From \ By the Author of "Disunion and Reunlc \ " A&? :: ': HBB , Madden) UNIVERSITY OF CALI3 DRNIA 'Received Accession No. m THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE BY The Author of " Disunion and Reunion" (W. J. MADDEN) ct rcvertere? Copyright 1898, by W. J. MADDEN. ST To those whose hearts are troubled by the burden and the mystery of life, and to those who say they can not believe, this book is kindly dedicated. ERRATA. On page 9, for equally substitute equably, in fifth line from bottom. On page 14, for Mirart substitute Jfivart, in ninth line from bottom. On page 26, for chain substitute chains, in third line from top. On page 77, for They are substitute They are not, in third line from bottom. On page 90, for fischu substitute fichu, in ninth line from bottom. On page 92, for touchant substitute touchent, in fourth line from top. O,i page 92, for Provines substitute Provinces, in ninth line from top. On page 101, for each substitute each other, in ninth line from bottom. On page 109, for palimpset substitute palimpsest, in tenth line from bottom. On page 136, for returns substitute returner, in fifth line from bottom. On page 139, for of them admittedly substitute of admittedly, in tenth line from bottom. On page 153, for Far from frowning on substitute Far from the church frowning on, in fourteenth line from top. On page 184, for sits substitute six, in eighth line from top. On page 225, for every time substitute /;/ every time< in eighth line from bottom. PREFACE. Some time ago I ventured to publish a small volume entitled Disunion and Reunion. This was a summary of quite an extended series of Sunday evening lectures delivered in the Cathedral of Auckland, New Zealand. The subject of these lectures w#s suggested by the popular interest taken just then in the question of church reunion as evidenced in the frequent mention made of it in the home and local press. When that book was getting into type, my work was by no means done. It had to go on. The same large audiences continued to come each Sunday evening expecting to hear a continuance of the lectures. Being in charge of the place, I felt it imperative on me not to disappoint them, all the more as the interest they manifested had been so earnest and sustained. Though the work looked limitless I made the effort. It lasted eight months longer. The strain of this was very great and, added to the other cares and duties incidental to my position, began to (iii) IV PREFACE. tell. I had advice that this strain of mind, together with the cerebral excitement of frequent public speaking, might possibly end in some sudden and fatal attack of which, already, certain warning symptoms were not absent. So when a change came in the gov- ernment of the Diocese I availed of it to seek health with honor in a long ocean voyage and under other skies. I have now the leisure to fill out the hur- ried notes from which these lectures were delivered. I mean, however, to allow my- self a certain freedom in adding to the sub- stance of these discourses and while reshap- ing them in book form to use a large discre- tion as to form and arrangement. This I undertake the more willingly in the hope that the book, should it see the light, may find its way back among my numerous hearers in Auckland and remind them of one who shall ever gratefully cherish the remem- brance of their friendship and appreciation. * * # * * In the other volume Disunion and Reun- ion the question treated could interest only those who still hold by the Christian name and still cherish a belief in the fundamental PREFACE. V doctrines of Christianity. But unfortunately there is in our day, as is well known, a large class who while living amongst Christian populations and conforming outwardly, and often unconsciously, to the standard of Chris- tian morality, because compelled by custom and convenience to do so, at the same time openly renounce all belief in Christian dogma. "Our kinsmen in the flesh" and of Chris- tian ancestry, they surely ought to be in- cluded in the appeals now so earnestly made " for religious reunion. And I think a strong appeal may be addressed directly to them at this moment by pointing out, that the agnos- tic science which in our day has been entirely responsible for the prevailing unbelief, has proved unsatisfying and disappointing in its conclusions; that there is more unrest among men now than before it began its destructive criticisms, and that many of its own promi- nent professors are showing signals of dis- tress. It will be practical also to bid them weigh the value and use to men in their every-day life of the conclusions of faith as against the conclusions of unbelief and thence consult for their personal safety. PREFACE. Such is the simple, and let us hope, useful of this book. It is a small book. I have purposely kept it small. In a busy age it will have a better chance of being read. San Jose, Cal. 1898. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. NEED OF THE REACTION - 9 CHAPTER II. SIGNS OF THE REACTION 22 CHAPTER III. WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST - 40 CHAPTER IV. AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM - 54 CHAPTER V. INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM - 76 CHAPTER VI. QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE 96- CHAPTER VII. THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE - - 109, CHAPTER VIII. THE "LACHRYM.E RERUM" - 119 CHAPTER IX. "STATIO BENE FID A" - 137 CHAPTER X. IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL - 152 CHAPTER XL PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS - 168 ' CHAPTER XII. MYSTERIES 184 CHAPTER XIII. FURTHER DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS 191 (vii) CHAPTER I. NEED OF THE REACTION. As I sit writing this morning there lies be- fore me the smiling scene of a Californian fertile valley with the famous Lick Observ- atory crowning Mount Hamilton on the ridge of the Sierras beyond. And the thought has come to me that if some wild and loosened flood burst suddenly over that valley, its devastating waters and the wreck they should leave behind would fittingly il- lustrate without much exaggeration the des- olating infidelity that over a hundred years ago broke over more than one country which used to pass as believing in the "argument for things that do not appear." Up to that men deemed it reasonable to live .in a simple trusting faith and bore more equally the toil and the burden of existence. Since then the air is filled with questionings and doubts, minds are troubled and restless and from the view of many the promise and sustaining (9) IO THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. hope of future and of better things have faded away. But just as there have really been floods in that valley in other days and now its soil is all the richer for their coming, so, perhaps, will the souls of men be better for that other and more disastrous flood when its troubled waters shall have receded. And happily there are in these later years unmistakable signs that they are subsiding. But a little while ago the agnostic scientist, always referred to as u that eminent man of science," was for worldly-minded people the supreme pontiff of all knowledge worth knowing. In pity for a generation whose ''intelligence was limited and whose mind was warped by old superstitions that were said to be revealed because they could not be proved," he undertook to explain the uni- verse on a rational and scientific basis. A tone of superiority and secure self-confidence marked all his pronouncements. His style v?as magisterial. The crowd like that. It is imposing. Here are men, they say, who make you feel they are sure of what they teach; let us listen to them. And they lis- tened. The disciples of science in the mid- NEED OF TH REACTION. Il century were many and credulous. The output of the press proved it. Great books full of the new knowledge went through large editions. Popular science lectures were established in all the great centers. The men of agnostic science went on tour. They had crowded and enthusiastic audi- ences. Their novel theories and specula- tions became the fashion of the hour in uni- versities, in drawing-rooms, and in working- men's unions. Not to be able to talk Dar- win and the Origin of Species was to uninformed. Not to have at least qipp^cl into the hard and ponderous meditation^' of Herbert Spencer was to be incompletely e cated. Not to fall into praise of the classic diction of Tyndall not to be an admirer of the bolder and more downright style of his twin-star, Mr. Huxley, and not to know at least the drift of their daring and sure views, was to be a very old-fashioned person and much "behind the times." Not to be tinged a little with the crabbed, sour scorn of Thomas Carlyle and gloat over the savage anger of the omniscient judgments he char- tered himself to pass on all mankind, was to be unadvanced. Not to be tolerant of Mr. \1 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Leslie Stephen in his open denial and even flouting of the Divinity, or his brother one of the judges of England's High Court of Justice in his restless theological doubt- ings, was to be illiberal. To speak disap- provingly of the mental gymnastics of James Anthony Froude in his curious pilgrimage from Anglican monasticism to the free shrine of modern unbelief was to under- value true freedom of mind. Such was the feeling which to a very large ex- tent prevailed in England and the English- speaking world not so long ago. There have been signs, too, that similar motions of the scientific spirit had taken place in most European countries. Reviews of for- eign publications in Germany, France, Rus- sia, Sweden, Belgium and even Holland and Switzerland, made it clear that this eman- cipation of human thought from the tram- mels of the supernatural was triumphantly proclaimed far and near. In fact from the year 1850 to the end of the next quarter of our century the agnostic scientists had a fair and free field. They had the reading multi- tude at their feet. Men would listen now to no other instructors and great things were NEED OF THE REACTION. 13 vaguely hoped to come from the invigorat- ing freedom of universal speculation. All beliefs and traditions that hitherto prevailed were to be put aside and an entirely new di- rection was to be given to thought and an entirely different sort of knowledge to be acquired. It appeared that this could not be done without throwing discredit and obloquy on the older order, and very bold words were now said out loud which formerly were sup- pressed for fear of Coventry. "Oh, the free- dom and the freshness of it," said one young man, who afterwards became quite famous, w r hen he read for the first time that blasphem- ing enigma called Sartor Resartus.* No patient hearing could be gained for the literati of the old and orthodox side in all that time. Many were chary of criticising the new theories lest they should be set down as opposed to learning and progress. And that was a terrible label to attach to one's self. A few prominent Catholic writers entered the list, but as a Frenchman finely says of them, it was only to carry on a coquetterie re'g- lee with the scientists of skepticism. For, *See Mr. Huxley's obituary on Tyndall in * 'Nineteenth Century." February, 1894. 14 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. while guarding their orthodoxy by referring the ultimate cause of all things to the action of an omnipotent Creator, they freely em- braced the theory of evolution, i. e. the de- velopment by gradual progress of everything and every one from germs. With the best intention no doubt they made a sweeping sacrifice of the literal sense of Genesis and wrenched somewhat violently the text of the story that men so long deemed sacred, as a concession^ to those who were openly ignoring God and denying all divine and supernatural action in the origin and growth of the world and its denizens. Now, evolution is not of that demonstra- ble certainty which does not leave us yet free to reject it if we choose, and while giving all due credit to men of great ability like Mr. Mirart and Mr. W. S. Lilly, we may be per- mitted to question whether all their ingen- ious pains to set up an orthodox evolution have been repaid by any good result. They certainly made very little impression on the agnostics, and their fellow-believers are not much more enlightened, while not a few may have suffered from a disturbance of views to no useful purpose. NEED OF THE REACTION. 15 There was one instance, however, of an eminent lay-writer whose steps were not so mincing in the lists. In a controversy with the biggest man among the agnostics, in fact the very inventor of that peculiar name, ag- nostic, Mr. Gladstone held the old-fashioned langauge of an uncompromising Christian. He spoke of "Our Lord" and "miracles" and "Satan" and "divine teaching" as a matter of course without the least show of human re- spect before those mighty men of science. was edifying to believers to see this veteran of political strife make at his great age so brave a stand for the supernatural, and though he may have 'failed to convince his individual antagonist, his sincerity extorted from Mr. Huxley a handsome compliment at the close of the argument, for he applied to the great statesman the words invented by Shakespeare for Cleopatra "Age can not wither him, Nor custom stale his infinite variety.''* But the day was coming when a voice of protest was to be raised, not from among the believers but from the ranks of the friends * See the "Nineteenth Century, ' 'Gladstone-Huxley Controversy on the miracle of the swine. 16 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. and sympathizers with science. These men of beliefless science were to be arraigned and at length asked to show where was the benefit to their fellow-men from their theo- ries so loudly and confidently proclaimed. They were to be summoned to point out what reliable comfort they had built up or were going to build up to take the place of the ancient beliefs that had been a protect- ing shelter to men for ages long. The public mind was more or less pre- pared for this turn of events. People had been awed but had now grown a bit wearied of the solemn, tiresome omniscience of these men and so were in a mood to enjoy the re- volt in their camp. That pontiff of agnosticism Prof. Hux- ley shortly before his death (for alas! even so mighty a dictator in letters is not immune from the common lot of mortals) composed a general preface for the final reissue of his works. In this he gives the public a bit of his early mental history in his characteristic style. He says that in the beginning of his scientific career he found stretching across his path and barring the way the old tradi- tions of revelation. They were regarded as NEED OF THE REACTION. IJ sacred and impassable. They were too high to climb, he tells us, and to crawl under them he would not condescend he disliked mud. In this dilemma he bethought him of a third way to surmount the barrier. He would hew his way through, hack and de- molish it! This he proceeded to do and, to his great relief, found it to be only lath and plaster and cardboard mere rubbish! Hav- ing thus rid himself of the Bible and all its tales, he marched unimpeded along his scientific pathway with what practical result time and his friends are begining to show. However, he was not summoned from that happy pathway he had cleared for himself before he was to witness, by an unpleasant irony, other and just as manly hands as his beginning to hack and hew the barrier of scientific theories which he and his col- leagues were at such pains to erect across the pathway lighted by faith. However, the protest which is beginning to be heard and which is quite a notable feature in the history of contemporary secu- lar thought, is not directed, it need scarce be said, against scientists of that patient and unassuming class who do no hacking and 2 1 8 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. hewing of sacred things. There are those who confine their scientific researches solely to the material benefit of their fellow-men. Their laborious clays have been given to smooth the rough places of life and make the human lot more bearable through the ex- ceeding convenience of their ingenious in- ventions and marvelous discoveries. But they never cast disturbing trouble into the souls of men nor sow disquieting doubts in human minds. Such scientists are greatly and deservedly honored. Watts, Steven- son, Thompson (Lord Kelvin), Nasmyth, Edison, Pasteur, Quatrefages, Virchow, these are the men, leaders of a large and use- ful class, who are justly regarded as benefac- tors of their kind. Any one of these is of more real worth to his fellows than all the monarchs or statesmen or great captains who spent their days amid the dire tragedies of human slaughter which fill so largely the history of the race. There are few among living men who would not rather be an Edi- son than an Alexander or Napoleon, a Bis- marck or a Moltke. It is not against scientists such as these that either complaint can be made or reac- NEED OF THE REACTION. IQ tion take place. The challenge that is now beginning to be delivered concerns only that class of scientists biologists and naturalists who have pushed their work, otherwise use- ful perhaps and lawful, beyond its legitimate limits and assuming a dictatorship over con- temporary thought, arrogantly demand the surrender of all previous beliefs in favor of their scientific researches proposing these as the sole and only rational source of hu- man knowledge. Such a summons issued in a tone of as- sured authority, has considerably disturbed a multitude of minds without adding any- thing to their happiness and nothing what- ever to the hopes that men will ever refuse to relinguish. The chief disturbers of the world's mental peace in our time have been Hegel, Schleier- macher, Strauss, Hartmann, Vacherot, Taine, Renan, Darwin, Tyndall, Spencer and Huxley a formidable phalanx. To these, on the literary side, must be added the numerous theorists of the "social question 5 ' who ignore the supernatural in everything that touches the human condi- tion. Such are Karl Marks, Kropotkine, 20 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. John Morley, Carlyle, Hugo, Elisee Reclus, Henry George, Louis Blanc, Leslie Stephen and the usual host of their imitators in the public press. As may be supposed the religious leaders and teachers have not been silent on the side of belief. But such apologists are scarcely regarded at all by those other men. They are set aside and superiorly despised. Pro- tests merely professional are not to be taken seriously. They are Ciceronian pleadings pro domo sud. In self-protection such pro- tests have to be made a mere matter of course that everybody expects and nobody minds. Interested witnesses were out of court in this important discussion and so forth. The words of professional religious teachers gave no alarm whatever to these agnostic scien- tists. They treated them as something to be amused at or as a subject for their raillery and lofty scorn. However, it was entirely another matter and much more serious when murmurs of misgiving and protests began to be heard from the men behind them, from those whom they fully believed to be sympathisers and supporters from men who lived far from the camp of the clericals. NEED OF THE REACTION. 21 Some few years ago vague hints began to be heard, like stray shots, as to the unsatis- fying results of the scientific conclusions as the panacea for our mortal woes. A patient hearing had hitherto been given to the agnos- tic scientists, and men had been waiting in confident expectation for their announce- ments. The magisterial tone of these emi- nent men of science had inspired nay, im- posed that confidence. In old times kings "touched for the evil." In our time democracy having exploded the divine in kings and most other things it was science was to touch for the evils of humanity. But now that its magic hand had been for some time stretched forth to heal, it is not apparent that the evils of poor humanity are growing any lighter or less. In fact never before have they been so pressed upon the public attention or louder plaints uttered by the masses as in our day. Science it seems has been "touching" in vain. In all its boasted pharmacopoea there is no potent drug for humanity's ills. And so men naturally began to ask of the scientists, "What practical good has come to the world from the years of your laborious researches is a mere negative result all we are to get for our patient -waiting?" CHAPTER II. SIGNS OF THE REACTION. The first formulated and indeed formid- able complaint came from a French acade- mician, M. Ferdinand Brunctiere. This was a startling surprise to the agnostic school and caused a great sensation. He was not only a man of recognized eminence in the literary world, but he always passed for a leader among Parisian Hires penseurs. He published in the Review of which he is the Directeur-gerant an article treating of what he very roundly and boldly called "the suc- cessive bankruptcies of science." This article marks the date of the aggres- sive reaction against the scientists of which we now see the rising tide. Re'nan in his usual tone of tranquil confi- dence had announced that "religious beliefs will slowly disappear from the world, mined by primary instruction and by the predomi- nance of science over literature and educa- tion." Prof. Huxley wrote: "If the scientific ( 22 ) SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 23 method working in the domain of history, philology and archeology has become so formidable to the dogmatic theologian, what may not be said of the scientific method working in the domain of physical science?" To them M. Brunctiere makes answer not only in the article alluded to but in others with which he followed it up in 1895 and 1896, that religious belief far from disappear- ing or being extinguished by the "scientific method" is becoming recognized as the only basis of solution for the problem of man's social condition. In his interesting and able review of Mr. A. Balfour's book "The Foun- dations of Belief" he says: "What is now dis- cussed is the question whether physically or physiologically the necessity of belief like the necessity of knowledge must enter, in some part, into the very definition of man ; whether historically, social evolution is conceivable without the supernatural which has ever been mingled with it as a guide and explanation; whether morally it was ever possible to form- ulate a rule of conduct for men which did not draw its sanction from the absolute." He thus honestly forces on the attention of his scientific friends the fact that when men 2\ THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. wish to analyze and account for humanity, from what point soever it may be looked at the "scientific method" is felt to be insuffi- cient and that it is the religious method (to borrow their word) must be relied on. M. Brunctiere ranges himself on this side and freely admits that it is as foolish as it is futile to banish the supernatural from the discus- sion of the grave problems of life. He is es- pecially strong on the impotence of reason as the only guide and sole source of knowledge and just as feeble as reason, science, its hand- maid, has also proved to be. Science, he asserts, has no answer to give to the various social problems which occupy present-day thought so prominently; on that account men are beginning to turn aside from it dis- appointed and dissatisfied, to seek an answer somewhere else. Science has been weighed in the balance of practical knowledge and found wanting. This in substance is the conclusion of M. Brunctiere, and thus he bears witness that a real reaction has set in against science as pur- sued by unbelievers. This writer is a power in the French world of letters. Unless his place were among the foremost writers of SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 25 France he would not be a member of her famous Academy. It is easy then to imag- ine the dismay of his fellow-agnostics at such an avowal on his part. Some of them called it the "great betrayal." It was not that. It was only the honest admission of his own return to sound sense in which he showed a great courage in support of con- victions unpopular with his friends. It is a striking sign of the times. But in the world of English letters there is another sign just as striking. At the time that M. Brunctiere was confessing his