

 It seems that the difficulty of naming the Divine Being is as hard to be overcome in our day as it was three thousand years ago. Admitting the existence of a Divine Being (which I have assumed from the beginning of this inquiry), I am willing to believe with Laotse, that "it is unnameable." God, the Divine Being, the First Cause, the Infinite, the Eternal, the Absolute, the Universal Father, the Self-Existent, in common with many more titles that have been applied to the subject of our inquiry, are only arbitrary terms used to describe something we cannot conceive of. We are forced to use them, as we use x and y in algebra. " the Egyptian's Orsires, the Hindoo's Brahma, the Hebrew's Jehovah, the Grecian's Jupiter, the Mahomedan's Allah, the Christian's Our Father, the Theist's Deity, and the Indian's Great Spirit, are in reality one and the same thing, although like different artists painting the same hero, they necessarily partake of the idiosyncracies of the painters." In trying to reason out "the problem of Deity," we soon discover that our mental powers are quite inadequate for the task; and as we cannot transcend the capabilities of the human mind, God must continue to be the Unknowable, as long as human nature continues to be conditioned.

 As to the possibility of ever being able to know what God is, the case is hopeless ; as “ to know God as he is, man must himself be God.”

 Many ingenious arguments have been advanced in proof of the existence of God ; but seeing that most thinkers are agreed as to the existence of a “power” to which so many names have been given, the great desideratum is a definition of this “power.” The Pantheistic conception of God immanent in Nature, is, in my opinion, one of the most logical and consistent beliefs in regard to Deity of any with which I am acquainted. There seems to be some little analogy to assist us in forming this conception, provided we can accept the theory of man's " dual nature" (body and soul). According to which theory, the man's body is supposed to be the outward visible manifestation of an inward invisible "something" which energizes the " physical form." In a somewhat similar relation the Pantheist conceives of God as the inward, invisible Essence, or life-giving “power,” of which the system of Nature is the visible outcome. In this case there can be no Divine Personality, no separate Existence of God apart from Nature, and having reached thus far with the Pantheist, there seems to be only a step to the conclusion, " that God is Nature, and Nature is God," and that the one cannot exist apart from the other. Viewed in this light each human being must be a part of Deity, in fact every “atom “ in existence must likewise be

 A part of that stupendous whole.

 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

 I confess that there may be some difficulty in accepting the logical deductions of this belief ; at the same time, we must acknowledge that it has the grand merit of universality in its favour.

 Hear the Spiritualists' conception of the Divine Being, as follows :— “ To us God is the Infinite Spirit—Soul of all things, the incarnate Life Principle of the Universe, impersonal, incomprehensible, undefinable, and yet immanent in dew-drops that glitter and shells that shine, in stars that sail through silver seas, and angels that delight to do the immutable will. When we designate God as the Infinite Spirit, presence, and substance of Universal Nature, from whose eternally flowing life wondrous systems of worlds have been evolved, we mean to apply in the affirmative, all Divine principles; attributes, qualities, and forces, positive and negative— Spirit, as spirit substance ; and matter, as physical substance, or a solidified form of force, the former depending on the latter for its manifestations.”

 All this high-sounding language strikes me as being not a whit nearer the object of our study than the Pantheistic conception before mentioned. the Russian poet reaches quite as far when he says,

 Being above all beings, mighty one !

 Whom none can comprehend, and none explore,

 Thou fill'est existence with Thyself alone,

 Embracing all— supporting, ruling o'er,

 Being whom we call God, and know no more.

 There seems to be a point in the investigation which cannot be overpassed ; at the same time it may be useful to the mind to give these insoluble problems some attention, as if we only learn how ignorant we are on these subjects it must be highly profitable to us in our search after truth.

 In these speculations about the Divine Being, how much better would it be for society if it could be demonstrated that God is Unknowable. Would one theologian continue to " damn the soul" of his fellow-theologian because their conceptions of Deity did not agree, if the fact were recognised that all our theories regarding the nature of God are purely speculative, and the sum of our positive knowledge of the Divine Being nil ?

 Let us briefly consider what Christian theologians have to offer as a solution of the problem of Deity.

 They believe that God is Tripersonal. The only evidence that can be advanced in favour of this extraordinary proposition, is a stray passage or two from the New Testament, which seems to favour the supposition that Jesus held such a conception of Deity. But even supposing that Jesus and John and all the Apostles entertained such a conception, is that any proof to a rational being that the Divine Being is Tripersonal ?

 What possible evidence of the nature of Deity had they which we do not possess ? If the profoundest reasonings of men in the nineteenth century, with the accumulated experience of all history to guide them, prove conclusively that God is unknowable, is it at all probable that ever he was knowable ?

 If Christian theologians can supply any evidence on this point, by all means let it be forthcoming, as the world is much in need of it. I question, however, whether they can produce a particle of evidence (worthy the name) as to the existence of three persons in the Godhead. The fact that so many of the brightest intellects of the age are dissatisfied with the Christian evidence shows its worthlessness. I am aware that Christian teachers rely mainly on revelation for their knowledge of the Divine Being, and are often in the habit of asserting that human reason can never of itself discover the nature of Deity.

