THE BIGOT AND THE SKEPTIC,

WHAT IS THEIR EUTHANASIA.

[1865.]

THE HE epithets Bigot and Skeptic are made for rebuke. No one covets them. To bestow them hastily is a weakness of the impatient, irritable or foolish, yet each of them indicates a real error of mind; a defect which besets every one of us, and deserves to be sharply pointed at. Analysis seems to lead to the following statement. Two propositions may be safely laid down:

I. Truth is wholesome to us mentally and morally; is eminently precious, especially in religion, and must be bought at all sacrifice, whether of prejudice or of material advantage.

II. Truth in religion is extremely difficult of attainment.

Of these propositions the former is learned from within, by Intuition, by a choice of the soul, just as we know that disinterestedness is better than selfishness and kindness than malice. But the latter is learned from without, by Observation, Experience, Testimony, and History. The former, like other fundamental principles of Ethics, may be called eternally true, since it co-exists with the ethical mind. The latter is true only during the intellectual infancy of man, and like other empirical truths may wear itself out by change of circumstances and improved culture.

The Skeptic errs on the side of forgetting or denying the former, while familiarly aware of the latter. The Bigot is ignorant of the latter, while sometimes possessed to the bottom of his soul by the former. But we must join both propositions, if we would be wise. It belongs only to those whose information and thought is quite narrow, to be unaware how very inadequate in every age and country mere Goodness is, to save men from the most irrational, pernicious, and degrading religious errors. Bitter at first is the experience, to learn of intense contrarieties of opinion concerning religion, where we should least expect them. Agreement is found, neither among the learned nor among the unlearned. Rabbis and Theologians, "babes and sucklings," those so devoted to piety as to study nothing else,

and those who with grave religiousness join extensive knowledge and worldly wisdom-yet on religion come into hopeless collision, too often unfriendly or bitter. It is irrational to deny that the attainment of Truth is difficult, when we see good, well-informed, able men inquire after it, yet remain so much at variance. Undoubtedly by such experience a light hostile to Bigotry has been widely shed abroad, so that this fault of character is perpetually on the decrease. We more and more learn to be gentle of judgment toward erring individuals, even if we cannot learn diffidence of our hereditary creed; and instead of moralizing over the wickedness of miscreants (i.e. misbelievers), we learn to rejoice that under every religion, however false, good men and women are found in great numbers. But after this conviction has taken root, the question recurs, "What then is Truth? how related to us?" We may, as one mode of cutting the knot, conclude, that Truth is unattainable, at least in religion; therefore it cannot be a natural want, it cannot conduce to our perfection, and it is unwise to enquire further. To adopt this conclusion, is commonly called Skepticism, by a strange inversion of etymology. A Skeptic ought to mean, one addicted to consider, to study, to inquire, yet we use the word to mean, one who deliberately ceases to search for truth, one who believes that inquiry is useless.

or

Only one reasonable alternative presents itself: for it cannot be called reasonable for each in turn to assume a complacent confidence that his own hereditary creed is true, when he sees how widespread is error among the well-informed and wellintentioned. The reasonable alternative is, to consider whether any discoverable errors of procedure have led to so extensive error of result. And here great light is instantly thrown on the subject by the parallel history of the human mind in other branches of knowledge. When we see a wide and pervading difference of opinion in Science, we make sure that either First Principles have been assumed too hastily, or erroneous Laws of Proof have been adopted; and the history of Science before Galileo establishes beyond dispute that to these faults were due the barren controversies of the preceding ages. What Thucydides complained concerning History was true of nearly all Science: "the research of truth was to the majority unpainstaking." Through deficient experience, all underrated the difficulty. Even those who spent their lives in thought, took up with a light hand and resolved with a light heart problems of the most

complex and enormous magnitude, utterly unconscious how presumptuous they were. No man was saved from great error by vast powers: for the greater his powers, so much the harder was the task to which he set himself, and so much the wider the grasp of his ambition. When foreign nations inherited Greek thought, individual Greek philosophers were made "authorities," and deference to these became a new mischief. Of these the great and good Aristotle had the most recent, the widest and the most lasting sway; and no progress in Truth was possible, until reverence for him (one may almost say) was trodden underfoot. Men were born to help each other to Truth, but not to dictate Truth; hence he who makes any one a dictator makes him a nuisance, sets him up as a necessary mark of attack, makes it a duty to hurl him (as it were) into the dust; that is, to exhibit his errors without tenderness; to dwell on his weaker side; to hold him up to apparent dishonour, until the spell of his name shall have been effectually broken.