failure of faith in the "scientific method/' another mind not less trained and brilliant than his was engaged on the same line of thought in England. Not long after the Frenchman's declaration of the "successive bankruptcies of science" in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Mr. Balfours thoughtful book "The Foundations of Belief fell as a surprise on the world of London. It created a profound sensation. That so busy a man as the Leader of the Commons could find time for the lengthy and deep meditations of which this book is the evidence and expression, was astonishing enough. But that one whom high questions 26 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. of State are supposed to absorb and whom the little spiritualizing pursuit of politics chainsto utterly worldly things, should be dis- covered devoting a large share of attention to the supernatural and the eternal questions, was a shock to the worldly-minded and a scandal to "advanced" thinkers of every hue. What gave special cause for uneasiness was the great literary power and charm displayed in the book. It would scarce be possible to treat in a finer and less fatiguing vein those grave questions which other writers of ability too often envelop in metaphysical and unre- freshing obscurity. There is great variety in it, there is novelty of view and originality. There is an easy and confidential tone- though lady-readers, if it find any, may resent the bit on bonnets as decidedly rash for so confirmed a bachelor as Mr. Balfour. But you will remark besides a grave earnestness in it, which makes you feel that the author was under the stress of the liberare animam meam. The whole drift of the book is manifestly a reaction against science of the dogmatizing kind. It is a plea for faith and a convincing - call to reinstate the supernatural in its own SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 27 place as a source of certitude and knowledge. Twenty years ago the author probably would not have had the courage to publish it, and if he had, he would just as probably have got no hearing on the subject. His first book bore the less open title oi" Philosophic Doubt" But the present one a manifest invitation to believe was the fashion of the day and the book of the season. This may be owing in some measure to the high place attained by the writer in the world of politics, but it is owing just as much to the fact that men's minds \vere prepared for it and were feeling a want they find there in part supplied. It shows that thousands of others are thinking the same thoughts that Mr. Balfour has so ably and so interestingly put into words. It is important to note that a demand was at once made for a French translation of this book and as a coincidence it is interesting to learn that M. Brunctiere was asked to write its French preface. This shows how instinct- ively and quickly was recognized the identity of view of these two distinguished men on the grave step of a return to religious thought men who probably had never seen each other, lived in different countries and had nothing 28 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. in common save their previous free-thinking tendencies. This is surely striking evidence of a reaction. In my book "Disunion and Reunion" I in- curred no little criticism and even ridicule for the statement that Scotch people would yet wield an influence over English thought in the direction of the old faith. Mr. Balfour is a Scotchman! Last year a M. Jules Payot, another of the French libres-penseurs, in a book called "De la Croyance" enters his protest also against the short-comings of science. Among other severe things he says: "My science does not hinder my ignorance of realities from being absolute; science has a symbolic language and an admirable system of signs, but the more it progresses the farther it gets from the reality of things and plunges into abstrac- tions." Mr. Benjamin Kidcl in his book, "Social Evolution" which has attained a wide and just popularity, also strongly express the same feeling of disappointment with the sci- entific method and its exiguous results. This book of Mr. Kidd's also enjoys the compli- ment of a French translation. This transla- SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 2Q tion was made last year by M. Le Monnier and published by the firm of Guillaumin of Paris. This would seem to indicate a de- mand in France just now for a literature widely different from that of the old school of irreligious scoffers and incredulous phil- osophers. There is scarcely any Review in Europe or for that matter in all the world, which com- mands a greater influence among the literary public than the Paris Revue des Deux Mondes. So many of its contributors have from time to time been elected to the high honor of membership in the Academic Francaise, that it has aptly been called the vestibule of that famous Olympia. Under the rule of its founder Mr. Buloz, it was unfortunately the happy hunting-ground of the most aggressive anti-religionists. It was through its pages M. Renan first found an audience, and for a long time it remained merely the organ for agnostic free-thought. But of late it has come to its readers as a surprise to notice how r it has been steadily veering round to the or- thodox compass-point of religious thought. Time was when this Review would not have published the following story of Count 30 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Cavour's end even though written by the Count Benedetti: "In a lucid hour of his last illness Cavour sent for his servant 'Martin/ said he, 'we must part. Send in time for Padre Jacobo, the parish priest of the Ma- donna dei Angeli; he promised to assist me in my last hour.' This priest was sent for and spent a half an hour, hearing his confes- sion. This he (Count Cavour) afterwards told to his friend Farini: 'My niece/ he said, 'has brought Father Jacobo to see me, for you know I must prepare for the great step into eternity. I have made my confession, later on I shall receive communion. I want all to know, especially I want the good people of Turin to know, that I die a Christian.' ' What! Cavour sent for a Catholic priest and asked for the sacraments of the church ? What a scandal to the free-thinkers and his fellow free-masons! Cavour, the noble radi- cal the unrivaled statesman whose power- ful mind swayed the councils of Europe, who was years ahead of his great coeval Bismarck in statecraft the untiring worker for Italia Unita the intriguer with the Carbonari and that plebeian bandit Garibaldi the sworn foe of the Pope and the beloved of all devout SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 31 Protestants he sending for a priest and dy- ing an avowed Catholic this should not have been made known, it is such a bad ex- ample to the atheistically enlightened! Yet it is in the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes for October of last year (1896) that this piece of history is given, vouched for by the distinguished Ambassador who knew him well. In the same pages too has appeared far the best appreciation of the life and work of the late Cardinal Manning from the pen of a Protestant gentleman, M. Francis de Pres- sense. When his able and sympathetic articles were published afterwards as a book it w r as "crowned" by the French Academy. Last year also in this Review a writer of great and versatile talent, with the liquid Bo- hemian name of Wyzewa, is permitted to give a remarkable criticism of that stupendous work (in eight hundred and sixty-five parts) of the artist M. Tissot. The opening words of his critique are so much to the purpose of this chapter that I may be pardoned for quoting them at some length in translation: "Every- "one has heard of that beautiful and good "princess who after long years of perfect 32 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. . "wedded bliss was brought back by her hus- "band and left in the wild woods where he "first found her. Her only fault truly a "rare one was that she was too good and "too beautiful at least so says the story. "But I fancy that born as she was in a wood "and knowing nothing but love, many little "rustic traits helped to detach from her the "princely husband's affections. Perchance "he bethought him that she once tended "sheep and was of rather low birth, or per- "haps as he grew older he acquired new tastes "and fresh desires, her natural disapproval of "which he could ill brook. All we know is "that he treated her most shamefully; but "hardly had he again consigned her to her "native woods than he was seen to run about "the world in the most light-hearted manner "looking for a more amiable princess and one "worthier of being the wife of a prince like "him, than the poor, discarded first love. "He soon discovered, however, that the "princess he had put away was the best of "them all; for none of those he subsequently "encountered could bestow upon him the "happiness he sought. So after saying to "himself twentv times over no doubt SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 33 "through pride or maybe weakness that "he never, never would recall her from exile, "still finding that he could neither live nor "die without her, he one fine day set out to "look for her again. The v legend adds that "it was even a great happiness to him to "have succeeded in finding her and though "she would have preferred his return "grounded on more tender reasons, such as "deep regret for his treatment of her and not "merely because he felt the want of her, she "nevertheless, touched by his misery, forgot "and forgave. This is the only "point where "this naive story falls short in perfect like- "ness to another story that is just now pass- "ing under our eyes. There is not one of the "adventures of this prince that we can not "compare to our own adventures since we "banished from our heart the old Christian "faith some fifty years ago that had been for "so many centuries our trusted and faithful "companion. ... It had seemed to us "too childish, we grew tired of it, it interfered "too much with our inclinations and we too "went about the world in search of a new "worship. Our hearts grew young in the "free air and not a phantom rose before our 3 34 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. "view but we decked it with all the graces. "First we adored science. This is what Re- "nan recommended us to do in exchange for "the faith he took from us. He set against "the 'unclean and puerile ideal/ he pro- fessed to find in Christianity 'the superior "sanctity of the scientific ideal.' Science "alone, he said, was pure. But after forcing "ourselves to love the substitute, it was far "from giving us the moral support we used "to get from Christianity. In fact we found "it refused us everything, even the smallest "grain of solid truth. Then, after how many "other specters did we run and found them "but phantoms that melted at our touch! "Like the prince in the story we were now "left alone, but just as little as he, were we "able to bear our solitude. For doing or "for dreaming for living or dying we must "have a faith. This is why some of us have "taken courage and have begun to deplore "aloud the loss of the old faith." A more earnest testimony than this to the present- day reaction it would be hard indeed to find. The popular reception given to M. Tissot's SIGNS OF THE REACTION. .35 marvelous artistic work in Paris, of which M. Wyzewa writes with such sympathy in the article from which the foregoing is taken, is another very striking sign of this reaction. This great artist has devoted ten years of his life to the accomplishment of this one work, no other than the painted story of the life of Christ. He went out to Palestine, as he himself tells us, with the Gos- pels in his hand and there studied on the spot all the places \vhere that divine life was lived. The result of his work was exhibited at the Salon of the Champ-de-Mars in 1894. It forms a series of no less than eight hun- dred and sixty-five different studies. It needed the courage of a great and sin- cere mind thus to set once more before the eyes of the most frivolous population in the world the entire life of our Saviour. It was also a strange venture at this late date to handle again a subject exhausted by the la- bors of so many others. Had it not been, treated a thousand times from every aspect and had not the worldly-minded long since turned weariedly away from it? Nothing could possibly be thought of less inviting to the mundane Parisians, Yet he never fal- 36 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. tered and to leave no mistake about his ob- ject he appended to each painted scene an explanatory note of his own, which confessed his faith and evidenced the reverent spirit which prompted his work. His success was beyond all expectation. Seldom has such a reception been given to any artistic work in our time. For three months immense crowds invaded the galleries in the Champ- de-Mars. Surprise, respect, unstinted ad- miration were the tribute paid to this su- preme effort of Christian genius, and an eminent art-critic, not by any means of a pious turn himself, has declared that it was impossible for any one who came there to leave without feeling the better for having come and seen. This splendid work seems like an inspiration. It was completed about the time that Ernest Renan lay dying in Paris. He was the Arch-Arian of the nine- teenth century. His cynical impudence in speaking of our Lord was never surpassed. He called him "that delicious young man from Galilee" and in another place "that de- lightful charlatan"! His treatment of the sacred life had destroyed all idea of Christ's divinity in thousands of minds. And now SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 37 almost at the door of his dying chamber a reviving elixir was being administered to the faith he so powerfully strove to kill. On the same lines though in a different way the distinguished Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoi has also been helping on the re- action. That a layman of wealth, high posi- tion, and scholarly attainments should oc- cupy himself in a serious and reverent spirit in editing a version of the Gospels at this late hour of our era is very disconcerting to the Huxleyan minds that have so long la- bored to discredit them. His book which bears the title simply of "The Gospels" was published in 1894 and in the following year was translated into French. In the introduction he declares at once the motive of his \vriting, "for me," he says, "there is nothing at all so important as this light which for eighteen hundred years has illuminated mankind." He excuses him- self from all discussion as to the personality and history of Christ and he adds "it is enough for me that His doctrine is the only one that gives meaning to my life." 38 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. It is also a significant fact that in a very recent number of a secular American maga- zine the Viscount Melchoir de Vogue, a brilliant member of the French Academy, should announce to the public of the United States that in his opinion the greatest of liv- ing men is the present Pope. And this is not an obiter dictum, it is the thesis of the article and in proof of this rather bold asser- tion he alleges that the Pope as "an enlight- ened guide in the supernatural unto his fellow-men has been of more practical use to them and has afforded them more valuable help than any of his contemporaries." As a psychological puzzle I am tempted to mention here a somewhat strange coinci- dence. While M. de Vogue was engaged on this serious and evidently sincere piece of work, which is also characterized by all the thoroughness of his great ability, he was at the same time in another quarter publishing a French story of a lubricious kind. This story bears the title of "Jean d' Agreve" and treats of a strange phase of illicit love. It may perhaps be pleaded in excuse that the utter loathing created by the vivid picture drawn of his hero as a worthless, egotistic, SIGNS OF THE REACTION. 39 self-pampered, uncleanly and sensual pagan coxcomb, and by the no less repulsive picture of the heroine, as an utterly sensual married woman, a mere animal in her sensuality, can not but influence people in favor of the higher and purer life but he does not say so. That is a risky way to inculcate virtue. CHAPTER III. WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. I think it is clear from the foregoing that the reaction against the scientists of the anti- supernatural and anti-religious class has commenced and most likely will continue. It will be helpful to that end and not with- out interest to many readers to explain why people are dissatisfied with the researches of the agnostic scientists. The reason is short and intelligible their conclusions bring no comfort and are of no vise to any human mind in answering the questions that are always present to men whence have I come, why am I here, and what is to become of me? For instance: The last question personally and vitally affects everybody. There is no more cer- tain fact than that we shall not be very long in existence here. What is going to happen then? Every individual human being wants to know something definite about that. The (40) WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 4! universal fact of death makes it so personally interesting to each and every one. Well, when the "scientific method" and its conclu- sions are eagerly scrutinized for information on this point of such intense interest, people are amazed to find, after all the brave parade made of them in these recent years, that they are dumb on this vital question. The ut- most the honester scientists say is We d0 not know. Some less scrupulous say There is nothing to follow or to happen. But that is not honest for they give no proof not the shadow of a proof of their assertion. The former, indeed, advise every one not to trouble about it to let themselves go with the great tide of human life into the void the unknown. There is nothing to fear, no cause for alarm. Now the great mass of men never have believed and never will be- lieve that. It is no wonder their disappoint- ment is great. An apt pupil of the ' 'scien- tific method" in her "Story of an African Farm" declares rather helplessly that "the tears of the mourners and the mud of the grave cement the power of the priests!" rather halting logic in our friend. One would think it was the priests invented death. 42 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. They, poor men, have got to face the muddy grave as well as other people and are quite as much interested as to what is to become of them as everybody else, but they are not at all likely to be so daring or reckless as to lend themselves to deceptions about a matter that involves their own outlook and well- being in common with all others. This is a specimen of prejudice-raising which begets that daring attitude in some, but which hap- pily does not satisfy the multitude. But though the "scientific method" has nothing to tell about the mysterious future after death, it has a great deal to say about our origin. On this ground science is much more at home and very confident. For, unlike the future, the past at all events is real and ex- plorable and science claims it as its own pe- culiar province for research. For the last forty years lakes of ink and reams of paper have been expended on reports by the scien- tist of their independent search across the ages for the first vital spark. To prosecute their researches quite unshackled by any pre- WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 43 conceived notions they abolished and wiped out all previous maps and charts which used to serve humanity as a guide over the distant and difficult country of its past. These maps and charts they declared to be utterly useless and misleading and \vere accountable for all the myths and superstitions about the origin or mankind which had so long degraded the human mind. They would undertake this exploration anew with common sense and en- lightened reason aided by the modern scien- tific method as sole guides. They would tramp every inch of that ground to its ut- most limits for themselves, taking nothing from hearsay or tradition. They would strip it of all its mysteries and bogeys and bring back but the plain, simple answers that hon- est nature had to give. So they began, and ever since they have led the world a length- ening and weary walk through the domain of time. At first the way was pleasant and interest- ing enough. It lay through the zoological department of the earth. Here as long as the study was confined to comparative anat- omy the bone-structure of the various ani- mal families, their similarities and dissimilar- 44 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. ities, it was curious and not uninteresting. Years of patient skill and labor were de- voted to this. To most people the motive of this minute curiosity about the formation of the animal world would have been to ad- mire the skill of the original designer of those marvelous structures (in which man had nothing whatever to do), and be lost in won- der at the resources of his great power. But the scientists never stopped to call attention to that. Their object was to find out what man really was and how he came to be. After more years of patient and minute study of animal structure a deliberate and definite pronouncement was at length made on the subject. Everybody now knows what this pronouncement was and with what min- gled feelings it was received by the world when first put forth by Mr. Darwin. As the result of his long studies he declared that man was not always as he is, that he did not enjoy, as was hitherto supposed, a distinct and different creation from the animals, that he passed through other forms before he attained his present shape, and in a pro- cess which he called by the now famous word evolution, man was shown to have "de- WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 45 scendecT from brute animals. He even spec- ified the immediate ancestor from which, as far as his studies then warranted him to say, he was gradually evolved in the animal world. Many think Mr. Darwin made a fatal mistake in thus particularizing, for it was then the world laughed irreverently and theories that move to laughter lose all their dignity. Though he clothed his announce- ment in grave words of learned sound namely, that our dear ancestor was quadru- manous, "arborial in his habits" and probably (a concession as he was now to speak more plainly), "furnished with a tail;" the facetious world caught the meaning at once "oh, we are descended from monkeys et solvuntur risu! That was a severe check to the new biological science and a poor reward for such long and arduous labors. But Mr. Darwin was quite serious and he abated nothing in his arguments and his as- sertions. His co-workers and followers stood by him and proclaimed his discovery a triumph. But their investigations were not going to end with our "quadrumanous" friend who was given to climbing trees and "probably furnished with a tail," 46 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Arrived at this stage of man's existence the free investigators were only now, so to speak, securely on the scent. They had yet to ar- rive at the more elementary conditions of his earthly life. So, for many more years, they wandered back through the wastes of time. They searched the rocks for fossils. They explored the caves and traveled the bed of the sea for specimens of life. They waded through swamps and quagmires and fished for tadpoles and mud-fish. Then at last came the announcement that the utmost limit of primal living forms had been reached. There in the "cells" of those minutest creat- ures lay the "fons et origo" of all terrestrial life. They named it protoplastic matter. From the mud-fish through varied forms came all animals; and just the same as the rest, from the mud-fish, through the ape, came mankind! Not long since Mr. Dar- win's fellow-scientists and pupils erected a statue to his memory in his native town of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England presum- ably in gratitude for his elevating discovery as to their descent. "Hey! a mad world my masters." Since Darwin's time further investigations WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 47 have been made about this protoplastic mat- ter. The scientists did not wish the world to suppose that they knew nothing of its na- ture. They brought chemistry to bear on it. They