 Assuming the possibility of revelation, how are we to know whether it be true or false except by the use of reason ? Take for instance the “ revelations “ of Buddha, Jesus, and Mahomet (which Christians must admit are widely different from each other) and supposing that each " revelation " is in turn presented to me for my acceptance, how am I to determine which is true ? Obviously, by comparing the different statements, and accepting that which seems most probable. The fact that Christians accept the revelations of Jesus and reject those of Buddha and Mahomet, proves that they use the same faculty of reason, in discriminating between "true" and "false" revelation. It is therefore evident that revelation, instead of being superior to reason, must become subject to it, and that the more reasonable the revelation the more truthful it is likely to be.

 Surely no person in his senses would accept the revelation that appeared to him to be the most unreasonable; but this is actually what Christian teachers would have us do, when they ask us to believe that three are one, and that the Divine Being at one time inhabited the organism of a Jewish mechanic. Christian theology asserts that the Divine Being is divided into three parts, each of which is not a part, but the whole. That one part, " The Father," or God of the Hebrews, is located in a place called Heaven, where He has resided uninterruptedly since the time that He appeared to Moses at Mount Sinai. That the second part "The Son," appeared in Palestine some 1900 years ago, where he suspended the laws of nature on different occasions, and at his death ushered into the world a new system of moral government (rendered necessary through some defect in the original plan) whereby a person through the acceptance of this belief may reap moral harvests that he has never sown, and safely and conveniently prevent effects from following their producing causes.

 The third part of the Christian Deity is said to be generally operating for good in the human soul, although he has often to contend for the mastery with a " malignant being,” whose power seems to be all but omnipotent, and who continually disarranges and frustrates the intentions of this Tripersonal Deity. It must be very humiliating for Christians to consider that in spite of the efforts of the third part, aided with the sympathy and support of the first and second parts of Deity, and also the special assistance of the "servants of God," on earth in counteracting the work of the "Evil Power," still Satan seems to hold his own against such fearful odds, and is evidently in as powerful a position to-day as when he proffered Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth on condition that He worshipped him.

 If this be the "best light " of Christian theology, it seems little better than "a glow-worm's lamp" amidst the profound darkness that envelopes the mysterious subject of Deity.

 Some of the more honest and capable of orthodox theologians are beginning to confess as much ; and it is worthy of notice that the deepest thinkers amongst them are invariably the most cautious in making assertions regarding the nature of the Divine Being. A great change is observable in the tone of theological writers within the last few years; and no doubt the advance of science, and the spread of freethought, have had much to do in causing the adoption of that apologetic style which distinguishes the writings of " advanced " Christian theologians.

 As to the evils resulting from the teaching of dogmatic theology, I have only time to refer you to the persecutions, fiendish cruelties, and cold-blooded butcheries that have been perpetrated in the name of religion throughout the past, and the sectarian animosities, and uncharitable feelings that are still engendered through the mistaken idea that the nature and purposes of the Divine Being can possibly be known to any individual or church organisation. In view of the religious wars and martyrdoms that blot the pages of history and call forth the execrations of the civilised world, let us endeavour to kill dogmatic theology by introducing doubt, and by promptly demanding proof from these who assert that they have any positive knowledge regarding the nature or intentions of Deity.

 As once upon Athenian ground,

 Shrines, statues, temples, all around,

 The man of Tarsus trod

 Midst idolaltars ; one he saw,

 That filled his breast with sacred awe,

 'Twas "TO THE UNKNOWN GOD." 

Yet still, where'er presumptuous man 

His Maker's essence strives to scan, 

And lifts his feeble hands, 

Though saint and sage their powers unite, 

Ah ! still that altar stands.

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. ), Saturday 17 March 1877, page 5 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/169512057

MR. FROUDE ON CALVINISM.

 [PALL MALL GAZETTE.]