Besides the extreme haste with which the old speculators jumped at their general doctrines, and the readiness with which they accepted as fact inaccurate or ill-attested statements, a fundamentally vicious mode of reasoning was very prevalent, which we might now describe as a confounding of Sciences. Such an error is it, to offer an ethical demonstration of an astronomical doctrine, or a metaphysical proof in optics. The limits of the Sciences were in appearance strongly marked in the age of Socrates, and one might have expected from their ample nomenclature exemption from this one error; yet it was never rooted out in the whole period from Aristotle to Bacon. One thing can nevertheless be said. Philosophy in its wildest days was raised immensely above the fatuity of the contemporaneous national Religions. It did not watch the flight of birds, nor listen to omens. It did not give credence to dreams, nor divine by lightnings. It did not open its ear or eye to mystical magicians. It did not burn or drown witches. It did not imagine sleepwalkers, or other persons who were in an abnormal state of mind, to be divinely commissioned revealers of truth. Fix on what era in the past or country you choose, the philosopher is always found sounder of mind and nearer to right procedure than the priest or augur who stood by his side.

If we turn to the old religions of India, we find only what we might expect, the premature speculations of antiquity overcrusted with a vast growth of wild poetry, of credulity, of

blundering mistake, and of craft. If we could quite clear away all that can be called corruption or perversion, and reach the original doctrines of those whom we must believe to have been great and wise men in their day, we make sure that we should find them infected by the errors necessarily incident to early philosophy, which inevitably mingles itself with religion. While men have very imperfect notions as to what constitutes Proof, and are unaware of the delusions which beset us in trying to decipher supersensible Truth, they cannot avoid errors of great magnitude. Hereupon the question presses, whether an Indian or Moslem can retort the same remark upon Europe, upon Christendom. What are the principles of proof on which Christianity stands ? Were its first preachers better taught in the foundations of philosophy and in the logic which is necessary to avoid delusive error than the most enlightened of their contemporaries ? Certainly, undeniably-they were not. Open the New Testament and read its very first pages: what do you find? A belief in dreams, such that if any man now professed it, he would be thought to be suffering under softening of the brain; a readiness to receive hearsay so absolute, that the writer does not imagine in the reader any need to learn who the writer is, how he gained his information, and on what basis he rests.

Moreover the writers of New Testament narratives do not profess to be divinely informed or divinely shielded from mistake of fact that idea is a pure invention of ecclesiastics. Indeed "Luke" in his four verses of Preface, tells us distinctly that he has taken pains to trace things accurately from their sources. It may not be amiss to dwell a moment on his words. He says: "Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to compile a narrative of the things fully believed among us, even as those handed them down to us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having accurately attended to everything from above [i.e. from the earliest sources] to write to thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of the things in which thou hast been catechized." So much is in the Greek of an educated Asiatic, and very superior to that of the rest of the book, which is on a par with that of Matthew and Mark, sometimes identical with them. The very word catechized, (that is, taught in a class) shows that the Christian Church was no longer in its first age, and the writer clearly informs us that tradition, apparently oral, was the basis on which the written

narratives were founded.

He claims no higher authority than had the many compilers who have perished (or perhaps exist and are called Apocryphal). He rests his credibility on his alledged accuracy of research. Thus he implicitly disavows miraculous sources. As to the accuracy to which he lays claim, his opening chapter shows how lax was his standard. Surely he knew that the "eye-witnesses and ministers of the word" could not give testimony about the miraculous birth of Jesus and his infancy; yet that goes for nothing with him. The same may be said of everything which is intended for historical writing in the New Testament; that is, in the Four Gospels and the Acts. Not one of the writers shows himself aware, that in narrating events which he supposes to have moved Earth and Heaven, and to concern intimately the eternal state of every man, any greater security against delusion is requisite, than if he were telling a campaign of Cæsar or a discourse of Socrates; while in fact he offers no such evidence as would prove to a jury an ordinary event, on the truth of which an estate of a hundred pounds were at stake. Not one of them seems at all aware that to believe on mere hearsay marvels and mysteries alledged to be divine, is of all things most prolific of pernicious religious error. Apparitions and messages of angels, and other things wholly supernatural do not appear to these writers to require any definite and clear attestation, or, one may even say, any attestation at all. Not one of them ever says that he himself saw any of these marvels, or thinks it necessary to give us a hint as to his informant, or to fix his own relation of time and place to that of which he is telling.

All the ablest critics now recognize that the three first gospels presuppose earlier documents from which they borrow in common: thus not one of the three belongs to the first age. Now it is quite incredible, that Jesus should come down from heaven to speak to mankind the words of God, and take no pains to let us know surely what those words are; should leave us to guess who wrote the fragmentary compilations which have come down to us,-with what means of knowledge, and with what security against error, credulity or fraud. Yet by writers, who in other respects also are evidently credulous, we are introduced to a divine messenger utterly careless to give us reasons for trusting the genuineness of the words imputed to him.

In these phenomena we have a sufficient explanation of the enormous and painful diversities of opinion concerning religion. Nothing else is possible, while lax notions of proof prevail. In