took it into the laboratory, set out their crucibles, retorts, solvents and stills and worked out an analysis of this subtle sub- stance result: four gases, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon! By evolution there- fore man as we know him "the thing to be demonstrated" of the scientists was at one time a monkey, sometime previously proto- plasm, and prior to that, four gases! But the ordinary common sense of men will not be satisfied with these results. They do not account for man. They say nothing of his chief attributes. How is he, a thinking be- ing, of great intelligence, capable of self- reflection, self-guidance and self-government? The agnostic scientists will not admit that anything came to him from outside as an en- dowment or the act of another being, their sole reason for not doing so being the questionably logical one that they have found no evidence of any creative act or cre- ating being. A negative reason like this does not satisfy as long as they are unable 48 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. to supply a positive one and assign a definite cause for a visible, palpable, undeniable fact, namely, intelligent life. It will not do to merely inform mankind that aboriginally they were four gases. They inevitably want to know how the four gases came to think, to reflect, to make thought rule action and account to themselves for their sensations. So for the practical minded all those re- searches of the scientists into the origin of man and the sources of life are entirely un- satisfying. They have failed to indicate any intelligible or adequate cause for compos- ite human life, such as we all know it to be. They are dumb before the universally inter- esting question which will never cease to be asked, Whence are we? One of the most influential of those scien- tists the man who gave the name agnostic to the sect (by no means new), not long be- fore his death, made the bold and what seemed to him the consoling statement that "Christianity was driven to its last ditch.'' With gratitude the Christian may thank the man for teaching him that word. That ques- tion is a final and a fatal ditch for "science." Further efforts, indeed, have been made to WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 49 scramble out of it. Some relied on the theory of spontaneous generation and elab- orate experiments were patiently made to sustain it. But the leading scientists hon- estly admitted that it was not sustainable and, as is well known, is now totally aban- doned by the scientific. This conception of life or the living principle producing itself in- volves a mystery as great as any in the reve- lation which those scientists affect to discard. Yet it was an unconscious adaptation of the eternal begetting of the Word in the God- head described by St. John. But to transfer what can happen in the eternal and necessary being to the contingent and transitory is not in the rules of logic. Others have since made a wilder and bolder plunge .to get out of the difficulty. The appearance of initial life on this planet they say is easily explained by the fact that the earth in its course through space encoun- ters a lot of cosmic dust which adheres to it and thus, mingled with this dust, living germs of protoplastic thinking matter found a home on our globe. But this ingenious theory is as little final as the others, for where or when in cosmic space did this living 4 5O THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. protoplasm get its life and how came it to be endowed with the wonderful potentialities of which the mental and physical faculties cf men and women are the development? That will not do. Thus the labors of unaided science have failed to give us any light on the question which so personally interests every living human being Whence are we? There is another question just as pressing and more important to men on which the in- dependent scientists, according to their en- gagement, are bound to satisfy them Why are we here at all? Their investigation of this question the purpose of human life has not resulted in anything pleasanter and more encouraging for us than their dissertations on our origin. In Mr. Darwin's books the "Descent of Man' and "The Origin of Species" as well as in the writings of those who follow and in- dorse him, all we learn is that mankind has been cast into the melee of this world to fight ! to struggle for his very existence and in that struggle to prove his fitness to live by "surviving." WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 51 I do not think it exaggeration to say that this is absolutely all that can be learned from those bulky volumes on the vital question Why are men here at all? When you come to extract from those books any practical or serviceable meaning or conclusions the only wonderful thing left you to admire is that men could write so much and say so little. But when the conclusion is arrived at it is only vexation of spirit. Of what use or com- fort is it to humanity to be told that there is a compelling and invariable law of struggle in animated nature in which the weak must always go down before the strong the ill- suited yield to the "fittest." For whose par- ticular amusement this rather savage game was invented or to what use the survivors were to put their "survival" these writers do not seem to have any sort of care. Why, a prize-ring has more meaning than the theater of human life in their view. Not to seem entirely barren, however, in their specula- tions, those ignorers of a divine purpose ap- ply evolution to man in his "survived" stage. He is not by any means done with evolution after merely surviving. That is a slow, ma- jestic if despotic process which is never more 52 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. to let go its grip. Formed into society as a survived species, man must go on evoluting, constantly tending to a state of greater per- fectability and so ad infinitum. That may be all very well for the individuals of the race who may reach that end, but what about those who have passed off the scene, those who are passing now and who will daily pass off through "death's cruel gate'' before tasting the delights of this vague perfectabil- ity of the scientists. Truly a vexation of spirit. And that is all they have to say. And if asked whether the deeds done in the days of his surviving have any bearing per- sonally and as an individual on man's condi- tion after he dies or what is to become of him then they say, "Oh, we are agnostics; you must not ask us anything about these myste- rious things; we do not know, for science has told us we can not know anything about {hem. Science has not discovered any intel- ligent Creator nor any meaning in life be- yond a struggle for existence, never came across such a thing as a soul, nor discovered any trace of any other existence or world for man but this." This is the last word of science, so turn down the lights, the lecture WHAT PROVOKED THE PROTEST. 53 is over and the audience is left groping and bumping against each other in the dark. These unsatisfying results of agnostic science have provoked the protest of which we saw the clear indications in the preceding chapter, and most people \vill allow that it was time, for the credit of common sense, to protest. CHAPTER IV. AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. The frequent failure of the "scientific method" applied to the conditions of life is another reason for the reaction. The scien- tific method, of course makes a tabula rasa of all previous religious traditions. Religion, that is, a knowledge of supernatural things and their relation to us, science has declared unproven and therefore to be set aside and not taken into account in the problems of man's conduct and existence. When men, then, in our time, came to think on account of the great inequality of fortune and increase of want, that society should be reconstructed or at least read- justed many schemes were proposed for this end. Most of them proceeded on agnos- tic lines, that is, were purely materialist and secular and omitted all calculation on man's spiritual nature, its demands, its defects and its aspirations. A fair type of these propos- als is to be found in Mr. Bellamy's book, (54) AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 55 "Looking Backward." He did well to lay the scene of it in the year 2000 when none of his readers will be there to enjoy the delightful happiness of his reconstructed so- ciety. However, we have the advantage of having witnessed some experiments in this reconstruction so brilliantly depicted on paper. It will be interesting and conclusive to give the story of a few of them. In 1894, in the city of Brisbane, Queen land, a lame printer named Lane assumed mission to his fellow-trademen and laborers, inviting their co-operation for a new social scheme. He had long been known as a la- bor organizer and a leader in the unions. But nearly all the strikes he had engaged in and helped on so actively had ended badly in the long run for the workers. This led him to think it was impossible to improve the social condition of the working- man while surrounded by the class prejudices and the adverse influences of the wealthy in society as at present constituted. Suppose they could be moved away from those sur- roundings and, putting oceans between them and those irritating, stupid class-divisions, and given a chance to found society anew on the 56 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. lines laid down by the clever theorists he had long studied and admired, there was no rea- son why they should not succeed. It was a poor compliment to the Queens- land government whose legislation in favor of the workingman had for some time been notorious and by some people deemed far too socialist and radical. But it failed to satisfy the aspirations of Mr. Lane and his friends. He drew up an outline of his proj- ect and addressed it not only to the working- men of Queensland but also to the working- men of all the Australian colonies. As many as could contribute a little to a common fund necessary to start them (I think it was 60), were invited to come away to Paraguay in South America and found a New Australia. Nor was this a step in the dark, for Lane had been in communication with Paraguayan au- thorities who, anxious for immigration and too poor to pay for it like its richer neigh- bors of the Argentina, welcomed his propos- als and offered grants of land in the interior. This was a great inducement, but a greater was the perfect freedom they were to enjoy. No clergyman or preacher of any kind was to be allowed to join. They were to have no AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 57 church or profess any religion. No lawyers were to come they should have no courts nor police. Community of interests and as much as possible community of goods was to secure agreement and exclusion of all class distinction, guarantee good fellowship and happiness. Well-ordered industry without the slavery and stigma of labor would in- sure prosperity without the unnecessary abundance which had bred the luxury and idleness so corrupting and baneful to the older society. Hundreds of applications poured in. The money was freely deposited. Lane chartered a large sailing vessel and had her laden (in Sydney harbor) with provisions and imple- ments requisite for pioneering. So numer- ous had been the applications that all could not be accommodated on the first voyage. A selection of about 300 was made, and in due time with a great flourish from the labor world and an ovation from the unemployed in which Sydney seems always to abound, they set sail for their New Australia beyond the wide Pacific. It is a weary way round the Horn to the La Plata, and from the banks of that famous 58 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. river to the site of the New Australia it is a long trek, as they say in Africa. So those of us who felt an interest in watching the re- sult of this extraordinary modern socialist experiment had to possess our souls in pa- tience wnen the good ship was lost to view. It was undoubtedly a remarkable event in our times and full of interest for every one who gave a thought to the great social prob- lem. Those men had gone out to teach the world a realistic lesson in building up the proper kind of human society. They would put to a practical test the favorite paper so- cial theories that of late had got such wide circulation. The world had reason to feel obliged to them. A valuable wisdom was to be learned from the result. Nearly a year went by before we had any tidings. Lane's first report of things was fa- vorable enough. All had arrived in safety. The Paraguayan Government had been as good as its word and besides had been very helpful. There was just a hint that great dif- ficulties had to be overcome, there were many things which could not be foreseen nor provided for beforehand. Still it was too soon to be either too sanguine or discour- AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 59 aged. Meanwhile he recommended that the applicants who could not be accommo- dated on the first trip should now be for- warded with fresh supplies and promised that the newcomers should find everything in good shape and should not have to con- tend with the discomforts of first settlement. (By the way, the lands of one of the old Jesuit missions once so famous and flourish- ing had been assigned them.) On this re- port two hundred more, if I rightly remem- ber, set out on the second expedition. They were not very long gone when a rumor from another source reached the Sydney press that things were not going smoothly in Lane's Utopia, with a caution to other intending emigrants to await further developments. This caused some uneasi- ness, and the news of the arrival of the vessel in the Plata was anxiously looked for. It came. At Monte Video the new emigrants were surprised to find some members of the first expedition waiting for them. No, they had not come to greet them and show them the way they were waiting for a chance to get back! Alas! poor humanity; it was the old story disagreements, disputes, jeal- 60 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. ousies, schism. The thing was not working, they said, and was not going to work. Lane was a dictator. They fancied they had come out to be rid of that kind of thing, but they were deceived, and so on. Having come so far and the complainants being comparatively few, the second batch continued on " their way to see for them- selves. There was silence again for another inter- val on the subject in Sydney. Then more rumors found their way into the papers from time to time. Now it was an interview with a returned New Australian, again it was a defense from Lane and explanations from his friends, then recriminations until people did not know what to think. After a while came a consular report that distress was prevailing among the immigrants; that many had found their way to the coast, were destitute among a people whose language was not theirs and were begging- passages home in English ships! Last scene in this eventful history: A member of the New South Wales Parliament unfolded to the House so dismal a story of the plight these New Australians found AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 6 1 themselves in, so far away in a foreign land, that a motion for their relief was generously carried and measures were sanctioned to fa- cilitate their return home. So ended this scheme to reconstruct society on the scien-* tific method of ignoring all knowledge of man's first beginning or last end. The pro- moters forgot one all-important matter, that, whoever would reconstruct society, where it needs reconstruction, should first reconstruct human nature. And science has nothing to say about that. The second case is still more instructive, for this second attempt at solving the social trouble was backed by all the resources of well-ordered government and legislative au- thority. It had none of the drawbacks of emigration nor the heart-breaks of distant exile. It was carried out comfortably at home. There is no place in the world where sec- ular socialism, that is, a socialism without any reference to God, man's relation to his will or laws, conscience or any supernatural con- sideration whatsoever, has had so fair a field or so much in its favor as in the Australasian Colonies. Universal suffrage, which, in one 62 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. of them at least, includes women, has given the making of the laws into the hands of the so-called common people, because in a new country the common people are for a long time in the immense majority. The policy of the governors sent from England is, as far as I have seen, not to interfere with any do- . mestic legislative arrangements the colonists see fit to make. This legislation, notably in Queensland, South Australia and New Zea- land, is inspired by all the modern secularist social doctrines. Equalization of wealth, leveling class distinctions, expropriation of large landholders, the land for the people, resumption by government of public convey- ance, telegraphic and telephonic service (an immense source of patronage) public funds to be advanced to the people for private enter- prise, chiefly agricultural however, easy mar- riage laws and facilities for divorce, free, secular, and compulsory education, perfect independence in voting, no privilege on ac- count of class or calling, accorded by the State such is the programme. Surely never before had "the people'' such a chance to re- alize their dreams of prosperity and social happiness. Let us see how much of that they AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 63 have attained. Ten years ought to yield re- sults enough to judge by, and that is about the time the Legislatures have been cleared of the old conservative, exclusive and aristocratic control. I shall take the Colony with which I am best acquainted New Zealand. In 1896 there were more prisoners in the immense jails of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin than in 1886. The prison for long penal sentences in the south was full, accommodating from eight to nine hundred convicts. The four large asylums for the in- sane were overcrowded in 1896, the smallest accommodating one thousand patients. In 1894, the most dangerous and damaging labor strikes brought trade almost to a stand- still and caused much privation and suffer- ing. These few facts speak for themselves. Popular legislation, so far, left humanity pretty much as it found it, perhaps a trifle worse. Yet "labor members" were numer- ous in the legislative Assembly; into the Council or Upper House were introduced four journeymen, a boiler-maker, a printer, a com- positor and a joiner, while among the Min- isters, the real rulers of the country, were an ex-pedler and ex-miner and "pub" proprietor 64 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. (these two became Prime Ministers) and ex- grocer and a telegraph clerk! Their greatest experiment in social equal- ity and an approach to orderly communism was the founding of Village Settlements. This scheme originated in New Zealand and was adopted later in some of the Australian Col- onies. It was a plain attempt to give reality to Mr. Bellamy's prophetic visions and there- fore interesting to follow its fortunes. The chief features of the scheme were these : Associations were to be formed consisting of not less than twenty persons. To each member of the association the government would allot sixty-four acres of land and a money loan of fifty pounds to be repaid at five pounds a year for ten years. Five pounds an acre should be spent each year on improvements. Every association was to be directed by a board of three trustees elected by the villagers from their own body. No member should have any private or sep- arate interest in the land save the possession and use of that portion allotted to him by the Trustees. The rules of living and work were very mi- AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 65 nute. They provided for the kind of mem- bers to be admitted. Women were eligible. Asiatics were not. No member was to be admitted without the sanction of the board. The board had power to expel members for disobedience to rule or absence from work without leave. An ap- peal lay from the board's decisions to the body of the members who decided by vote a bare majority sufficing. The board resumed pos- session of the rights of the expelled and even of the deceased, reallotting the property for the benefit of the community. The board was elected for one year and was eligible for re-election. The board's powers were very ex- tensive. They were what Fourier, that patri- arch of Socialism in France three-quarters of a century ago, imagined they ought to be. Probably the promoters of that Parliamen- tary Bill at the antipodes had made acquaint- ance with the views of that fertile dreamer. The board was charged with the responsi- bility of the villagers to the government. They regulated the work to be performed, assigned to each one his task and prescribed the hours. The board managed the cooper- ative stores and fixed the payment-in-kind 5 66 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. to be made to each family money currency was to be dispensed with. The functions of mayor, corporation and magistrate were discharged by the board and they were be- sides constituted inspectors of domestic ar- rangements and guardians of the general wel- fare in fact such a Pooh-Bah was never seen as this board of the Village Settlement. As regards the earnings it was arranged that two-thirds were to be distributed as divi- dends, the other third reserved for interest and improvements. Any one incapacitated from work without fault w r ould continue to participate to the full share in results. The villagers w^ere to show deference and respect to the members of the board. Resi- dence was compulsory. All absences should be duly authorized, save a half-month's holi- day in the year, which was a right. No buy- ing or selling was to be permitted in the set- tlement without the knowledge and sanction of the board. If the board ordered the prof- its made by any individual whether within or without the association to be paid into the common fund, it should be done. All tools and implements were to be looked on as the property of the community. All were to AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 67 consider themselves as possessing only the use of the land and not proprietors or farmers in the old sense. Every Friday dockets or coupons were to be distributed to each fam- ily entitling the bearer to supplies of all kinds at the stores. Finally, the legal dissolution of the association could be declared by the ''general assembly" of all the members but not before the State was safe-guarded in all its outlay and all debts paid. Such were the Village Settlements "in New Zealand and other Antipodean regions praiseworthy effort no doubt to advance the well-being of the people. It is sad to relate they have all been dismal failures, and the reason is not far to seek. It would be very blamable to make it a reproach to the promoters who now wield the political power, that they once were ped- lers, publicans or petty clerks. But it is a reproach to these men that they gave the bad example to the people they professed to serve of discarding all religion from their own lives and excluding all consideration of its restrain- ing influences over men, from their manage- ment of public affairs. A late workingman Prime Minister in New Zealand, was once 68 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. notorious as a lecturer on the atheistic plat- form and when he came to die cut off in his prime the whole country knew that to the end he was true to his principles and false to his God. He was buried with civil rites. In those days when that two-handed fallacy and most fallacious of shibboleths liberty of conscience is bandied about, it may be said that no one should find fault with a man's opinions or professions. But in the ordinances of God and in the matter of obedience to His will who can honestly pretend there is liberty of "conscience" or conduct for any- body? And if men assume that there is no God to be taken into account nor any rules laid down I5y Him for human conduct the logic of facts quickly refutes their assump- tion. The failure of agnostic Socialist schemes such as the Colonial Village Settle- ments demonstrates that unless men feel themselves answerable