Mr. Froude has republished the remarkable address recently delivered by him at St. Andrews, and it is certainly well worth studying. It is admirably written, and full of genuine eloquence applied to questions which all thoughtful men are asking at the present day. Its form, indeed, is historical; but there is throughout a reference to modern problems which can be understood without much skill of interpretation. Mr. Froude inquires what is the true meaning of Calvinism. Why did the doctrine which at the present day is generally denounced as harsh and unreasonable appeal so forcibly to some of the greatest men that ever lived ? If, as we are sometimes told, it is an immoral and a slavish creed, why was its first influence to restore the moral law to its rightful preeminence, and to sustain the greatest of all revolts against unjust authority? Calvinism, he says, when all other systems have failed, "has borne over an inflexible front to illusion and mendacity, and has preferred rather to be ground to powder like flint than to bend before violence or melt under enervating temptation." How was this? The answer, so far as we can summarise Mr. Froude's remarks in a very contracted form, would be somewhat to this effect. At all times reasoning men have been perplexed by the dark enigma of the world — by the difficulty of detecting the supreme order and purpose beneath the apparent confusion which lies on the surface. The most superficial observation shows pain and misery inflicted alike upon the wicked and the righteous; and the ever-recurring problems of the origin of evil and the nature of man's responsibility present themselves in various forms to successive generations of mankind. The " better sort of men," however, cling to two primary convictions: the first, "that there is over all things an unsleeping, inflexible, all-ordering, just power;" the second, " that this power governs the world by laws which can be seen in their effects, and on the obedience to which, and on nothing else, human welfare depends." The history of great religious movements is the history of attempts to put these truths into a form which may practically influence the consciences and aspirations of mankind. For, unluckily, the better sort of men by no means have things their own way. Great reformers arise at intervals when the times are ripe, and pronounce the doom of the falsehoods which have been corrupting society. The intervals are periods of religious decay, during which the formulæ which served to express vital truths are being perverted into the service of error and used as a makeshift compromise between the love of good and of evil. The moral law is superseded by a ceremonial law. Duty comes to mean the observance of certain rites, and is dissociated from its influence upon practical life. This is the essence of idolatry — the formation of a system, which would be very pleasant to everybody if only it would work. Priests are exalted, and laymen are allowed to gain favor with God while in no way hindered from their ordinary occupations and engagements. Gradually, however, the rule of hypocrisy and mendacity becomes intolerable ; and some fresh warfare breaks out against the lies and iniquities that are flourishing in high places. Such, says Mr. Froude, passing in review some of the main religious movements of the world, was the history of the Jewish revolt against Egypt. The Egyptian monarchy was rich and luxurious, with its exclusive castes of priests and nobles, and its proletariat of slaves. The Egyptians, indeed, believed in a future state of punishments and retributions as clearly as we can do. They were an " eminently religious people." The priests claimed supernatural powers and the keys of the sacred mysteries. They knew that the question which would be asked at the final tribunal would not be whether a man had been " just and true and merciful, but whether he had believed what he was told to believe, and had duly paid the fees to the temple." The slave races toiled on, their masters being controlled by no fear of retribution ; and when there was a danger that they would multiply too fast, their children were thrown to the crocodiles. One of these races at last revolted, not against tyranny, but against mendacity and hypocrisy. They dropped out of sight, though they did not explicitly relinquish the belief in a life to come which had been corrupted for priestly purposes. They became the soldiers of a purer creed and, in spite of many errors, left their mark for all time on the history of the human race. Such, again, was the history of Zoroaster and his Persians, and such essentially, though their principles were embodied in a far loftier faith, was the great protest of St. Paul and the fishermen of Gennesaret against the corruption of the Roman empire. Men had neglected the laws of their Maker, and the world could only be saved by forcing them back to their allegiance. Christianity itself may be corrupted, and the Eastern Empire had fallen into the same degradation which prepared older revolutions, when St. Clement describes the fine Alexandrian lady ascending the steps of her basilica, " to which she was going for what she called her prayers, with a page lifting up her train. He paints her as she walks along the street, her petticoats projecting behind with some horse-hair arrangement, and the street boys jeering at her as she passes. Mohammedanism was the rebuke to the evil principle then dominant ; though doomed to speedy decay from its inherent vices, it owed its power to its recognition of a Supreme Spirit, Maker and Ruler of all things. And finally, when Western Christianity had sunk into a similar corruption, Luther and Calvin spoke out once more and shook the spiritual organisation of Europe to its centre. "Lutheranism when Luther himself was gone, and the thing which we in England know as Anglicanism, were inclined to temporising and half-measures." But half-measures were insufficient "to quench the bonfires of Philip of Spain or raise men in France or Scotland who would meet crest to crest the princes of the House of Lorraine." Calvin was the man for the times ; and his grimness and hardness were necessary qualifications for struggling against the mighty powers of tyranny opposed to him. If the Calvinists seemed to value the Old Testament too highly in comparison with the New, it was because they believed that in the Old Testament was to be found a Divine example of national government carrying out the laws which men are bound externally to obey. If they were fanatical and dogmatic, it was because they had to meet unrelenting persecution, and abhorred, in a degree which no body of men ever exceeded, all mendacity, impurity, and moral wrong. They did their work ; and their belief, too, has become corrupt. The acceptance of a system of belief instead of obedience to duty has become the condition of salvation ; and people are apt to understand by religion a system of devices for saving the individual soul of the believer. The Calvinism which "purged England and Scotland, for a time at least, of lies and charlatanry," is dead; but "unless God be a delusion, and man be as the beasts that perish," it must reappear in some new incarnation, as the spirit which from time to time rises in revolt against untruth. We have glanced in the briefest way possible at topics which Mr. Froude himself can, of course, only touch in passing. The inference, not directly expressed, is plain enough. We have sunk again under the dominion of lies, and fallen into the corruption which is its necessary consequence. The Alexandrian lady is not without her counterpart in London streets. The Egyptian priests may find a feeble reflection in Mr. Purchas and his friends ; the noble caste and their proletariat have representatives in our modern civilisation. Some protest will come in time. We shall have our Calvin, our Mo-hammed, or our Moses, and great will be the crash of existing systems. Who will the new preacher be ? Is he already among us? or are we only in the dark hour which precedes the dawn ? These are wide questions, and they, as well as many others suggested by Mr. Froude's remarks, must be left to our readers. On one point only we will say a word or two. Mr. Froude is rather fond of giving side-strokes at modern science. Not long ago, he says, Scotchmen believed in witchcraft ; and "at this very hour the ablest of living natural philosophers is looking gravely to the courtship of moths and butterflies to solve the problem of the origin of man, and prove his descent from an African baboon." Surely there is some confusion of ideas when a belief in witchcraft is coupled with a method of scientific inquiry. The philosophy which despises investigation into the most trifling natural phenomena is out of place at the present day, and would involve the abandonment of our most valuable knowledge. Mr. Froude takes a more intelligible and worthy position when he says that religion is not really interested in such problems as those investigated by Mr. Darwin. If, he says, we are descended from a glutinous jelly, he cares not. Duty will still be the same, and we may equally believe in the imperishable nature of the intellectual spirit. That is very true in some sense, and very important. Yet Mr. Froude's contempt for natural philosophers leads him to neglect another truth which deserves consideration. These philosophers are in one respect the legitimate representatives of Calvin. They, that is, are honest seekers for truth at any price, and haters of every variety or imposture, if anywhere we are to find the means for a revolt against the tyranny of mendacity, it will be among men who have been trained in the school of rigid inquiry, and who are accustomed to yield conviction to reason, and to reason only. Nor is it true that such inquiries have no more direct influence upon religion. Every religion must give us some theory of the world, and some explanation of man's position in it. It matters little in one sense whether man is or is not descended from an African ape ; he is a man now, and that is the essential fact. But it is impossible that such a belief should be generally accepted, with all its consequences, without profoundly modifying our views of the world and of morality. It would, so to speak, alter our whole perspective, and teach us to look at many things from a different point of view. But, also, it would tend to give a fresh significance to that belief in the evolution of all things in obedience to certain fixed laws to which Mr. Froude himself attaches so much importance. Religion in the best sense has nothing to fear from such speculations ; for the instincts for which it provides expression will remain, however their existence may be explained. But it is impossible to suppose that the expression would not be profoundly modified, or that our imagination would not be powerfully impressed, by receiving these novel conceptions of the world. Indeed, we believe is would be truer to say that the great changes which are going an are essentially the adaptation of our religious creed to the new ideas imparted by scientific observers, than to say that those ideas are irrelevant to the main question. To mention nothing else, their acceptance would involve a very important modification of Mr. Froude's theory that the "moral law is inherent in eternity." Those words would cease to have much meaning if we suppose that the moral sense is the result of hereditary instincts, moulded in certain ways by the external conditions of life. But we will not go further into a controversy which could easily be spread beyond all limits. We are content to say that, whatever view is taken of the merits of his arguments, Mr. Froude's essay is very eloquent and interesting.