to a higher and greater power than their fellow-men and amenable to a Judge whose reprimand and award reach far beyond this life, they never will be capable of the self-sacrifice, self- restraint and self-denial absolutely necessary for living or laboring together with any ap- proach to peace and concord. AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 69 So after but a few years of trial most of those Village Settlements have broken up. Quarrels and bickerings, in some cases ac- companied by assault and violence, were re- ported from all sides until the governments are pretty sick of their experiments. In South Australia towards the end 1895 it became necessary to institute a parliamentary inquiry into the state of those Village Settle- ments. Thirteen such associations had been there established but two years before. The evidence given before the committee was de- plorable and conclusive. The settlers were found to have fallen into debt all round, to the government, to merchants, to the banks. The board charged settlers with idleness and incapacity, the settlers charged the Board with despotism. In some of the villages with not more than two hundred or three hundred inhabitants, distinct parties had already been formed as inveterate in opposition as any Tory to Whig or Radical to Liberal-Unionist. Alas! poor humanity. Another strange fea- ture appeared. Nearly all the settlers before they entered the association were ardent dis- ciples of the lecturers under the "red flag" and readers of the abounding communistic 70 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. press. The Village Settlement was the beau ideal of these theorists the practical real- ity of their doctrines. A short trial brought a rude undeceiving. One man was heard to declare that for years he had been an advocate of "the land for the people"- but now he preferred to believe in "the land for Tom O'Grady" without "the people." Another had been eager to live where every one was to be a brother and sister, but now he thought it more peaceable to be a friend- less orphan, and so on. They all agreed that somehow the thing would not work nor was it ever likely to work in the way laid down for them. I have dwelt on these somewhat dry details but not without a purpose, because I mean to show presently how in contrast to the sci- entific method these same conditions of com- mon life are actually being fulfilled under our very eyes, if we would only use them to see, and have been successfully fulfilled for cen- turies under the religious method and by force of the supernatural motive. But before entering upon that and as it is a matter of present public interest I wish here AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 71 to notice the still broader and bolder experi- ment in the "land question" which these same socialist and agnostic legislators of the An- tipodes have entered upon. In 1894 the New Zealand ministry began a trial of that Land Nationalization scheme advocated by Mr. Henry George, of which the world has heard so much talk of late. They passed a "perpetual lease" bill by which land in New Zealand shall henceforth be held by tenant-occupiers only, the State possessing the fee-simple and becoming the grand landlord of all the country by de- grees. The "limitation of holdings" was another important measure. It provided that for the future no one person shall acquire more than four hundred acres of purely agricultural land, or more than eight hundred acres of land part agricultural, part pastoral, or more than two thousand acres of purely pastoral land. This measure is a step, nay, a stride, towards the equal partition of the land among the people and aimed at the "squatter" or large station-owning class. The last election, 1896, was looked on as the most important ever held in New Zealand, because during 72 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. this term of office immense tracts of Crown lands will fall into the hands of the govern- ment formerly leased under "squatter" as- cendency at the merest nominal rent to large pastoralists in addition to what they had al- ready purchased, at a cheap figure also. It was therefore of immense interest to the large station-owners that they should have a voice in deciding whether those old leases should be renewed or not, while it was perfectly well known that if the promoters of the new land laws the party then in power got in again those leases would most certainly not be re- newed. It may be imagined how eagerly both sides prepared for the fight. It was the last great effort of the Conservative party which for some time has been in a hopeless minority. Like the Tories in England who fell back on the rump of the dissident Liberals and became Liberal-Unionists in order to re- main in power, the Conservatives were ready to ally themselves with any old party that would give them a chance of a majority. They adopted the platform of the liquor Pro- hibitionists with somewhat wry faces it may be supposed. They also gained some strength from those, and they were many, AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 73 whose confidence was shaken by some recent financial blundering of the popular party's ministry. But to no avail. Last November they were defeated at the polls and those im- portant expiring leases are at the mercy of the land nationalizes. But it was not alone for renewed leases the large land-holders were fighting, it was for their very existence, for there was yet another land measure passed by the Popular party which affected them most seriously. It was the "progressive land tax" bill, which provides that taxes will go on in- creasing heavier and heavier on every thou- sand acres of pastoral land above the pre- scribed number. -It is another way of ex- propriating the big land-owners. Coming- together with the large outlay necessitated by -the rabbit-pest it has made large station owning a losing and ruinous occupation. Some proprietors have already sold out to the government, the only available customer, and all would be willing to do so and leave the country if they could. Thus the work- ingman's government will be ultimately free to parcel out the land among the working- men. The outcome of this very courageous legislation can not of course be fully foreseen, 74 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. for it is only the next generation will be wit- ness of final results. But one experiment al- ready made by the government with an estate purchased from dissatisfied owners does. not augur fair things for their further ventures in the future. It is now widely rumored that the government has not found the State farmers of this Cheviot Estate any less troublesome, more honest or happier than the village settlers. The truth is those new legislative reformers of humanity are at- tempting the impossible task of promoting the contentment and happiness of men with- out improving that human nature from which all their miseries spring. The genius of the "scientific method/' which entirely ig- nores the cultivation and correction of that human nature, is deluding these obstinate but well-meaning politicians of agnostic so- cialism. A whole generation has now issued from the free and secular . schools founded also by them. And what result can be looked for from pupils who never once within their walls had heard inculcated the only ef- fective principle of moral restraint and self- control nor ever heard mentioned the name or existence of the supreme Arbiter of hu- AGNOSTIC SOCIALISM. 75 man conduct? In some schools indeed such things have been mentioned only however to be sneered at by atheist teachers, of whom there are a very large number in these State schools. The evidences accumulating from every side of perverse and vicious conduct demonstrate the utter inability of those - purely secular experiments in Socialism to meet the aspirations of humanity for a more tolerable mundane existence. No wonder people are beginning to clamor for some more successful solution. It will be well worth while then in the next chapter to show that this very socialism and communism so much advocated in these latter days and so often abortively attempted by some men, are not only not impossible and unattainable but have for centuries been re- alized and actually exist with the happiest re- sults in the world of to-day. CHAPTER V. INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. I have before my mind a body of men in the world at this present moment numbering roughly some twelve thousand associates. They are drawn in most part from the poorer classes. They are strangers to each other in the sense that they come not from the same place or even from the same country they are of many nations. There is no distinc- tion of rank or class among them save what good order requires. The places of author- ity are filled by election and, in the minor trusts, by appointment. All whether in au- thority or not are equal before the general regulations or rule of life. They possess property, places of abode and means of sub- sistence, but everything is in common. No individual possesses anything in his own right, yet all have the use of what is owned. They may inherit from relatives and others as individuals, but such inheritance may be used only for some good purpose and by permis- (76) INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 77 sion. They can however will it back to whom they please outside their own body. They work, not as they please, but only as work is assigned them. The main employ- ment is of one kind, they teach mostly the poor. They teach too those who can pay, to be able to teach more of the poor who can not. They also instruct the ignorant of the adult working classes. After that they do all their own domestic work. Beyond the mar- keting and cooking and cleaning up, that is very little, each one in his private life being his own servant. They are ready however at all times for any deed of neighborly benevo- lence that may lie at their hands to do. They have joined the ambulances in time of war. They have their own times for relaxation and moderate enjoyment, but the pleasures which the world pursues with so much zest and cost concern them not. They are never permitted to be unoccupied. Their day is of seventeen hours and minutely regulated. Their night is of seven hours from 9 P. M. to 4 A. M. or 10 P. M_ to 5 A. M. in some climates. They are^lovers of the soft life. They live to- gether in groups and call each other "brothers." They are interchangeable from 78 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. group to group and though they are scattered widely through the world all follow one and the same rule and obey one voice. At stated times they hold general assemblies, each house electing a representative delegate. They have thus existed for over two hundred years. They join young, live long, and die in the ranks. They renew the dead by ever increasing volunteers. In sickness and old age they receive a constant and tender care. They must needs like this life and must deem it happiest and best for them to abide in it so long. This is a living and wonderful fact for all men to see. I have in view again a body of women in the world to-day numbering some fourteen thousand. They differ from the men, just alluded to, in that they are drawn from all classes of society, from families of wealth and title down to the daughters of the poor. They differ too in that their works have a range as wide as human wants. They tend leper hospitals or smallpox patients or yel- low fever cases. They teach fashionable academies or instruct little duskv natives un- INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 79 der the tropics. They go under fire on the battle-field to aid the wounded or into the slums of towns to dress the sores of the uncleanly sick and charm away by soothing words the sullen despair of the suffering poor. They give lessons in painting, lec- tures on physical science or preside at an or- gan. They cook like professional chefs, wash the pans and kettles, launder and scrub the house. They train the workman's child to lace-making and embroidery, short-hand, and typewriting, or take charge of a lunatic asylum or a female prison. They have open homes for the friendless young of their sex, and shelters with a sister's welcome for the fallen and unfortunate, fourteen thousand of them, busy ever at all these w r orks all over the world! And all that work they do for nothing. There is no personal gain they get no money for it individually. There is no rank or division of class among them. The countess and the peasant work side by side. They wear the same costume the same plain and rather coarse garb. You can scarce tell who is who, for all are trained to gentle manners, and when they want to spend a few pennies they often laugh 8o THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. together to find they have not got them. Though they have gone apart from their own kin to live with strangers they have homes in common wherever they go and they call each other "sister" which they truly are to each other in will and deed. They rise at 4 o'clock at all seasons and in every climate, and there is scarcely a climate where they are not found, and they retire at 9 P. M. Through their long day they agree to be busy, . always busy. They agree to be cheerful too to help others through sorrow. Their government or plan of man- agement is very simple but very perfect. They are all subject to one head and that is a man. He is called the director. But he is not absolute or despotic. There are others to whom he is responsible, and he guides only by long-established and fully accepted rule. There is ample and full pro- tection for the weakest and youngest among them. Brave and wonderful little army! Death claims them as other mortals but their ranks never seem to thin. Human hearts beat beneath their blue serge robe women's hearts with all her tenderness and yearnings but disciplined. They, too, have their INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 8 1 general assemblies now and again and then it is wonderful to hear them tell the blended story of their world-wide experience, for the great human drama has been unfolded before them in the by-ways of life the fierce pas- sions at play, the hopes, the fears, the griefs, and joys of the human struggle they have witnessed it all and borne part in the action. Among themselves they are republican in simplicity and equality, and if one is given charge, as must needs be, she is obliged to call herself the servant to obviate distressing airs and keep her humble. For women are prone, perhaps more so than men, to men's great weakness, which Shakespeare so finely censures "Man, proud man, Clothed in a little brief authority, Doth play such tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep, ' ' or laugh perhaps would be better. They are guarded against that and are not per- mitted to distress each other or either amuse or grieve the angels. They choose never to call anything their own they say our shoes, and if things get mixed in the washing they do not mind, provided they fit they 6 82 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. put them on. They sit at the same table and eat the same food, what one has all have. What could be more perfect commun- ism than this? Have you ever heard of socialism more complete ? Nor is this a state of things they are merely experi- menting on. Their association came into existence about the time that London was burning and was made desolate by its great plague. And for these two centuries and more without dispute or quarrel this same life has been lived by multitudes of those weak and gentle women. They must have found it good to live so. The stage of ex- periment is over long ago, and at this hour there are some fourteen thousand who live so still and make no noise about it either. Again I have before me yet another body who have gone apart from their kindred to live a similar life in their own fashion. It is a body of men. I have lately seen it stated that at the present moment they number about fifteen thousand. They differ from the former bodies in that they are drawn from the aristocracy of talent. Except a INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 83 minority of lay-associates who do the lower order of w r ork but who yet enjoy to the full equality of membership and share in the common life, all the rest are gentlemen highly educated and accomplished. This element is admittedly the hardest to deal with in the matter of socialism, for "knowl- edge puffeth up" as a wise writer said long ago and nothing puffs up like it. Yet three hundred and forty years have gone by since they first came together and without any friction from within they have succeeded in merging self in the common number and have lived in true fraternity, equality and that liberty they like best. No matter how much the body gains in w r ealth or acquires in property it does not make any individual among them one doit or dime the richer. No member wants or cares to own anything, not even the coat or hat he may be wearing, and were he asked to take them off and let another have them, he would do so and re- ceive others though inferior. There are no parties among them nor any private enter- prise or interest to be pursued. All yield themselves voluntarily to the strictest disci- pline and each receives his orders what to do 84 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. or where to go, even to the most distant place, without* a murmur. They have com- mon homes and a common table and like the others only seven hours' rest. Their employ- ments are very varied but their main work is secondary and higher grade teaching next to having knowledge is the pleasure of im- parting it, and the years are long that they devote to its acquisition. However there is this peculiarity to their body. After the general and thorough training, to which all are submitted, has been completed, then great latitude is allowed to individual bents and tastes. One man has a taste for oratory well, an orator let him be and give him all the time that the drudgery and toil of ora- tory requires. Another man likes astronomy they build him an observatory and stock it with instru- ments. They have three very famous ob- servatories at present, at Rome, Manilla, and Havana. They will let their man go in charge of government astronomical expedi- tions. One died at the Cape in such employ- ment not long ago. Another man has a talent for writing let him w r rite by all means and have every facil- INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 85 ity for publication. Or they found a monthly magazine and let him edit it. Another loves teaching they find him "a chair" and make him a life-long professor. Another thinks he can manage the strange peoples of distant countries they send him to China, Korea, and Japan. Another has a tact for civilizing savages they plant him among the very worst speci- mens to be found in Northwest Australia and Borneo. Another has the social gift and will carry weight in society they give him a good coat arid let him dine out. Another has a turn for the physical sci- ences they build him a laboratory, supply him with chemicals and a microscope, and let him correspond with "learned societies." Thus the widest room is given to individ- uality, yet from one governing hand go out the threads of the wide network that holds all in the unity of the common life. When- ever and from wheresoever they are called back, they come. Wherever sent, they go. In declining years or strength they have a welcome home and a brother's care. When they die they make no will, they have noth- 86 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. ing to leave even their old clothes are not theirs. Did Marx or Blanc or Fourier or Bellamy or George or Wm Morris ever formulate a more complete socialism or com- munism than that? The schemes that these men have sketched for us remain mostly on paper. When tried they break down. But this body is a living reality, an achievement, a success! Why is this? The answer is very simple. Those writers confine their view solely to this life, but the men and women I have described, work both for this life and the next or rather work through this life with a view to that they believe eternal. The self-restraint and the curbing of all self-seeking necessary that men should live together in peace while pursuing a common end find no motive strong enough to sustain them in the mere temporal Advantage of a little more security or temporal happiness to be attained. This is a matter of fact. It has been proved by the failure of the trials essayed over and over again. The socialist Village Settlements in the Australian Colonies just described are a notorious and very recent example. It is well known that in other places groups of INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 87 people wearied by the aimless frivolity of what is called society and pained by the seemingly unjust inequalities of life, now and again, have gone apart to try the experi- ment of the common life on purely secular lines. The New England Brook Farm com- munity (disciples of Fourierism and Mar- garet Fuller) were the wonder and the talk of the world for a brief season and ended in the pitying smiles of many. The biography of the late Lawrence Oli- phant supplies another and very inter- esting instance, though the story is sad enough. Readers of his works can not fail to recognize his brilliant gifts of mind and to admire the grace and fluency of a style that entitles him to a high place among the writ- ers of our century. Readers of his biog- raphy will w r onder that a man like him born to good social position, attaining by his tal- ents high rank in the diplomatic service of his country, eagerly bid for and largely paid as a journalist, should have abandoned a career of such brilliant promise and, in un- rest of soul, sought the happier way of a higher and unworldly life. But to relin- quish wealth and high position, to brave 88 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. public opinion, to bear the pitying comments of friends, above all to lead his young and accomplished life-partner into his venture, displays at least the courage of sincerity. It all reads like some far-off old religious ro- mance rather than a true story of real life from our worldliest of centuries. But the strangest and saddest part is the singular choice he made of a guide to -that hard and mystic way. This was a certain American, an ardent preacher of the higher life and the better way. It is almost unaccountable how a man of Oliphant's in- telligence and worldly experience should have fallen so easily under the influence of that person, who, as the sequel showed, was more of an adventurer, if not a mountebank, than a spiritual enthusiast. Yet so it was, even to the extent of utter self-abandonment. He and his young wife accompanied him to America and having made over to him all their money and even their personal effects, were put to work by him on his communistic farm. His despotism over them went the length not only of imposing the rudest and most drudging toil upon those refined peo- ple but of separating them and forbidding INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 89 them even to speak to each other. But their fortitude soon gave way and they came out of this painful and humiliating experience shattered in health and fortune and survived it only a very few years. On the other hand, the thousands of peo- ple, banded together under similar condi- tions, in the three associations I have de- scribed, succeed and persevere unto the end, happy in their undertaking. That description is no fancy sketch. These associations are living facts visible before the world and have names. The first is an Order of French origin known as the Brothers of the Christian Schools, commonly called in English "The Christian Brothers." The second, also of French foundation, is the congregation of the "Filles de la Charite" the famous Sisters of Charity those with the great, white, wing-like bonnets supposed to be adopted from the Picardy or Norman peasant head-dress of the seventeenth cen- tury. And the third is the celebrated Order whose members write the formidable S. J. after their names Societas Jesu Jesuits. One of the moral \vonders of the world is the Noviciate of the Sisters of Charity in the 90 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Rue du Bac touching on the wicked Latin quarter the seminaire as they call it, semi- narium, in spiritual botany the nursery, where the seeds of piety in every variety are planted under cover, and its tender shoots sprout in warm shelter from passion's storms. If you are respectable and get yourself authenti- cated you can have a peep. Under an old portico in that rather dingy street you enter one of the largest private properties in the heart of Paris. When I saw the Novices it was on a procession clay. They numbered then between five and six hundred. It was a wonderful sight. The bloom of youth was on them all and beauty's bloom on many the usual slender proportion of it as in any crowd of the sex. They were dressed all alike half cap, half old-fashioned bonnet a fijg.chu and plain black gown like decent, cleanly, French country girls. They were of many nationalities of all ranks. The neighboring, aristocratic Faubourg St. Ger- main was even represented. It was delightful to hear that immense chorus of young voices in the hymns. What a holocaust to heaven in those young lives. They were here prepar- ing, in innocence and purity of life, for the INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 9! great renouncement. Out from that train- ing cot would go those carrier-doves of the Divine Compassion to minister to all human- ity's miseries. For two hundred years they have been going into every clime, across many seas. They are going still, if indeed they have not been evicted by those noble persecutors of all that is good, messieurs the municipal councillors of Paris. A little farther dow r n on the same "Rive Ganche" near the "Invalides" you may see a similar, if not quite as pic- turesque a sight in the Noviciate of the Freres des Ecoles. It is certain they have been disturbed, drafted into the com- mon barrack-room to serve their military term by the votes of those "emanci- pators of the race" the Republican deputies of modern France. There were not enough soldiers without disturbing those devoted in- structors of the poor! Will any one solve the mystery why so many men and women are found to hate, storm, and rage against everything that is really pure and good? If any one doubts there is a devil let him ponder that fact. Left and right of that river Seine there is heaped up as much hu- 92 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. man defiance of God and depravity as could well cumber any given equal space of this earth's surtace. Wedged in between les extremes se toucti&nt" you have those par- terres of virtue's finest flower to stay the sus- pended sword of the Divine Avenger. The Noviciates of the Great Society S. J. are everywhere. There is one for each of its twenty or so of Provings. But these three orders by no means ex- haust the list of those who seek their happi- ness and welfare in the common life even at the present day. I selected them as types. They are not even as old as some others which still exist. One has been thirteen cen- turies in existence. Millions of men have passed through its ranks in that time and hundreds of thousands of women through those of the female branch, dwelling in per- fect communism and purest socialism. This is the famous Order of the Benedictines. The Cistercians and Carthusians date from a thousand years back. The Friars Minor, the Friars Preachers and women's Orders of Carmelites, Franciscans and Poor Clares, six hundred or seven hundred years. Far from decreasing since the times of the INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 93 so-called Reformers of the sixteenth century these associations of pious communism have had so prolific a growth that the Council of the Vatican had it on its programme to de- vise a scheme for their limitation and the amalgamation at least of those whose founda- tion \vas only of comparatively recent date. And they all succeed ! It is surely worth the while of our agnostic socialists to in- quire into the secret of that success. If they are sincere it ought to be of the highest in- terest to them to know that a socialism and a communism in the best meaning of those words, well regulated and successfully con- ducted, do exist and are actually practised at this very hour and have existed so for cen- turies. This they may see if they but use their eyes, and may moreover learn the se- cret of this amazing fact. For the men and women who have gone apart to tread the peaceful happy way of self-renouncement have enrolled themselves in no secret socie- ties. The conditions of their lives are per- fectly well known. Their friends and rela- tives, from whom they are by no means sev- ered either in converse or affection, know perfectly how they live, why they so live and 94 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. are quite at ease as to their conduct and wel- fare arid their sanity. There is a certain class of people who do not weigh this latter fact sufficiently when they officiously display their fears and anxiety about conventual life. It should make them feel they are meddling in a business which is the immediate concern of those friends and relatives to attend to, and who do attend to it and are perfectly sat- isfied that it is all well with those who are near and dear to them. This fact is also a crush- ing refutation of the many coarse and gratu- itous assertions on this subject that rest as a blur and blot on many a page of English lit- erature for the last three hundred years. Our agnostic theorists and unsuccessful ex- perimentalists in the common life will find that those other men and women have lived it and died in it because above and beyond this theater of human passions, weaknesses and contentions they lifted eyes of faith and held in vie\v as their goal the life that ends not and knows no strife. And they may rest assured if they will only read the lesson of facts, that all other communism and socialism not founded in a faith like that are simply impossible. There is no proof so convincing as experience. INSTANCES OF REAL SOCIALISM. 95 And if there is one experience more invari- able in this world than another it is that mo- tives of faith have here succeeded where bare human efforts have always failed. In traveling the highways of the world I have been surprised to find how many of our brethren separated in the various sects ' are strangely uninformed and misinformed about the great religious Orders actually existing in the Catholic Church. Whenever I at- tempted to describe them they listened with either an air of incredulity or as if the tale were of some long-past romance. As for the many people who "believe in nothing" I might as well have talked to them of the plan- etary beings of Mars or Neptune so little did they suspect that there were fellow-men around them leading such wondrous lives. For such as these this chapter will not be amiss. "But surely you do not expect all the world to become Jesuits and nuns to im- prove their social condition?" By no means, but what I do assert is that every experiment in socialism that is not founded, in a modi- fied degree of course, on the supernatural motives that inspire these great Orders is sure to end in disruption and confusion. Without religion it could not endure. CHAPTER VI. QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCI- ENCE. If the scientists who ignore revelation have presented us with only a very uninviting and somewhat slimy account of our origin and are entirely mute before the question of what is to become of us, let us see if they can sat- isfy or reconcile us to the state of things we have to endure in our intermediate passage between our cradle and our grave. The human life transitory gift of each one of us, brief and sure to end that is the problem of the highest interest to men. Few there are who fail to feel how trying and puzzling are its varying moods and varied fortunes. "Moving accidents," there are, "by flood and field" perils, seeming in- justices, fearful cruelties, unfair inequalities, pain, sorrow, suffering, race antagonisms, human slaughter by human hands until the earth is soaked in blood and human history (96) QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 97 grows red as we read. Men want to know Why should these things be? In another aspect this planet of ours looks like a huge penal settlement adrift upon the sky. While all men are born to work of some kind, nine-tenths of them are con- demned to hard labor for life. The lot of the majority is a rough one and their condi- tion is prolonged poverty, while everywhere absolute pauperism is more or less to be found. Suffering and sorrow with impartial hand knock at every door. There is no house be it ever so grand or ever so wretched that has not or has not had its secret sorrow and its chamber of sickness, pain, and death. Why has it been so ordered and who has ordered it so? Surely it was not man. Each one's gift of life is a troublesome thing. It demands constant thought and care. Any relenting or neglect means star- vation, dirt, suffering, and disease. Each minute part of the bodily organization must be ministered to and some of its functions are most humiliating. What is it in our nature that makes some things painfully and shamefully repugnant to us with no choice but submission to them? Life is threatened 7 98 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. with fearful dangers. Think of the storms that rage, the hurricanes, tornadoes, the choking, blinding blizzards of winter, the sun-stroke of the summer-time, earthquakes, tidal waves (thirty-five thousand people de- stroyed in Japan the other day), of the anni- hilating lightning. When "the sea gives up its dead" that went down in doomed ships, what a host it will be! When the graves of earth shall yawn how many shriveled corpses will bear the scars of violent ends! Think of the fierce beasts and poison- bearing reptiles that lurk upon the earth where the sun shines hottest the prowling tiger that carries off between his powerful jaws living, agonizing Indian villagers to de- vour them at leisure in his lair, and the other "tiger of the sea" that bites through bones and flesh at a single snap the deaf adder of the sugar plantations, whose swift sting paral- yzes from head to foot with electric speed the sword-fish that pierces a body and lashes it to death upon the waves the stinging sea slug that benumbs the swimmer, and, strang- est beast of all, the man-eating man the can- nibal of the Pacific seas! Think of the wasting, desolating plagues QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 99 and epidemics, cholera, yellow fever, bubonic plague. Men did not invent such things surely and while they are laying their vic- tims low in agony, no hand from outside is interposed to check their cruel course. Perhaps the saddest feature of this world, and fraught with ever-threatening danger, are the inter-racial hatreds and aversions. Three hundred millions of Chinese call us "foreign devils" and "barbarians," and we call them in equally complimentary contempt "chinkies" and "chows." Two hundred and odd mil- lions of Mahomedans curse us for "Chris- tian dogs" and W T C call them "unspeakable Turks," and though their creed is "death to the Christians," of which they often give startling illustrations as recently in Armenia, yet when they ask for loans of money we have witnessed the strange paradox of Christians pouring millions of gold into their treasury oh no, not for charity or peace-offerings but for greed of the high interest offered, and the wily Turk pats those fat bags of money and says, "Ha, this will keep those Christian dogs from biting they can not now hurt our Moslem nation for fear of losing all this money we have them safe in 'Turkish 100 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. bonds !' ' and so he slays Armenian and Greek and the bonded "powers" stand around looking very foolish. There are, besides, three or four hundred millions of Brahmins and Buddhists as far apart from us and all the rest as if they came from a different Creator. And when those race aversions reach an acute stage, as they do from time to time, and the races come into contact, the spirit of human slaughter broods over men and the earth takes on the appearance of a pandemo- nium where the battles rage. At this hour what we know as Christendom, is one vast military camp. Its component nations, in dread and distrust of each other, are armed with the deadliest weapons yet invented, and fleets of fearful engines of destruction ride the seas. Some men, seized with a just alarm, are agi- tating for peaceful arbitration as a substitute for war. But mankind and human passions, being what they are, they agitate for a Utopia. The godless recklessness which is a product of the ''scientific method" and which is so gen- eral in our times, makes war inevitable and its total abolition but a fond dream. Besides in QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. IOI such a state of society as the present, it is not without its uses. But why should all this be? And why worse even than this is it that as soon as men begin to congregate in towns and cities almqst the first public structure they erect is a jail to protect themselves from violent outbreaks of the vicious inclinations and the unruly behavior of their fellow-citi- zens? Jails are everywhere and always well filled. Depravity and vice haunt the out- skirts of every aggregate of humanity, and men have to tax themselves enormously for protection from their troubling and pervad- ing presence. Besides being a public danger the ruin brought on individuals by moral evil is in evi- dence on every side and the petty, hateful pas- sions that men bring into play against each embitter many a life and mar the peace of so- cial existence. It would be pessimism to say that human life was made up only of this dismal catalogue of woes, and pessimism is false, and because it is false it is also wrong. Much happiness is attainable and attained, and few indeed there are who do not taste at some time the 102 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. gladness of life. But iliere are those ugly facts that press us on every side, real and un- deniable, and there is no reflective mind that does not impatiently ask Why, why should these terrible things be? And what answer have the agnostic scien- tists to give? Practically none they have to notice them of course, but their explanations bear no message of comfort to men, they lead rather to despair. The arch-agnostic Mr. Huxley confessed himself so puzzled by the woes of humanity that he considered the happiest result would be for some "friendly comet to collide with this wretched earth and end up the whole thing in destruction!" Mr. Carlyle is represented by his biog- rapher, Mr. Froude, as going about per- petually moaning and groaning over the "black confusion" of things on which, by the way, his thirty published volumes the re- sult of his much-lauded Golden Silence shed not the smallest light for any one. Mr. Herbert Spencer wraps himself in the clouds of the dark "Unknowable" and can not, of course, pretend to trace to any cause or permissive will what is beyond the dispen- QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. IO3 sation and control of men. The disciples of Mr. Darwin and the legion developers of his evolution theory tell us, as a rule, that all these cruel facts proceed, in blind and powerless obedience, from certain fixed law r s whose end is to aid in the indefinite process of this great evolution. All the facts of life are normal and natural, and under the exigency of law are working toward some final emancipation. Whether this explanation honestly satisfies themselves is their own affair. It is but poor comfort to the actual and antecedent suffer- ers in this "Juggernaut" procession. There is no man who does not feel that his is a per- sonality distinct and separate from every one else all his own. "What is to become of me?" has a most intimate and exclusive inter- est for each individual person independently of every one else, and it is profoundly disap- pointing to be told that this personality, of which I am so intimately conscious, is but an irresponsible factor in the vast process of evolution. An atom of a great aggregate borne upon an irresistible tide whither no one knows. Over and above this dismal spoliation of our personality, no information, as already stated, is given us as to how we 104 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. came to be cast into this whirling evolution, what good it is to do or what benefit is ulti- mately to be derived from it. Thus the "scientific method" has left the world in a very unsatisfactory plight and it is little wonder that confidence in its high promises of emancipating thought, liberating the human mind from superstitions, and ele- vating our intelligence, has weakened consid- erably. But if the teachings of the "scientific method" be cheerless and unsatisfying to the individual, the logical results of its influence on private conduct are disastrous to society. If men believed about themselves what they read in the agnostic science-books and pro- ceeded to act on what they learn from them, the world in the long run would become well- nigh uninhabitable. The First Cause of our being, it is there stated, is not only unknown but unknowable and the final cause just as un- discoverable; it then becomes at once clear to men that they have no final responsibility for their conduct to any one. An unknown au- thority is no restraint on conduct, to a nebulous judge men give no sort of care, and we all know to what human conduct without QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 105 restraint leads. The moment a man pro- fesses the principles of the "scientific method," which unfortunately is too often done in the foolish phrase, "Oh, I have no religion; I do not believe in anything!" you may quite fairly suspect that man in every relation of life. Suspect his honesty. With his principles it would be quite foolish of him not to cheat and. turn everything to his own advantage by fair means or foul when it can be safely done. Suspect him of being hard-hearted, selfish and unfeeling. Why should he not be, if it suits him? He knows no authority over his personal feelings. Suspect him of being vindictive and revengeful. He will pursue relentlessly whoever crosses or injures him. To gain his revenge he will not stick at secret murder. Why should he? If he can be safe from men there is nobody else to fear. Suspect his chastity. There are very few, if any at all, who are not intermittently solic- ited by lustful fancies. Will this agnostic who spurns accountability and writes down divine commands as superstitious lies, hesi- tate at indulgence wherever and however he can, when so inclined? His logic would call 106 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. him a fool if he did. Thus this free-thinking disciple of the "scientific method" uncon- sciously proclaims himself an object of dis- trust to his fellow-men in every dealing and social relation of life, and they in turn would be very foolish not to distrust him. Mutual trust and confidence are absolutely necessary for decent and tolerable society. The ag- nostic principle, if rigidly followed, utterly destroys those pleasant bonds and society ceases to be either tolerable or decent. Moreover the basis of justice on which hu- man laws rest is undermined by the scientific method in its account of human existence. Why should a judge impose a penal sen- tence on one who quotes the agnostic evolu- tionist (whom a great part of the world de- lights to honor) for his assertion that he is under the spell of a natural law impelling him to struggle for existence and that there is no being known to nature who has given pro- hibitory commands or who will bring him to account? He can plead from their text that his impulses are nature's work, not his. Why punish him for them? It is unjust. He is but an irresponsible factor in the gresft evolu- tionary process. When he cheated and stole QUESTIONS UNANSWERED BY SCIENCE. 107 and was revenged and murdered, in the whole story of human life as told him by the evolu- tionists, there is not a shred of evidence to show him guilty of moral wrong or wicked- ness. There have been and are in our days agnostic judges, B ram wells and Stephens, on whom the accused could turn and declare from their own beliefs or want of them, that their laws have no foundation, and their courts, frauds on poor evoluted humanity. The same would apply to domestic rule and parental authority. The children could turn on agnostic parents and demand by what right they corrected or punished them for the peccadillos and unruliness to which all children are prone, but which make family life impossible if unrestrained. The children can appeal to nature and impulse, sacred in the eyes of agnostic parents, and deny that they are in .fault, and no fault therefore no correction why punish a poor evoluted mud-fish? how expect moral rectitude in a lepidosiren or conscience in protoplasm? The "scientific method" cries out against such things. Thus carried to its logical conclusions in practical life, agnostic science would upturn I08 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. human society from its very foundation and convert this earth into a pandemonium. The clear perception of this has shaken the confidence of many minds in this much- praised "method" of dispensing with all in- formation from the supernatural, and they are turning back again to the old ground for a more rational account of themselves, their lives and their destiny. CHAPTER VII. THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. In contrast to the unaided and self-reliant "scientific method" let us recall what the old story, believed for so long a time and by so many to be revealed, tells us about ourselves, It certainly has the merit of presenting a picture of our origin which does not repel or put us to shame. Of recent years that picture has been kept a good deal out of the common view, "skyed" by the men of science. It has moreover been smeared over by much protoplastic mud, so that like a palimpsei manuscript, w r e must do some scraping to get at the original etching which means that it is not easy to induce people nowadays to go over again carefully so familiar a lesson as the Scripture story of the creation. But compared to the dismal tale of the scientists on the same subject it is absolutely pleasant and most flattering to us. In place of mud swamps where "lepido- sirens" swim and slumber, it introduces us to (109) 110 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. a fair garden where golden fruit is on the trees. Cool, clear streams are flowing on the carpet of green through the glades a wondrous variety of animals, tame and gen- tle, peacefully browse, and birds of every hue float and sing in the blue above. There is one form just moulded and still lying upon the earth, but far finer and more perfect in line than any animal. And over that still inanimate form the Great Maker, God, it is said and said, remark, without any explanation or apology of wearying demonstration, just as a matter of course, taken for granted as the great first logical necessity that all right reason demands and postulates God breathes ! That creative and mysterious secret the spiraculum vitae life from the Divine breathing, courses at once through the finely modeled members of that prostrate form it glows and moves, the eyes open and light up the features with intelligence, and then this last and greatest of the Creator's works rises and stands erect the first living man. That is what we infer from the plain reading of Genesis and what men for ages have been satisfied with and proud to believe. But in these later times THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. Ill it seems that this will not do at all. It is too simple, too plain, too nursery-story-like for the trained and powerful modern intellect. Facts, it is alleged, have been brought to light by intelligent research which prove that this was not could not be the way in which we were made. The human mind is surely very perverse in this as in other wel known things. You w r ould suppose that handsomely set-up being like man should be very glad just to find himself so, without in- quiring too minutely how he came to be so gifted a being the first, the superior among all the visible living things on this earth. But no, that position does not suit our mod- erns. They want to sweep away that priv- ileged pre-eminence as a childish fable, not- withstanding the visible evidence all around us, and reduce man to the same common level of origin with the animals, no greater specifically, no better essentially. "Grant," says Mr. Darwin, "a simple archetypal crea- ture like a mud-fish with five senses and some vestige of a mind, and I believe natural selection will account for the production of every vertebrate animal. 