—————————————— 

* "Calvinism An Address delivered at St. Andrew's " By James Anthony Froude. (London ; Longmans and Co. 1871.)

Age (Melbourne, Vic.), Monday 26 June 1871, page 3 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/203008991

KARL MARX: Poverty, hatred shaped life of a great revolutionary.

 Does the spread of Communism menace world security? Is it a sane political doctrine, or a new form of Fascism? This study of Communist No. 1, Karl Marx, helps to answer these questions.

THIS week, Mr. Churchill told the British House of Commons: "It is in the Kremlin, if anywhere, that the seeds of a new World war are being sown."

 What are Russia's plans?

 How is the original doctrine of Communism, as defined by the intellectual father of the Soviet regime, Dr. Karl Marx, likely to affect our future?

 The world would like to know.

 Marx, the most influential political economist of the past century (if not of all time) died in London 63 years ago.

 Today he is a sort of demigod to Communists throughout the world; to them his doctrines, as interpreted by Lenin and currently by Stalin, are an official gospel with the force of a religion.

 To others, including some non-Marxian socialists as well as many believers in individual freedom, Marx is one of history's most wicked men, a brilliant but depraved apostle of hate whose doctrines would destroy most of the values of Western civilisation.

 Some people believe that the Russian Revolution and Soviet international policy are the living embodiments of Marx's doctrines. Others regard them as a complete negation of his doctrines.

 The truth lies somewhere between.

 But, however narrowly limited is the possibility of understanding current Soviet manoeuvres through Marxian texts, a study of Marx helps to illuminate some basic attributes of Soviet thought and behavior that have puzzled Western observers.

 Karl Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, a Rhineland city near the French border, the son of a well-to-do lawyer and a descendant rabbis on both sides.

 Heinrich hoped that his son would follow in his respectable footsteps. He was overjoyed when at 18 Karl became engaged to the 22-year-old girl next door, Jenny von Westphalen, beautiful daughter of a baron.

 Although Heinrich died when his son was only 20, he had already foreseen disappointment.

 After Karl had gone to the university (first at Bonn, where he soon got in trouble for radical activities and "nocturnal drunkenness and riot," then at Berlin), the paternal letters were filled with foreboding and reproach; for the boy's egoism, for his neglect of his parents, for his extravagance and "wild frolics," for the "demon" that seemed possess him, for fear that his heart was not as great as his mind, for the "dangerous and uncertain future" he was preparing for Jenny.

 Despite occasional "frolics," Marx was already displaying a prodigious intellectual energy.