7 ' Well, well, I much prefer the other story. 112 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. And that story so long held by so many of our race as a sacred tradition continues with a still more interesting simplicity. Adam, our prototype and first father being thus fashioned, the Great Creator makes over to him and his, with a generous bounty that men forget, as a gift forever, all the other wondrous, works of his creation. He made him lord of creation with dominion over every living thing. In trial of his ownership Adam summons all living things to his pres- ence, and lo, they obey his call! Submis- sively they defile before him and as they pass he names them according to their kind. But, as yet there is a certain loneliness in his state. These animals are fair to see in the grace and freshness of their primal type, but from not one of them all comes back to their new master an answering voice of intelligence no communion on equal terms of soul and mind. The Great Maker, however, does not leave him in that loneliness. He prepares a delightful surprise for him. He throws him into a deep sleep, and as he slept, by some mysterious process of creation, not at all nec- essary for us to know, and which with our present limited intelligence it is impossible for THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. 113 us to understand, he took from Adam's sub- stance, material out of which he builds up another form like to his own, and sets it over against him to look on when awakened. With what delight and wonder must he not have gazed on this new thing of exquisite beauty. He had seen the animals and doubt- less admired their wonderful formation, but what animal of them all showed anything like to that in shapeliness of form and comely grace? Its shape is like his shape, but, oh, more finely, more delicately, more ex- quisitely moulded! It moves and speaks, it comestowards him. Adam peers into those eyes on a level with his own, with joy he beholds a responsive intelligence in their light, and in rapture exclaims, "Now truly is this the flesh of my flesh and the bone of my bone," and he hails the first woman as "Eva the mother of the living." This is how it reads in the old, old story. No mention be- ing made of an "archetypal creature like a mud-fish with five senses and a vestige of a mind," the scientists laugh it to scorn. "I would give absolutely nothing," says Mr. Darwin, "for natural selection if it requires miraculous addition at any one stage of de- 8 114 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. scent." "I hope," said Mr. Tyndall in his Belfast address, "to find in matter the origin of all terrestrial things." To talk of the miraculous at the beginning of things where all is miracle to us, seems shallow if not impertinent. It is irritating to think that puny men, who pass away after a brief life, fancy themselves competent from a mere examination of fossil animal forma- tions to enter the domain of the Creator and infallibly insist that the great mystery of life began in the way they arrange and in no other. In view of the fact that the scientists in many countries nowadays regard the theory of evolution as a scientific truth, some of our writers, it is true, maintain that evolution is perfectly compatible with the story of Gen- esis, as far as the corporal formation of the race is concerned. Very well. If they wish to enter upon that experimental inter- pretation of the sacred Scriptures they are free to do so. The Church does not forbid it, provided they hold by the dogma that God as Creator is back of it all. But let them not forget, in their enthusiasm for scientific research and their complacent ac- THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. 115 ceptance, as scientific truths, of the generali- zations from biological and geological facts, that it is precisely that dogma which their agnostic friends want to have ignored. From their avow T al it is perfectly well known that their object is to dispense with the ne- cessity or even the supposition of a Divine Creator. To our orthodox enthusiasts for evolution this should be a note of warning not to allow themselves to be led too far afield. I know they say there is no danger, we can admit all the postulates of evolution and still assert that they are but the Creator's modus operandi. That they can do this is not at all so clear. If you admit a common protoplastic origin for all living things and a subsequent transitional change from spe- cies to species, how differentiate between ra- tional and non-rational creatures? how ex- plain responsibility and non-responsibility, ac- countability and non-accountability? Where does the rational basis of man's nature come in? At what stage of his evolution was it added on? Was it as he was passing from the mud-fish into the reptile or from the rep- tile to the bird, or from the bird to the quad- ruped or from the four-footed to the four-* Il6 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. handed animal or finally from the erect quad- rumanus "furnished with a tail" into the man? Where and when and how did our ra- tional nature accrue to us? Whence the soul, with its moral sense and aspiration for im- mortality? Evolution has not only no word to tell us about that, but it is impossible to see how it can come into the theory at all. The truth is, biologists and geologists can legitimately argue on the subject of creation only a posteriori, that is from the few facts they have been able to marshal from the skeletons of animal life, the processes of gen- eration and the surface of the earth. This we all know to be an imperfect and fallible method for deducing universal conclusions or establishing general rules. When scien- tists pass to a priori statements, that is, lay down how the creation must have taken place, they are guilty of the fallacy known to logicians as the transitus a genere ad genus a fraudulent skip from one position to an- other position altogether different and then proclaiming from the second what they pur- ported to have found in the first. To make a priori infallible statements as to the man- ner of creation (which they do with seemingly THE ALTERNATIVE OF SCIENCE. Iiy great security), they must either be more than men and share the creative faculty themselves or have stood on the level of the Creator's platform while He was working, which is of course absurd. No matter what may be its merits as a theory, evolution proves far too little for us as rational, responsible and accountable men, and so will never sat- isfy us. It has no practical value for us as a light upon the meaning of our origin or our- selves and may just as well be relegated to the glass cases of museums as a curiosity or conundrum of scientific speculation. The other story is more comprehensive and satis- fying it is certainly more agreeable and it is as elevating as agreeable. It gives us an exalted idea of ourselves to know that WQ are descended from a first pair, a man and woman fashioned by an Almighty Creator and endowed with an intelligence far above the rest of His works. Secure in that thought we are safe from the despair which must beset those who believe that they have been cast out unacknowledged and disowned by some unknown and brute cause into the whirling mass of the evolutionary struggle. We feel an intelligent ownership back of us IlS THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. and a Fatherhood above us which will not permit the existence we received to be merely a torture and a mockery nor the aspi- rations implanted in our breasts dreams of Tantalus. There is hardly a doubt that the many who are turning away dissatisfied with the conclusions of Agnostic Science will find a more secure and peaceful refuge for the mind in the opening words of the ancient creed "I believe in God the Father, Almighty Cre- ator of heaven and earth and of all things." CHAPTER VIII. THE "LACHRYM-/E RERUM." If the story science has to tell us of our origin be an uninviting 1 one, still more dread- ful are its lessons about the evils of life. As an explanation of the harassing' problems of existence with its manifold evils and the "tears of things," the bare theory of natural selection, struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is revolting. Applied to sentient and intelligent beings it implies the infliction of a shocking, meaningless cruelty a blind, wanton injustice on the poor hu- man race. For those who feel overborne by the evils of life, evils that are very real and very terrible, and have nothing to stay them but this bald theory of struggle and survival, what refuge logically remains but "To take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them/* or to express it without the poetry com- mit suicide! Many are doing so now almost (119) 120 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. daily in countries where formerly that stupid revolt against the Giver of life used to be ex- tremely rare. Suicide clubs, we are told, have even been formed. Modern suicide has thus assumed a cool deliberateness where before it used to be the unreasoned act of a wild despair. This is quite as it should be according to the "scientific method" of accounting for things. If there were nothing but that, it is a proper and a wise thing for the unfortunate to kill themselves. But happily the great majority of rational beings hold the act of self-destruction, no matter how heavily life's fardels weigh, as a thing to be abhorred. Why? Because they evidently do not trust the "conclusions of science," they look else- where for the something more sustaining that "gives them pause" before that dread and tragic act. They find the motive in the old story of revelation. Millions have found that suffi- cient motive before them, millions find it now, and millions will continue to seek and find it sufficient, in spite of the fatal deduc- tions from agnostic science. The origin of evil has ever been the puzzle THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM. 121 of the human mind. The ancients sought its solution in the absurdities and superstitions of polytheism. In the early Christian cen- turies an eastern monk, in a clumsy but pious effort to free God from any share in it, imag- ined his two eternal and coequal Principles, one essentially good, and the other essentially bad, so that every good thing comes from the one and everything bad from the other. This blunt logic all metaphysi- cians agree to call an absurdity, since two eternal and opposing Principles are impossi- ble. This doctrine had an immense vogue at the time and Manicheism, as it was called from its author, counted numerous followers for nearly three centuries. Carried to its strict conclusions in practical life the sect be- came a nuisance and a scandal, and its teach- ings and practises were many times refuted and condemned. It is strange that we should see in our day a revival of this ex- ploded system with the same good-natured motive of finding a convenient escape from difficulties about the nature of God. Very recently a little book called "Evolution and Evil" was published in Edinburgh, in which the author harks back on the old Manichean 122 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. principles to fill a manifest gap in the evolution theory. The agnostic evolution- ists either forgot to say or had not the cour- age of the absurdity, that wickedness and crime must have been somewhere rudimen- tally inherent in their protoplastic mud-fish, and did not forecaste the time when jails would have to be built for those dear little creatures evolutecl into men and women. This hard-headed Scotchman clearly sees where the evolutionary scientists egregiously break down. He is evidently dissatisfied with them for stopping short at the point of all others the most interesting and important to us. But he has gone to the wrong source to supply the omission. . . . This is how, in outline, the origin of evil is ac- counted for in the story of Revelation. The picture it now presents us is not as fair or cheering as that in which it traced our or- igin. It is indeed a changed scene. The prospect is somber, the sky is lowering, the garden is full of weeds, the animals have gone wild for a dire thing has befallen the fortunes of the first pair. He who made the gift of all things to this first man and woman could not, of course, withdraw himself from THE "LACHRYM^E RERUM. 123 his own creation. Nothing was more rea- sonable than that He should exact some ac- knowledgment from them; that they should at least continue to know Him, to admit His sovereignty, and show a grateful submission. He therefore made one small reservation from their free use of all He had given them, as a test of this acknowledgment. To One infinitely rich in creative power it did not really matter what that test was, provided it was a test. And certainly it does not seem much that He demanded. Of all this varied creation which He placed at their disposal He informed them that there was just one thing He wished them not to touch or use. But this aroused their curiosity and through a perverseness, with which we have since be- come very familiar, though they had plenty of everything else besides, that one thing be- came the object of their intensest desire, the very thing that seemed to them they could least do without. They failed in the test, they broke down under so small a trial and disobeyed. There is the origin of evil, the evil that affects us in this human life. So Milton said, five thousand six hundred years later expressing the survived tradition 124 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. * 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe, With loss of Eden . . . sing, heavenly Muse." The Creator was displeased. Could any- thing be more just or natural than that He should be? The first parents fell out of favor. From being perfect in their kind as the high- est and best work of the mundane creation, made in the image and likeness of the creat- ing Divinity, they deteriorated. The will that opposed the Supreme Will lost its strength, the intellect that shared the Divine knowledge lost its privilege, the image of the Deity was blurred in their soul and they stood in the case of rebels. And when they began to beget children they could only be- get them of that nature in which they them- selves were, could impart to them no other when begetting them, and so we all came to stand in the case of rebels, under a ban. This is the kernel of the story. It is an ac- count, and the oldest account, of how the misfortunes, undeniable and ever-present, of our race came about. It is at least an intel- ligible account, it is reasonable and most likely. It has been very long in possession THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM." 125 and before it is cast aside as a myth some- thing better ought to be proposed in its stead. Have the agnostic scientists given us any juster reason why humanity is in a penal state, why wickedness abounds, and calami- ties afflict, and why there is no such thing as perfect and long-continued happiness or contentment to be found in all this earth of ours? By no means. Their statements are most disheartening in presence of these hard realities and conduce to despair, and they may thank the utter helplessness of their conclusions for the reaction that is steadily setting in against their magisterial utterances. On the other hand the story of the old tra- dition is most hopeful in its sequel. It tells of a restoration and the "blissful state" to be regained, as Milton words it. Such a theory gives a new and more hopeful complexion to human life; it makes the struggle worth en- during, because it gives it an intelligible and stimulating meaning. The struggle is com- paratively brief, and at the end of it, is the possibility of full and lasting compensation for every danger and every pain endured. Yes, say the scientists, if it was only true the admixture of the marvelous such as the 126 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. talking serpent savors at once of the mythi- cal. But why should it not be true? Is it be- cause you have found no trace of it in biology and geology that therefore it did not happen? That would be bad logic. Meanwhile cer- tain facts of life are there, and you have not been able to assign any adequate cause for them. It is therefore unfair of you to inter- fere with those who fall back on the tradition of the race about them. The first intelligent progenitors of our race were sure to transmit a minute and ac- curate account of all that happened at its be- ginning to their intelligent posterity. It would be contrary to the whole human mode of acting if they did not. It is incredible that they never should have mentioned a word on a subject so deeply important to all posterity, and it is most improbable that what they imparted was not carefully re- peated at least substantially. So important is it as affecting human life and conduct, that when it came first to be written down multi- tudes have always believed, as a thing reason- able and quite to be expected, that the writer was guaranteed by the direct action of the THE "LACHRYM^ RERUM. 127 great Creator from substantial mistake, or, in other words, inspired. It is reasonable to be- lieve all this, especially as it assigns a suffi- cient cause for many things in human life and character otherwise absolutely unintelligible to us. With regard to the marvelous inci- dents of the story, who can tell what is pos- sible or impossible to a Creator of such won- drous skill and power which, if we are not blind, \ve must acknowledge him to possess? Every man, not intoxicated to asphyxia with his own puny conceit, must honestly ad- mit that he has no locus standi in objecting to the ways selected by an Agent immeasur- ably superior to him, to bring about his purposes no matter how peculiar or even gro- tesque they may now seem to us. The mat- ter being beyond our power and outside our province to interfere in, it is wiser to accept the only reasonable explanation, within our reach, of the strange state in which we find ourselves. It is more than merely wise to do it, it becomes imperative when we see its practical bearing on our actual condition in life and on our ultimate fate. Look around on humanity in general as we know it. Is it not a grandeur in ruins, rather than a 128 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. bran-new structure erected on flimsy foun- dations and progressing gradually to com- pletion? When you look upon a stately ruin you never say, Here is something gradu- ally growing to perfection; how fair it will be to look upon when completed! No, you judge from this shapely arch, that bit of tracery, or those broken pillars that origi- nally it had been a fine building. In the same way when amid the fierce passions, mean- nesses and deformities of human nature so abundantly illustrated for us by history and made real to us by our contemporary wars, our jails and courts of law, we are able to trace remnants of a far nobler condition in generous impulses, in deeds of gentle virtue, of self-sacrifice and heroism in love for the beautiful, the pursuit of it in art, music, in poetry in the yearnings for the good and the true, we say, How beautiful it must have been before the ruin came! So that our per- sonal experience of humanity corroborates the tradition that man began with the perfect human nature which some calamity disturbed and shattered. Even when some meanness or frailty overtakes us individually the first thought that comes in sober moments is, THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM. 129 "Oh, for shame, we ought to have been above that!" showing that there is a remnant of a higher, nobler nature yet within us. There is nothing in the shape of man that does not exhibit the remnant of a nobler na- ture. The blacks of North Queensland are supposed to be the very lowest types of hu- manity. If I may be pardoned a personal reminiscence, I wish to relate here how I found that remnant even among them. They were small incidents, it is true, but none the less they illustrate what I say. I was one day visiting a camp of blacks who lived on the warm sand-dunes inside a man- grove swamp, on the north side of Cook- town harbor. In front of one of the miser- able huts which are only used as sleeping- places, being long, narrow and scarcely three feet high, a poor old woman was seated on the ground industriously knitting, with very primitive implements, a small open- work bag, such as children might use for school-books. The material was the native twine made from dried fiber and dyed in dif- ferent colors. Anxious to get a memento of the rude skill of this very backward people, who seemed to me in their homes to have 130 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. touched the lowest rung of the human ladder, I put a silver coin in her hand and made signs that I wanted the bag. She looked at it and shook her head, which I took to mean that she would not part with it. It was not so, however. One of the men came up and managed to explain that she did not wish to give it to me unfinished, but would finish it as soon as possible and send it over to-mor- row. Considering that it was a good four miles across the water, I thought the chances of getting it very slight, still I left her in pos- session of the coin and passed on. As we were at breakfast on the trelliced veranda of the house at which I was staying in the town at 7:30 the next morning, two of those coal- black natives timidly approached, holding up that bag! Honorable, was it not, in that poor creature? Another day, strolling by the shore, I saw some Chinese beche-de-mer fishers bargaining with a native black. Their net, it appears, had got fouled in the deep chan- nel some distance from the shore. These blacks are famous divers and the Chinamen were inducing him to go down to free their net. He at length consented and put off with them in their boat. At that moment THE "LACHRYMAL RERUM. 131 his wife, carrying a small child, came running down. It was too late to stop him, so she stood with riveted gaze looking at that boat. Beauty is not a strong point in those poor people, in fact it is not a point at all, but it was beautiful to see the play of fine qualities of soul and heart in that poor black face. The job turned out somewhat troublesome and the diver had to make three different descents to the rocky bottom, remaining down what seemed to be quite a long time each dive. While he was under water the young wife seemed beside herself. I do not think I ever saw r such genuine feeling expressed in any face, white or black there was tenderness, protest, devoted love in it, and when he came safe to shore, relief with a sort of sad, re- proachful delight. Beautiful remnant of the nobler nature even in the dregs of humanity! I can not help adding in illustration of the abominable meanness of man that, a few minutes later, I saw those Chinamen cheat that poor black! They put him off with two ounces of coarse tobacco and a handful of stale biscuit for a task that gold coin would not have induced themselves to undertake. The poor fellow took that squalid pay quite 132 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. meekly and went away. There be yellow men, thought I, in some things, lower than Queensland Blacks. Is it not more rational to believe that such virtues have been left in a nature once all vir- tuous, and that such vices come from its de- terioration, than to assert that both are de- veloped out of mud-fish? Mere science leaves man without hope in his miseries. It admits them as facts; it even points them out, but gives no satisfac- tory reason why they are there, and supplies no motive for the patient endurance of them. Doleful, indeed, if not cruel, is its attitude in presence of the universal fact of death. When the quickly passing life of each individ- ual is over and he must leave behind all he loved, prized and strove for, science stands by in pitiable and helpless silence. Not so the theories of revealed tradition. It has the story of a reconciliation between a displeased Creator and ungratefully delin- quent creatures. The nature passed on to their progeny by the first pair after their disobedience is to undergo a process of restoration by the proffered interven- tion of 'the Godhead, and, by the fulfilment THE "LACHRYMLE RERUM." 133 of new and not very difficult conditions, the title-deeds, forfeited by the bankrupt parents, to the "blissful state," are to be given back to all the children of men. Here at once a meaning is given to human life, the touch-spring is supplied to human action. The trial and the struggle endure, it is true, for each individual of the race. But the very possibility of reinstatement is an end worth his efforts. The great sanctions for upright conduct are kept ever present to him immense reward for success penalty for wilful failure. These, \vith the higher feeling of loyalty to the intentions of the benevolent Creator, supply motive power to the whole moral world. They are the real and efficient agency for civilizing humanity and have been admitted and are still admit- ted by the majority of men to be the best the world has got up to the present moment. They have inspired and still continue to in- spire all that is best in heroic self-devotion. They sweeten social life, help to the patient if not cheerful endurance of pain and sorrow, and altogether have proved far too prac- tically useful to the human family to be con- temned and renounced at the summons of a 134 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. science which has but a gospel of darkness and despair to offer in their stead. That which has been the mainstay of millions of the most civilized people in the past, and has best reconciled them to life in its varying for- tunes, it would be most unwise to discard until at least something as good has been found. It is certain that the results of scien- tific research supply no such substitute. A great multitude in our time have been led away by the ably-edited pretensions of the scientists and have laid aside the guiding motives of life derived from faith, relinquish- ing all external observances of religion. Yet the restlessness of minds has by no means abated. It shows itself in many ways at this hour to be as great if not greater than ever. The recent closing of the grave over many of the men who made the greatest stir in the mental world for the past forty years has given food for sobering reflection to many of their disciples and admirers who, weary of the emptiness of their master's conclusions, are longing again for the comfort of a confident and unfaltering faith. They found its formula regarding our origin in the opening words of the old Creed THE ^LACHRYM^E RERUM. " 135 already quoted. The second part of that Creed gives motive and meaning for the hu- man life they are actually leading: "And I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, who for us men and for our eternal safety came out of the heavens and took flesh through the Holy Spirit from Mary, the Virgin, and was made man. He was also crucified for us, suffered, and was bur- ied. And the third day He arose from the dead and ascended to the heavens; thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead." This describes the restoration of the race and the final issue that awaits it. He who raised it up again, helped it and made salva- tion possible for its members, will also be their Judge. "Oh, but this is bringing us back to our catechism again it is faith and most of it must be taken on trust!" Precisely, and why should you be ashamed of it? Lift yourself above your little self and think of the distinguished men men whose tran- scendent ability is admitted on all hands who at the present day all around you openly believe and advocate all that. Mr. Gladstone does so and who will deny his superiority of 136 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. intellect? England's great Prime Minister Lord Salisbury believes it all. England's Lord Chancellor believes it, so does conspic- uously her Lord Chief Justice, so do most of her able jurists. So do her ablest diplomat- ists Lord Dufferin, Sir Rutherford Alcock (lately deceased after a most distinguished career) Sir Philip Currie, Lord Brassey and the present able Ambassador to the Court of Russia. President McKinley believes it, so do his living predecessors in that highest of all America's positions, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Cleveland. These are but some of the great names, and is your judgment likely to be of more value than the convictions of such men as these? Why, before such an array of abil- ity on the side of belief, the cynical apostasy of a John Morley (vide his "Voltaire"), the ravings of Thomas Carlyle as exhibited by his trusty showman, Mr. Froude, and the poisoned shafts of Prof. Huxley the Bob Ingersoll of England seem impertinences of no weight whatever. Yes, the goal of the returns' from this un- satisfying agnostic science is faith, belief in the communications vouchsafed to us by the Great Master, Owner, and Maker of us and of all things. CHAPTER IX. "STATIO BENE FIDA." No one, at all observant of the signs of his times, can fail to see a movement away from agnostic science and back to belief. But is there a sure haven for the unrest of the re- turning? If unfaith and faith were just two camps the question would be simple enough. Unfortunately the ungovernable tendencies of human thought, its refusal to be restricted, its opposition to restraint, no matter how- reasonable that restriction and restraint may be demonstrated to be, have divided the fol- lowers of faith into many camps. This being a fact and a sad one, it is too well know r n to be denied and too real and present with us, to be ignored. This domestic quar- rel has been the excuse for agnosticism and is the strong point with the remainder adher- ents of that forlorn cause. In any sincere effort, then, to be of use as a guide to the un- restful soul after its incautious excursion into the bewildering maze of agnostic science (i37) 138 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. this unpleasant fact must be faced and hon- estly weighed. However, it has the disadvantage of mak- ing the writer appear in the light of a special pleader for his own views, and special plead- ing arouses suspicion and arms prejudice. "Oh, he is fighting for his own side of course all he says is sure to be biased in favor of the section to which he belongs." And so, when there are contending interests, it is hard to get a hearing for the special plea. I therefore wish to avoid all appearance of that as much as possible and merely invite the reader to the inspection of facts as they exist about us. Facts are the most persua- sive of arguments.- They are not so dry as polemics. I suppose then that the intelligent wanderer, in quest of the dropped threads of his old faith, would like to give in his adherence to a body of doctrine about which there is no uncertainty, fluctuation, or dispute among its particular followers, rather than to one about which there is much dispute, diver- gence, and dissent among those who vari- ously profess it. I suppose he would prefer to join a body "STATIC BENE FIDA. , 139 that has a long and continuous history, to one that has a much shorter and somewhat broken history. I suppose he would feel more secure in associating with a body which is numerically greater, while agreeing among themselves as a unit, than all other dissidents from that body put together and disagreeing among themselves. Now such exactly are the characteristics of the two phases of Chris- tian faith which, as mere facts, visibly and un- deniably confront him in the world to-day. Everybody knows who Leo XIII is. He is the two hundred and fifty-seventh, in direct succession, of the men who held his place in Rome for nearly nineteen centuries. Every- body knows that there are over one thousand bishops all over the world, men of education and intelligence, many of thefij admittedly high intelligence, who all hold their place and title from him, acknowledge his author- ity, and are in perfect agreement with him in every essential particular. Under them there are between two and three hundred thousand clergy in the same perfect agree- ment w T ith their bishops and under them again between two and three hundred million of laity in perfect accord with their 140 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. pastors. No danger of our friend feeling lonely in such a company at any rate. Let him enter the poorest of their churches, be it on an Irish mountain-side or in a bush-town at the Antipodes or the fa- mous cathedrals of continental Europe or in. the Spanish Americas, he will hear the same identical doctrine taught in each and all, and the same rite of divine worship observed. That must appeal to him as something ad- mirable and arrest his interested attention. Here then is one broad fact, easily verifi- able, spread out to his view at this moment. Everybody knows, also, who the young Tsar Nicolas is. He is the head of a church, a very numerous church, but his title as such does not reach very far back, at most to his savage ancestor, Peter, in the last century, while the faith of that church which came from Greece is substantially the Roman faith but marred by a break in allegiance to the lawful successor of the apostles and denial of his authority as divinely appointed judge and guardian of that faith. Everybody knows who Emperor William II is. He is the head of a church whose title goes back only a few centuries, and the faith of that 4< STATIO BENE FIDA." 141 church is in entire disagreement \vith that of the Greek and Russian and only a very frag- mentary agreement indeed with that of the Roman, while from the principle of free pri- vate judgment and by consequence the lack of a standard within its own limits, there is abundant domestic disagreement and inde- pendent sectional branches. Everybody knows who Queen Victoria is. She is the head of a church, but her title to spiritual supremacy passed to her only indi- rectly from the Tudor line of monarchs from whom she is not even descended, and who usurped that sacred title only a few hundred years ago because of a rebellious quarrel . with the Pope over an adulterous marriage. Meanwhile the Anglican Church is entirely independent as to authority and standard of belief from the Greek-Russian and the Ger- man Lutheran. Within the English fold, too, the right of private judgment prevails and has been a powerful dissolvent. As a result there are nearly two hundred distinct and independent religious sects in England and throughout the wide domain of her colonial empire and also in English-speaking America the same strange spectacle, in pro- 142 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. portionate extent, may be witnessed. In- deed the ultimate logical result of this free private judgment seems to be as many re- ligions as there are men. And is it not a curious thing that men demand a freedom in religious matters not permitted them in mat- ters of State or in other relations of life? The State does not tolerate private judgment about its constitution and its laws, if carried into practise, as it is so unrestrainedly in re- ligion. However, as a matter of fact, this is the other phase of Christian faith presented to actual view by the most civilized of the na- tions to-day. That this is pretty accurately their condition nobody can deny, as it is a thing of common and public notoriety. No\v is it likely that our friend will lightly commit his spiritual hopes and future wel- fare to such a Babel confusion of religious guidance? Common prudence and sound sense would deter him from so little promis- ing a course. Besides if he hears of the prayer of the Divine Founder of the whole system "that the world, may knoiv, Father, that Thou "hast sent me, let these he one as Thou art in me and I in Thee 9 ' it will be clear to him "STATIC BENE FIDA. 143 that there must be something very wrong about all these people for they are not one but two hundred churches. It would there- fore be something more than imprudent, it would be rash and dangerous, to follow after their way. If he is to subscribe in full to Christianity, from which, supposedly, he originally started out in quest of something new, he has but one alternative. The fact of the marvelous unity combined with great numerical strength, of historical tradition, will forcibly appeal to his logical mind and incline him to become one of the two hundred and fifty millions who own Leo as visible chief. However, it must be admitted that he will be confronted with another fact for which the restlessness of certain minds in other dis- rupted branches of Christianity is account- able. There have been many in our day who, not venturing to go the whole daring length of total unbelief under the lead of agnostic scientists on the one hand, and not content, on the other, to rest under the re- straining soul-discipline of Christianity, have bethought them of the Buddhistic faith of the far East, which seemed to them to impose 144 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. the minimum of individual obligation and to be free from harassing complications of doc- trine. Hence the recent introduction of what has been named Theosophy among the more civilized peoples. I doubt if this curious cult will arrest the attention of any capable or reflective mind for an}^ long time. It has had, however, a certain vogue and its present standing may be examined not unprofitably. It is as hard to get any precise statement of this new osophy or of the Buddhism it is supposed to represent as the late Professor Freeman said it was to fix Freemasonry as a historical fact, or come at any reliable evidence about it (Italy, page 34). In a certain American university the dis- satisfied Christians of a philosophy class not very long ago, with a view to adopting The- osophy as a substitute for the faith of their fathers, invited a Hindu Bonze or priest named Dharmapala to give them an authen- tic and concise version of Buddhism. To elicit more readily what they wanted to know they decided to proceed by way of question and answer, so they put up the Hindu on the platform of their hall for interrogation and "STATIC BENE FIDA." 145 appointed their professor as leading cross- examiner. But it soon appeared that the professor was like a man diving on a rubber surface, he could not get under. After sev- eral questions answered in the high-flowing and vague style of the Hindus this professor, who himself was evidently tired of the ver- sion of Christianity as taught in one of the two hundred sects in which he was brought up, seemed to lose patience and exclaimed with an air of profound disappointment: "But all this scarcely differs from what Christian- ity exacts." Nirvana being the heart of the system, the professor next questioned him about this. What was its nature? how was it to be attained? and when attained what was it like? On these points Dharmapala dis- coursed in grandiose and soaring phrases to which the examiner frankly declared he could attach no practical meaning. He finally asked the learned Bonze to give them a short, intelligible description of what they might expect in the state of Nirvana; he re- plied that "no one having yet attained to it, it would be impossible to do so!" A full ac- count of this proceeding appeared in the San Francisco papers in the early summer of the 10 146 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. year 1897. But we have not since been in- formed that a temple to Buddha has been erected in this very eclectic Californian uni- versity. An effort was made to popularize Bud- dhism among the upper classes in England under the pontifical patronage of Mr. Edwin Arnold before he was made a knight (and there was a time when the English Court would not have admitted an English Bud- dhist among its equerries), but it took no hold there. The advent of Madam Blavatsky and Prof. Max Muller's able exposure of that lady's ignorance and charlatan preten- sions may be considered the requiem of The- osophy as far as England is concerned. The theosophical priestess subsequently removed her headquarters to Paris. Among a cer- tain class of the French, ever ready to experi- ment with the newest sensation, she met with some success, but her poor, clumsy con- juring with familiar spirits from the Pamirs was exposed by a fellow-countryman, the editor of a St. Petersburg journal. He wrote a biography of this Mrs. Blavatsky, and not the least useful of the labors of the London Psychical Research Society was the transla- "STATIC BENE FIDA." 147 tion of that remarkable and sadly interesting book and its circulation over the English- speaking world. How any sane person could continue to pursue this phantom of a faith after reading this book passes compre- hension. It is true that Mrs. Blavatsky's very erratic disciple, Mrs. Besant, published another biog- raphy enthusiastically favorable to her, but it was manifestly compiled from material supplied by the most interested of witnesses, the lady whose praises are sung. It is also true that much has been said in favor of the purer forms of Buddhism, nota- bly by Mr. Max Muller, and the word of that wonderful scholar is of great weight. But by the purer forms the professor is careful to explain the high moral maxims which he found in its ancient writing. Surely we need not go to Ceylon or Thibet for high moral maxims! Are they not to be found as high as any one need desire in the book from w r hich with scarcely any doubt Gua- tama Buddha himself and his disciples largely borrowed the Old Testament and which the New Christian Testament en- dorses and adopts? 148 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Much is made, too, of the statement that Buddhism is the religion of three hundred millions of the human race. But far too much is made of this. Without due exami- nation that broad statement is certainly cal- culated to impress and disturb the ordinary un-Buddhistic mind. But, first, supposing them three hundred million it may be asked, What is the quality of that portion of the hu- man race? Are the people composing it among the foremost, best educated and most civilized peoples of the world? Surely not. Again that statement is contested. Travel- ers who have come from the Eastern lands assert that this number as representing those who are really Buddhists is enormously ex- aggerated. I have seen it reduced by some writers to as much as one-tenth! But even allowing for a very great number it is beyond doubt that the divisions and dif- ferences among them in creed and practise far exceed even the fragments into which the so-called reformed-Christianity is split. Almost the first object that greeted the vis- itor to the last great World Exhibition in Paris was a huge statue of Buddha. Any civilized man gazing at that most inartistic, clumsy and "STATIC BENE FIDA." 149 stupid-looking travesty of the human form, must have felt nothing but aversion, and passed on with a sigh of pity for the aberra- tions of the human mind when abandoned to its own purblind groping for the great secret. Mahomedanism will also greet our friend as another of the world's great facts in super- naturalism. To find what is attractive or of value in that, he has but to do two things examine what historians who write of the sixth century have to say of its founder that remarkable Bedouin camel-driver of that period, and of his preceptor, the ex-Nestorian monk. Next, reflect on what is the lowest animal instinct in men and what Mahomed- anism promises and permits in satisfaction of it. When he has done this, it can be safely left to himself to say whether respect for his own intelligence and regard for our weaker and gentler sisters will permit him to enrol himself among the followers of the prophet's present representative whom a great English statesman has proclaimed to our age as "the great Assassin." He will encounter still another fact in the world of religions far less in proportion than the last but far greater in significance and even mystery. He will see a people some 150 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. seven millions in number scattered through the world, owning no country yet as distinct and apart from all other peoples as if their "place and nation" had not been taken away. If he read history aright he will think gently of the Jew. He will forget Shakespeare's Jew the worldly and commercial Jew that deals in "usance" and "pounds of Christian flesh." He will remember this people for their grand tradition. He will remember them as the progenitors of our whole race, as the chosen people of God and of old time. His most favored nation. He will think of them as the people whose influence on the world stands first and without any rival; and he will think of them in the later time when, alas! they let their day go by and standing belated by the wayside allowed their sacred inheritance to pass to the Gentile. He will think of them, then, as the poor outlawed, hunted race, driven and persecuted for weary centuries at the hands of those whom the di- vine compassion of their gentle Master, Him- self of Jewish blood, should have taught hu- maner methods. He will recognize in their marvelous preservation a divine intention and a lingering of divine regard. He will recog- nize remnants of their greatness in their su- ''STATIC BENE FIDA. 15! perior intelligence which, when the opening comes to them, makes them still leaders among men, as it has at this hour made them princes in the world's commerce. And finally he will remember them as the people of a prophecy yet to be fulfilled, which tells that their latest progeny on earth will be rallied to the spiritual kingdom of Him whom their fathers, foiled in their mistaken hopes for na- tional glory, rejected and delivered over to torture and to death. It is not good in us to think unkindly of Jews when the Master's latest prayer was for their forgiveness. They are a living fact in our world to-day. In their creed they profess and possess the truth the genuine truth that we too hold in honor only they have halted short of its divine fulness. Such is the full prospect before those who are returning disappointed and empty from their agnostic experiences. If to the care- ful use of their intelligence, they but add a humble prayer for guidance and for strength, there is little doubt which anchor- ing ground will appear to them the statio bene fida, the right trusty harbor for their souls. CHAPTER X. IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. The returning agnostic will find that in the "safe harbor" indicated in the last chapter his love of science need not, by any means, be shed at its entrance nor its fascinating pur- suit be necessarily abandoned. Though the parent church of Christianity does not assign the place of first importance to the study of the natural sciences she is far from forbidding that study to her members. This very year 1897 gives a striking proof of this. The Fourth Catholic Scientific Con- gress was held at Fribourg in Switzerland at the end of the summer. The most eminent Catholic scientists and their number is not small were invited to attend. The meeting- was thoroughly representative of the Catholic world. There were delegates from Great Britain, Ireland, the United States, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany and Belgium two hundred papers on scientific subjects were read at the sessions of the Congress. IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 153 Almost every branch of human knowledge was discussed the social question, law, his- tory, political economy, physics, mathemat- ics, astronomy, biology, art, philosophy, re- ligion. Surely a syllabus ample enough to satisfy the most ambitiously scientific. All these had their share of friendly debate. The leading and most useful feature of the discus- sions seems to be an honest effort to deter- mine what has been really demonstrated in science and what has not, thereby separating true science from that which has not as yet established its title to that august name. Far from, frowning on this enterprise as fraught with danger to matters of defined faith it was entered upon with the permission and full approval of the Head of the Catholic Church. But there is besides permanent testimony to the freedom of scientific pursuits within her fold in the programmes of her higher edu- cational establishments in all parts of the world. They may be had for the asking any- where and a perusal of them will show how false it is to say, as Mr. Huxley unfairly said, that this church is always opposed to the study of science. 