 In one of his infrequent letters to his father, he reported that during the past term, in addition to reading an astonishing variety of books and writing summaries and reflections on them, he had written three volumes of poems to Jenny, translated the "Germania" of Tacitus and the "Elegies" of Ovid, plus two volumes of the "Pandects" (Roman civil law), written a play and an original philosophy of law that he tore up as worthless, and, "while out of sorts," got to know Hegel "from beginning to end." 

Hegel, who had died only a few years before, was to remain a major influence on Marx's thinking.

 The first of Marx's political articles that got him into trouble was written early in 1842. It was a blast at the Prussian censorship.

 Soon the young rebel began writing for Cologne's liberal Rheinische Zeitung. In October he became its editor-in-chief.

 A few months later the paper was suppressed because it had criticised the Russian Czarist regime.

 Marx, after a seven-year engagement, married Jenny and went off to Paris to study socialism.

 In Paris he swiftly developed from rebellious youth to full-fledged revolutionary, resolved to destroy existing society and bring about a "complete rebirth of mankind." 

In Paris, too, began the great friendship and collaboration of Marx's life. Friedrich Engels, two years younger, was also a Rhinelander, the son of a prosperous textile manufacturer with mills in Prussia's Barmen and in England's Manchester.

 Friedrich Engels' revolutionary zeal had been spurred by the degradation of Barmen's industrial workers and by the harsh bigotry of his grimly Calvinistic father. 

Outwardly Marx and Engels were almost complete opposites.

 Marx was short, stocky, powerful-chested, with a swarthy skin and shaggy mane and beard of coal-black hair. Engels was tall, slender, blue-eyed, fair-haired.

 Marx was grim, brooding, academic, awkward, unconventional. Engels was gay, gregarious, a devotee of fencing, fox-hunting, and other sports, a lover of wine and music.

 But when Engels stopped in Paris to pay a call on Marx in 1844, the two found their ideas and sympathies so closely matched and mutually so stimulating that they talked steadily for 10 days. Thereafter, whether they wrote jointly or discussed and encouraged each other's individual efforts, their lives and work were indissolubly joined. 

Marx was no mere armchair revolutionist.

 In Brussels, after being expelled from Paris, he and Engels joined the League of the Just (soon renamed the Communist League and transformed from a hole-and-corner conspiracy into a propaganda society with unconcealed revolutionary aims) and set about fanning, by means of writing and speeches, the fires of revolt that were to sweep Europe in 1848.

 In 1847, in the "Communist Manifesto," they produced one of the most forceful pieces of propaganda ever written. 

The next year, after the beginning of the revolts and Marx's expulsion from Brussels (in the course of which Jenny, jailed over night, was forced to share a cell with a prostitute), they hurried to Cologne to publish a revolutionary newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

 Engels even fired some rifle shots against the Prussian Army when it invaded the Palatinate. The revolution failed.

 Marx brought out the last number of his paper in red ink; it sold 20,000 copies. 

Years later, in 1864, after the Communist League had broken up, the two friends helped found the International Workingmen's Association — the first International. 

One of his sons-in-law compared Marx's mind to a warship with steam up, always ready to move in any direction on the sea of thought.

 He won arguments — but never any large personal following. He was handicapped not only by his metallic voice and general lack of stage magnetism, but more seriously by his passion to dominate, his fierce intolerance of any ideas or leadership except his own.

 Sooner or later he quarrelled with nearly all of his fellow socialists and other radicals. The failure of the 1848 revolution and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, into which he had poured all that he could raise on his and Jenny's inheritances, left Marx penniless.

 Banished from Germany, he abandoned his Prussian citizenship. Now, for the rest of his life, he was a man without a country.

 After a short time in Paris and one last expulsion, he went to London to stay. There, determined to follow his goal "through thick and thin," he resolutely refused to let "bourgeois society turn me into a money-making machine."

 Marx was not entirely "practical" in his private affairs; there was about him something of the absent-minded scholar (he had once hoped to become a professor). 

Only once during his 33-year exile in England did Marx grow desperate enough to try to get a regular job: then a railway company turned him down because of poor hand writing.

 Always Marx plodded ahead on his masterpiece, "Capital," reading enormously in many languages and piling up mountains of notes. He worked mostly in the British Museum, daily from ten to seven, and then at home far into the night.

 When Marx in 1867 published the book "to which I have sacrificed my health, my happiness, and my family," he firmly but quite wrongly hoped that he would soon be a "made man."

 In London, the Marx family's situation shortly grew so desperate that Engels felt compelled to go back to "filthy trade" in his father's Manchester mill in order to support them all. But the sums he was able to send from time to time were not enough to do more than keep the Marxes alive.

 After eviction from their first London home, the Marxes (with a German maid who stayed with them to the end) moved to a two-room tenement in the slums of Soho.

Sometimes Marx lacked money for writing paper or for postage. Sometimes, beset by dunning or distrustful tradesmen, the family lived for days on bread and potatoes. 

The evidence is surprisingly unanimous that under these circumstances Marx remained as devoted to his family as he was truculent in his relations with the bourgeoisie and rival revolutionists. A police agent, for example, regarded him as "the gentlest and mildest of men" in the home circle.

 Marx was plagued by ill-health during most of the last half of his life. He was tortured by chronic insomnia, inflammation of the eyes, racking headaches, rheumatism.

 THE great riddle of Karl Marx's personality will probably always be in dispute: how much was he driven to his extraordinary life and work by love of humanity, how much by hatred of capitalist society and of its more fortunate members?

 Certainly he kept himself personally remote from the proletariat he championed. 

The vivid accounts of English working-class miseries in the mid-19th century that help make "Capital" so heart-searing a document were drawn, not from personal observation, but in the main from Engels' "Condition of the English Working Class," and from reports of parliamentary investigations Marx read in the British Museum. 

"Working for the world" was one of Marx's favorite sayings, and occasionally he mentioned the service or the sufferings of humanity in his writings. But for every word of such explicit humanitarianism there are a thousand of hatred and appeals to hatred.

 He spoke the word "bourgeois" as though spitting out something evil-tasting.

 He asserted that the power of love had failed to better social conditions in the 1800 years since Christ, and that the "iron necessity" that drives the proletariat to destroy capitalism and capitalists "will open the way to socialist reforms by transformation of existing economic relations sooner than all the love that glows in all the feeling hearts of the world."

 He argued that what the proletariat needed was not Christian "self-abasement, resignation, submission and humility," but "courage, confidence, pride, and independence even more than it needs daily bread."

 Marxism is not to be found neatly packaged in "Capital" — and especially not in the first volume alone, which is all that most people read.

 His theories of history, politics, and revolution are scattered through the writings of 40 years.

 Some of the reasoning is difficult to follow, especially for those not steeped in the grandiose and mystical speculations of German philosophy.

 Sometimes the reasoning in one work contradicts in part, that in another. But Marxs' main conclusions, his fundamental principles, are reasonably clear.

 Marx called his theory "historical materialism." It was the application to history of what Engels called "dialectical materialism."

 From Hegel the team borrowed the notion that everything in the world is in constant flux; something new is always developing, something old is dying away. And sooner or later all this change is for the better.

 Progress is achieved by what Hegel called the dialectic: one force (thesis) is opposed by a second (antithesis), which has split from it, and from their conflict emerges a synthesis containing the best elements of both. 

When the unification is completed, then it gradually becomes old and the process is repeated. 

Hegel, a patriotic State-worshipper, believed that human progress had reached its apex in the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III.

 Marx held out for one more step.

 "Modern bourgeois society, rising from the ruins of feudal society," proclaimed the "Manifesto," "did not make an end of class antagonisms. It merely set up new classes in place of the old; new conditions of oppression, new embodiments of struggle. Our own age, the bourgeois age, is distinguished by this; that it has simplified class antagonisms. More and more society is splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great and directly contraposed classes: Bourgeois and Proletariat."

In "Capital," Marx set out to show how capitalism (thesis) must inevitably, by its own inner laws, become so increasingly intolerable to the proletariat as to produce revolt against the bourgeoisie (antithesis) and a classless society (synthesis).

 Marx, who scorned other socialists' neat blueprinted Utopias, said little about what the classless society would be like.

 He did not even find it necessary to assume that the revolution would wash away all human vice.

 For him it was enough that:

 ⬤ Most of the world's troubles have sprung from the exploitation of class by class.

 ⬤ The ascendancy of the working class would abolish classes by making every man a producer.

 ⬤ Abolition of private property in the means of production would mean that no one would have anything to exploit anyone with.

 To be sure, he predicted that after the revolution, while Communism was emerging from the womb of capitalism in a "long and painful travail," there would be a "political transition period" requiring a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and considerable inequality of living conditions.

 But after sufficient education and organisation, the no-longer-needed State would "wither away," and everyone would live in peace and plenty in a society devoted to "the full and free development of every individual," under the slogan, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"

 This vision, the end result of the continuous progress assured by the dialectic, is to almost all Marxists not a hope but a "certainty," for to them, as to Marx, dialectic materialism is not a philosophy but a science, a science of society comparable in exactness with the science of biology.

 Indeed, Marx fancied himself as the Darwin of the social sciences.

 In explaining why capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, Marx begins with the theory, inconclusively advanced by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo that labor is the source of all value.

 He went on to develop his theory of surplus value, the keystone of his economic philosophy. According to this view, each worker spent only a fraction of his working hours earning his wages. The rest of the day he works for nothing.

 From this unpaid labor come all profits, providing those needed to pay interest and rent.

 Thus Marx arrived at his picture of society; a host of useless capitalists and landlords robbing the workers of the fruits of their labor.

 Every capitalist, he argued, necessarily likes to wring from his workers as much surplus value as he can; even if he is humane, his competitors force him to exploit. At first he may simply make his employees work longer hours. When the law forbids that, or the capitalist finds that it lessens efficiency, he may shorten the hours, but introduce the speed-up and stretch-out to make his workers work faster and harder. 

What do these things mean for the worker?

 Marx's summation: "They mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital."

 Machinery produces technological unemployment. The capitalist accumulates more and more of the profits of his unpaid labor, he buys more and more machinery, machines do more and more of the work, fewer and fewer human hands are needed to tend them.

 Besides, capitalism needs a large unemployed "industrial reserve army" for the times when it suddenly wants to hurl large amounts of its overflowing wealth into new industries, or into old ones whose markets have suddenly expanded.

 Finally comes the worst of capitalism's evils, the periodic recurrence of ruinous depressions.

Marx, although asserting that capitalism tends to give the working class less and less money to buy its products, flatly rejected the belief of labor leaders and other reformers that everything would be all right if employers would only pay their workers high enough wages to maintain a balance between production and consumption.

 Marx held that the prime cause of depression is overproduction, resulting from expanding capital's insatiable urge to find a profit and the compulsion upon invested capital to keep producing, regardless of demand, in a desperate effort to maintain itself.

 Marx predicted capitalism's trend toward concentration and monopoly. "One capitalist," he observed, "always kills many."

 He predicted the virtual disappearance of the middle class, as one ruined capitalist after another dropped into the proletariat.

 He believed that the end would come when a handful of great capitalists at last con-fronted a proletarian multitude, disciplined and united by enforced association in great industries, driven to despair by prolonged depression.

 By that time, too, capitalism would have reached its highest development, as Marx believed it must; its centralisation and productivity would be at a peak of ripeness for handy plucking by the proletariat.

 To Marx it made no difference whether Capitalists are good or bad: they are driven by forces they neither control nor understand.

 No matter how much the worker's lot may be improved, there can be no final compromise; the class war must be fought to the end. The end must be "a revolutionary change in the whole structure of society," or else "the common ruin of the contending classes." 

Marx taught his followers to harness for their ends the energy of class hatred wherever it existed.

 But he was aware that the conditions for revolution had not arrived. The only hope of a proletarian victory, as he saw it, was through a temporary alliance with the bourgeois democrats then revolting against monarchy and aristocracy.

 In 1850, Marx gave the Communist League significant strategic instructions in handling the bourgeoisie: "In the event of a struggle against a common foe . . the interests of both parties coincide for the moment . . .

 "During the struggle and after the struggle . . the workers must at every opportunity put forth their own demands alongside those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers the moment the democratic citizens set about taking over the government . . . 

"From the first moment of victory our distrust must no longer be directed against the vanquished reactionary party, but against our previous allies, against the party which seeks to exploit the common victory for itself alone " 

The "Manifesto" laid out the goal: "The Communists . . . openly declare that their purpose can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of the whole existing social order . . . Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all lands, unite!"

 What Marx meant by some of his strategic and tactical statements has been a subject of bitter dispute among his disciples.

 Interestingly enough, Marx did not mention a party in his 1850 address. In the "Manifesto" he wrote that "Communists do not form a separate party conflicting with other working class parties."

 He never spoke of a dictatorship of the party. Of course, just as he believed in the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat as instruments of struggle toward his goal of the classless and stateless society, he believed in a party as an educational agency. 

But he had never seen nor could he have envisioned the kind of monolithic and omnipotent party that rules Russia today. 

As for the "dictatorship" idea, there has long been controversy as to the meaning he attached to this concept.

 But this much is clear: Marx defined freedom as a condition in which the state is subordinate to society, and Engels equated the dictatorship of the proletariat with "the democratic republic."

 What was meant by this seeming semantic outrage?

 Some followers have believed that it meant a political democracy in which the proletariat, grown to immense proportions, could by ballot dictate economic measures, furthering its interests against those of the capitalists. Then the task of the party would be not to rule, but to educate and lead the proletariat.

 Perhaps this sounds like nothing more than New Dealism, rather than violent revolution.

 THE fact is that Marx observed the failure of his frequent prophecies of early revolution and he shifted from the hot intransigency of youth to the involved economic and metaphysical abstractions that make "Capital" such hard going in spots.

 Without ceasing to be a revolutionist, he became more reconciled to waiting and even eschewed the dogma of the universal indispensability of violence, declaring that socialism had a good chance of a peaceful birth where indigenous democratic traditions were as tenaciously rooted as in the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. 

Eventually, struggles inside the First International put before Marx and Engels the unpleasant alternatives of concentrating on its affairs to the neglect of study and writing or of letting dominance pass to the Russian anarchist, Bakunin, an advocate of direct and violent action without reference to political conditions.

 Thereupon Marx and Engels sent the International to the U.S. to die, which it did.

 In 1889, with Engels' blessing and under the leadership of some of Marx's disciples, the Second International was founded. 

The Second International placed its faith in slow accretions of power by the proletariat, which would build a new socialist society inside the shell of the old. 

The socialist task, therefore, was to teach and preach the inevitable coming of a classless society by almost automatic evolution.

 World War I laid the Second International low.

 Another interpretation of Marx was made by V. I. Lenin for use in the country Marx had regarded as the least hopeful prospect for socialist revolution.

 By its use Lenin organised the Bolshevik Party, captured power, and founded the Soviet state, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat, and, when he was being more accurate, the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

There is no record that he ever disputed a statement of Marx's. But to square all of Lenin with all of Marx is extremely difficult.

 Lenin regarded the party as an elite of hardened professional revolutionaries capable of knowing the relatively backward workers' interests better than the workers themselves. It must therefore be justified in using and means to make its will prevail. 

In contrast to Marx's contempt for concealment was Lenin's advice to members of the Communist Party that to capture strategic posts of power "it is necessary . . . to go the whole length of any sacrifice, if needed, to resort to strategy and adroitness, illegal proceedings, reticence, and subterfuge — to anything in order to penetrate ... at any cost, to carry on Communistic work. ..."

 When the saving revolutions that Lenin looked for in Germany and the industrially advanced west failed to develop, even with the sparkling of the Third International set-up in Moscow, he did not drop the power he got under such special conditions. He decided to dig in, build industry, await new tumults. 

War, he felt, must come — "the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with the imperialist states for any length of time is inconceivable."

 Lenin was succeeded, after a struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by the latter, whose removal from the party secretaryship had been the outstanding point in Lenin's political testament.

 After a series of purges, political trials, and executions of most of their surviving old comrades, Stalin and a small group around him consolidated their dictatorship of the Communist Party and through it of the Soviet state.

 From proclaiming the goal of building "socialism in one country"— a revision of Lenin as well as of Marx — the Bolsheviks went on to a nationalism so strong that they claimed, with much justice, the mantles of ancient Russian national heroes, such as Peter the Great and even Ivan the Terrible.

 Thus was Marx reinterpreted again.

 During the last years of Lenin's life, Russian writers began referring to their gospel as "Marxism-Leninism" rather than simply as Marxism.

 After Lenin's death, Trotsky, in his attacks on Stalin, began referring invidiously to the current gospel as "Stalinism."

 For a time the use of this word was regarded by the regime as a sign of opposition and disloyalty. Then Soviet writers began referring to official doctrine as "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," and later as simply "Stalinism."

 This is now an official Soviet term.

 Leninism has been called "the Marxism of the imperialist epoch"; Stalinism may be called the Leninism of the epoch of the party dictatorship.

 Last February, Stalin made a speech about capitalism's doom and socialist revolution.

 Until then he had not talked like a Marxist in any important public speech since 1939, when he said that Russians can expect to achieve a stateless society only when socialism is victorious in all or most countries and "there is no more danger of attack."

 Then Marxism went into a wartime eclipse. Neither during the pact with Nazi Germany nor during the "great patriotic war" did Marx make a happy Soviet symbol. 

No longer were huge posters showing Marx's head a dominant feature of Moscow parades and meetings. Throughout the war his name was taboo in the chief Army publication, Red Star.

 True, Marx's writings continue to be analysed, worked over, dissected, and classified by Soviet authorities.

 But basic Soviet policy is largely independent of Marx.

 For example, he declared that "we Communists do not deign to conceal our aims." But Moscow-controlled Communist parties conceal and disguise themselves, e.g., in Cuba where the Communists call themselves Popular Socialists.

 On the other hand, whereas Marx opposed all reformers, the Communist Party cannot be counted on to do so, as Australian Labor leaders learned when it so embarrassingly endorsed them at the last election.

 Such subterfuges and compromises are mightily modified forms of Marxism. 

Nevertheless, to Russians, Marxism, as interpreted by their leaders, has given some-thing important in addition to the wide variety of propaganda masks suitable for all eventualities of the changing world scene.

 It has given them reason, as the world's sole great "proletarian nation," to be suspicious of nations that are not only foreign, but capitalistic, and has given certainty that they are full sail in the main stream of history, while capitalistic outlanders stupidly row against the current.

 Has Marxism bound Russia to turn on her late allies and organise, agitate, and, if necessary, fight until the revolution has triumphed in all or at least some of the dominant countries of the world?

 Although Russian spokesmen may quote Marx on this point now and then, to try to find the answer to the question in Marx is futile. For Soviet policy is neither world revolution nor simple nationalism; the two aspects exist simultaneously.

 To Russia's revolutionary policy, the nationalist aspect lends a dynamism derived from propaganda about a holy socialist fatherland flowing with liberty and security; to the nationalist policy the revolutionary aspect brings the services of disciples in every foreign land, organised to do Moscow's bidding.

 None of this is simple Marxism.

 All of it ignores Marx's warning that the outcome of human struggle may be progress under socialism, but that it may also be — a striking phrase today— "the common ruin of the contending classes."

 Karl Marx has had an influence so great as to be difficult to explain in terms of his own theory of history.

 Somehow his personality and intellectual achievement seem to loom larger than they should according to his theory, with its stress on broad social forces.

 Few careers pose the problem of the relation of the individual personality to history so sharply as does that of this son of the bourgeoisie who sacrificed comfort and family to the intellectual goal of building a classless society.

 Marx's money worries lasted until 1869, when Engels sold out his interest in Ermen and Engels, moved to London, and gave his friend a settled income.

 Jenny died in 1881, Marx in 1883 at his dusty scholar's desk, Engels in 1895, after publishing the second and third volumes of "Capital."

 Marx's daughter Eleanor committed suicide in 1898 at the age of 43 because of a disappointment in love.

 Another daughter, Laura, and her husband, Dr. Paul Lafargue, committed suicide at the age of 70, feeling that their useful years were over and not wishing to be a burden in old age and illness.

 The third daughter, Jenny Longuet, alone left progeny; her son Jean was a leading French Socialist; her grandson, Robert-Jean Longuet, is a French Socialist writer.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article248500951