154 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. The pursuit of science in itself she has never opposed. But she has combated and must always combat the conclusions of certain scientists in which the existence of God is de- nied, or in which He is declared to be un- known and absolutely unknowable, and therefore is not to be counted or thought of at all in human affairs; in which the human soul and man's immortality are also counted out, and in which all revelation or knowledge, derived from Him who created us, about our- selves and the meaning of our lives, is to be rejected as a fraudulent and absurd invention an imposture! Yes, these assertions al- leged to be directly derived from science, the Church, and I fancy the saner and better part of mankind, will always contest and refute, maintaining that they are not legitimate con- clusions from true and demonstrated science. Why they are persistently asserted by men of name before the world is a secret of their own personal and private lives which the great ac- counting day will record. It is certain the conclusions of Science favor the freest kind of living. They act as mutes on the strings of conscience. The returning agnostic will find, too, in IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 155 the teaching and practise of that church not mere dry speculative dogmatism having ref- erence only to the life hereafter, but much that is valuable in its practical bearing on the actual life of the world, much that is of great service to society, curative of its ills and fenders to its dangers. What are the things which agitate and alarm society at the present day? i. There is the unrest of the masses of the laboring poor their aw r akening to the con- sciousness of the fact that they are poor and ill-provided with the comforts of life and slave-driven in work which at best is preca- rious, and from the profits of which only the very slenderest share comes to them, while there are a favored few into whose hands enormous wealth has been gathered, who have apparently bought themselves free from general sentence of toil, who live in extreme comfort and luxury and who command an abounding market of needy men to do every- thing for them, even to the increasing of their already great stores of riches. This glaring inequality is the root of the socialism so uni- versally discussed in our times, and is assum- ing such threatening attitudes against estab- 156 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. lished order and peace almost everywhere now. He will find in this church some very prac- tical teachings to assuage this acute feeling and mitigate the danger of its violent out- break if listened to. In a former chapter I briefly but truthfully described numerous societies of men and women who actually exist around us and have existed for a very long time where com- radeship and harmony prevail with perfect equality and unity of purpose for a common good a good by no means restricted to self, but helpful to others, and a life, not ease-lov- ing and indolent, but ceaselessly and devot- edly active in the cause of ignorant, needy and suffering humanity. It is the supernat- ural motive the reflex from the eternal life and all they are taught about the will, the justice and the holiness of the Omnipotent, which alone makes the self-devotion the self-immolation of such an existence possible in this world. And it is the same motive and none other, applied of course in a lessened degree and modified to meet the circum- stances of worldly occupations, that will re- strain the poor within the bounds of modera- IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 157 tion in their just efforts to better their condi- tion and guide them securely in the way of happiness. It is through men's minds the world is best governed better than by the ruder means of force and terror, and unless it is ingrained in men how unwise it is to give all their thought absorbingly to a life so pass- ing and so short, and practise no virtue, which is the price of better things in the more enduring one in other words, admit the supernatural into their thoughts and daily lives in vain will you propose "nationaliza- tion of all the instruments of production/' "unification of labor/' and "equal distribu- tion of profits/ 7 "land tax" or "single tax/' Fourier's "Phalansteries," Comte's "Polity," or any of those well-intentioned schemes for social improvement, of which the last forty years have been so prolific. Nor is the su- pernatural motive a nostrum with which to beguile the poor. It is for rich and poor alike. The supernatural must be readmit- ted into the lives of both in much larger measure than it is at present, before there is the slightest chance of restoring peace be- tween capital and labor. It is quite certain that these benevolent schemes of the 158 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Georges, the Marks, and the Morrises will never succeed. With men, as they are now, they are unworkable. That the supernatural no longer occupies the prominent place it ought in the lives of multitudes of men in our time is due mainly to the wrangling and divi- sions of sects since the sixteenth century. So the first step in efforts to restore it would be to bring about a. reunion of Christendom under one form of faith. But this, it will be answered, is as Utopian as the schemes of single taxers and national- izers "of land and instruments of produc- tion." I do not entirely admit that, but I say that unless some approach to it is made, notwithstanding the impious sneers of a reck- less minority, you may despair of a settle- ment of the social question. Agitation and storm and fights will come violence and bloodshed will be witnessed again, but when their short season is over things will fall back into the same, if not a worse, state again the future but repeating the past. Mr. Ben- jamin Kidd in his "Social Evolution' 9 says that the "altruism" on which the socialists de- pend to make their proposals a success is not to be found in human nature. He maintains IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 159 that "the altruism that ever did anything or ever will do anything among men has been generated by religion and religion alone/' The late Professor Blaikie, whose sym- pathies were strongly in favor of a moderate socialist programme, also confesses in one of his essays that "the true altruistic spirit, nec- essary for the success of socialism, must come from the fountain of religion and so- cialism must enter into closer alliance with religion." It is a pity that many will have to ask "Which?" Socialism is as broad as humanity, and religion ought to be able to confront it as one, and with no faltering and uncertain doctrine. This latter condition, at any rate, our returning friend will find well fulfilled in the great church still united under Leo XIII, who, by the way, is acknowledged in our day as the best exponent of socialism in its highest and truest sense. 2. Our age is suffering, and in some places alarmingly so, from a deplorable change in women's views of maternity. In France premiums have been offered by government for larger families! Not long since a prominent New York physician, in an article contributed to the l6o THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. North American Review, raised the alarm for America on this delicate but most important subject. He declares it has become the rule with American wives either not to bear chil- dren at all or to have but one or two at most. Among the causes to which he attributes this dreadful state of things he notes "the loosen- ing of religion's hold on American parents.'' They no longer regard its strict prohibition of this practise and have taken the matter into their own hands. In the Catholic Church a most successful remedy is applied to this. The practise and obligation there enjoined of the regular "confession of sins," which has come in for such aspersion at the hands of the separatist Christians, but which is really one of the greatest forces for moral good in the world, though the least obtrusive and most silent, renders such deplorable prac- tises impossible. Every Catholic woman knows that the benefit of this sacrament would be uncompromisingly denied until all such sinful tampering with nature's laws was completely abandoned. And their faith in their church's teaching always prevails. It is not out of place to add here that the prejudiced attacks on "the confessional" IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. l6l happily growing less in this more reasonable age have no foundation in fact. Here is a simple way to test it. You may meet every- where whole families whose members of both sexes have made it a lifelong practise "to go to confession." Ask any of them collectively or individually if any harm or evil has come to them from that practise? Their answer will be, "No." Ask them if they ever heard anything in that confessional that was not for their good? You may rely on it their answer will be, "Never." The thing stands to reason. If there were in this practise adopted by millions of people, as a part of their lives and so for many hundreds of years, anything radically or grossly wrong, it would have become of such public notoriety long ago, that no one of respectability would be found to follow such a practise; but as many follow it as ever many most excellent peo- ple, you will find, if you only take the trouble to inquire, which proves that a most unjust prejudice has been propagated against it. 3. Our age is suffering from the loss of re- spect for the sacredness of the marriage bond. Facility of divorce, which now nearly every- where prevails under the unrighteous usur- ii l62 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. pation of the civil power over an institution directly established and safeguarded by God Himself, has resulted in sad consequences to society. It is not unusual for a woman to meet at social gatherings two, three and even four men to whom she had been severally married! The disruption of families follows so many foundations of civilized society uprooted. Children are robbed of their homes and neglected. The filial feeling, hith- erto so wholesome and sweet an influence in life, is blighted and ruined by a precocious knowledge of the disgraceful frailties of parents. The most repulsive feature in this author- ized license of manners is that these divorce courts offer a premium and an invitation to vice, for almost immediately the "respond- ent and co-respondent" get married. These shameless people often unblushingly own that their infidelities have been committed that the divorce court may have evidence to set them free to indulge their unnatural and illicit amours. And the court obediently enters into their plot. Against this manifest drifting into pagan barbarism, the ancient Church stands firm. IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 163 It proclaims to the world that marriage is not a thing to be tampered with by any human authority whatsoever. "Whom God has joined together let no man put asunder," is her charter on this. The yoke which has been deliberately and validly assumed it is God's will, she declares must be borne to the end. The marriage bond is sacred made by God Himself and in the keeping only of those who represent Him. No marriages, she says, done in slipshod fashion over the counter of registry offices shall be blessed by her. No halting, conditioned form of mar- riage on which rests the gloomy shadow of a prospective divorce and takes away from the young people that security of "settling in life" they so eagerly looked forward to, is permitted by her it must be "for better, for worse till death do us part." And if in a minority of cases the yoke hopelessly chafes and the couple prove ill-suited to each other, she meets that with the legal separation from "bed and board," but insists that for the com- mon good the inconvenience of celibacy must be borne until the death of one shall set the other free. 4. Our age suffers from a lack of honesty 164 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. in public and private life. People are begin- ning to be puzzled to know what to do with their money which prudent thrift rightly dic- tates to them to put by for "the rainy day." The exposure of gigantic swindles like that of J. Balfour, ex-M. P., &c., the wholesale plunder of the Panama stockholders, the "booming" of worthless or fictitious proper- ties and stocks as investments, awaken the world from time to time to the fact that mul- titudes of men have lost all conscience about stealing the money of others. The expens- ive excitement of "turf and "ring" gambling has created a passion for petty pilfering which leaves no employer safe. The system of electing office holders and judges only for a short period has opened the door to cor- ruption and dishonest jobbery of all kinds where that system prevails, until people get little value for their taxes and can scarcely get justice fairly administered. To this serious and dangerous wrongdoing the Church firmly opposes the "refusal of ab- solution in confession" to the thief and cheat, no matter of what rank or position, until res- titution be made to those who were wronged, and until robberv in everv form be aban- IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 165 doned. The world little knows the powerful help it lost in its affairs when the separating Christians of the sixteenth century decreed to discontinue the practise of confessing their sins. 5. Our age is suffering from a loss of what may be called, for want of a less awk- ward word, femininity in women. An am- bitious spirit has entered into them. They are hungering for a share in all public affairs and aim at abolishing all distinctions of sex in the avocations of life. Why may not we do everything that men do? they say. And they proceed to do it never reckoning how much of their charm they shed with their skirts. They stop not even at skimming the highways and dashing through our streets in that new and least modest of postures astride of a bicycle. Well, the church has nothing de fide on the manners of women, but she has plenty to re- strain their excesses in the wise traditions from which she does not intend to depart, and in the golden rules for women's conduct which she has by no means abrogated. She has quiet but sufficient means to see to it that her children, who are styled in her liturgy 1 66 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. the devotus femineus sexus, shall not make themselves instead of helpful examples in modest reserve wanton occasions of spirit- ual hurt to men. Women owe their present high place in civilization, as well as their res- cue from a barbarous degradation in past times, exclusively to the action of this ancient Church. They should, not ungratefully, re- member that. If they choose to forget it and despise her counsels, so wise from long ex- perience, it is certain they will fall back into the same cruel subjection again. Let them turn their eyes to the Orient! Who of them would be Moslem women or Hindoos? Well, to that, the half-unsexed woman of to- day is inevitably hastening her sisters of the future! Thus our friend will find that the practises and teachings of this oldest Christian church are by no means all dry mysticism or value- less speculation. All the other way. There is hardly a detail of human life on which they have not a direct and beneficent bearing and undoubtedly make for the true civilization and happiness of the race. A signal service was rendered to the Christian world when the Council of Trent, IMPORTANT AND PRACTICAL. 167 amid the mental confusion of the sixteenth century, issued a clear and unhesitating re- statement of the whole Catholic creed. He would do well to refer to that settled stand- ard of faith for further details. Many edi- tions of it have been published in the Latin tongue as well as translations, and may be procured from any Catholic publishing house. True, since that time two points of doctrine have been defined the Immacu- late Conception of B. V. and the Infallibility of the Pope quoad fidem et mores, But defin- ing does not mean inventing. It does not mean that those points were not hitherto be- lieved. On the contrary, it is an affirmation that they w^ere always accepted as true by the church generally, but that no pressing need of formulating them as beyond all dispute, that is defining them, having arisen, they were not hitherto incorporated in set terms among the articles of faith. CHAPTER XI. PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BE- LIEVERS. There never was a time when "the just man living by faith" was more exposed to disturbing influences than he is at present. i. Magazines and Reviews have multiplied to an enormous extent. They are not what they used to be. They have no particular views, no principles, take no sides, and repre- sent no party. They open their pages im- partially to error and to truth alike. They are open debating ground from which no subject is excluded, where nothing is sacred any longer, nothing exempt from the most searching and adventurous criticism. Side by side with an interesting account of travel or some question of politics you have a fierce onslaught on the Bible, on some particular point of belief or religious practise. To take a hap-hazard instance look at the North American Review for December, 1895, where (168) PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 169 Prof. Goodwin Smith disports his Voltairean- ism. Look at almost any number of the London Nineteenth Century, or of the Fort- nightly Review, the same medley of confusing views on every aspect of religion and the supernatural may be encountered. This species of literature has a very wide circula- tion and makes favorite short reading for hosts of men who are too busy to study things au fond or read whole books. Ther is little doubt that this literature is account able for much of the unbelief and of the un- settled belief that prevails. It is, then, a danger to the believer. But what is to be done about it? It is hopeless to expect that the unre- strained liberty of the press in this particular will be. interfered with. No government cares any longer to intervene in favor of re- ligious belief. As governments they ignore the fact that God has rights over the minds of his creature. It only remains then for individuals, who do care for faith, to refuse to aid and abet such publications by neither subscribing for nor reading them. "Oh, what narrow-minded advice! People 1 70 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. ought to know all sides of questions; it is un- fair and cowardly not to listen to what people have to say." To this remonstrance, which will at once be made in many quarters, the Catholic believer at least can most reasonably answer, that he does not choose to employ himself so idly as reading denials and con- tradictions of matters that for him were settled ages ago by expert authority which he deeply respects and on which he has long since made up his mind that it is safer and wiser for him to rely. It is not cowardly it is common sense and prudence not to listen to people who only succeed in upsetting the mind on subjects he deems very vital to his happiness and have nothing at all to offer in place of the hope they deprive him of, and leave him only in bewilderment. It is not unfair in him to demand at least the liberty of not listening to very bad and very unprac- tical advice. Take for instance Goodwin Smith's article above referred to. He seeks to undermine all respect for the Bible and flatly denies it to represent God's instructions or the expression of His will to His creatures. Well, what are we to accept in place of it? Mr. Smith's instructions to the world ? PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 1 7 1 Hardly! For hundreds of years this ques- tion was deliberated upon again and again by intelligent educated men, men of cultivated intellect, of different nationalities and differ- ent times, and they all have delivered a unani- mous verdict in favor of this most ancient and venerated of books. That ought to be enough for any ordinary man and the believ- ing Catholic knows that it is enough for him. Nor does he feel he is surrendering his reason or his judgment in any way. He rather feels he is vindicating his common sense and acting as all sensible men do in the ordinary affairs of life. There are legislative bodies and Supreme Courts of law every- where. No reasonable citizen ever thinks he is surrendering his reason or judgment in ac- cepting their decisions, and on occasion he is willing even to surrender his own private judgment as the wisest and safest thing for him to do. If any one button-holes him and lays out arguments to prove to him that he should not do so, he says, "That is foolish talk/' and he does not listen. Every sensible man applauds him for that. On subjects that to him are of much higher importance than State laws, why refuse to the believer the IJ2 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. same approval that the citizen is sure to get for acting so sensibly? Or take Mr. Huxley's assertive articles in the Nineteenth Century. Why should the believer waste time in reading what hundreds of men, whom he knows better and respects more than Mr. Huxley, have told the world long ago were matters fixed and decided on as of faith and founded on divine authority? All the Huxleys in the world could not change his opinion now, and even if they could they have nothing to offer on which he could rest for courage and hope as he rests on his present belief. Therefore the best and only thing to do is to leave those men and dangerous literary symposiums severely alone. When you are walking out peacefully with a sound head and whole skin, and rocks are flying about, you do not go deliberately in the way of them. "But," it will be answered again, "Cardinals Manning and Newman and Gibbons contrib- uted to the pages of these magazines." That these distinguished men felt impelled to reply to outrageous attacks on revelation wherever opportunity afforded, is by no means a formal approval of the methods PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 173 adopted by the publishers of those new ec- lectic periodicals. Probably they were glad of the chance to turn an evil, they could not abolish, into a vehicle for at least some good. Moreover there is no need to have recourse to these monthly papers to find out what these eminent churchmen have to say; that may be found in better and fuller form in their own published works. 2. Free Public Libraries are another dan- ger. They are everywhere the rage in our days. Though free they are in another sense compulsory. People are compelled to pay for them in taxes, if private munificence has not stepped in to build and endow them. In another sense too they are really free very free indeed. There is no censorship for any kind of book, except the openly obscene. The shelves of those libraries are as impartially open to irreligious falsehood, attacks on faith and the supernatural, and to religious truth, as the pages of the new symposium journals. These library buildings, all handsome, sub- stantial structures on which public money is unstintedly lavished, are said to have many advantages. They are nice cozy shelters for the poor and unemployed. No one will 174 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. grudge them for that purpose though no doubt something less pretentious would do in most places. They keep the working classes out of sa- loons and gambling places. This is a matter of statistics that I am not competent to deal with, but if they do and do them no worse harm, supply no poison for their souls all right. They are a great help to the poor scholar and intelligent mechanic where books beyond their slender purses may be consulted ex- cellent. The best and newest literature, his- tory, travels, fiction, etc., is there within easy reach of all who can not have home libraries and who, out of working hours, are fond of reading and self-improvement admirable too, only it must here be added that from universal experience the heaviest demand is always on the fiction department, especially by the youthful of both sexes, so the "self- improvement" is of a shady and doubtful kind. They add to the culture and refinement, lessen ignorance and keep up education among the people. The experiment is too new to pronounce yet with confidence on PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 175 these happy effects. It should be the wish of every one that they may do so. But it is just possible that just such miscellaneous reading may have a lowering effect on moral- ity. And what will compensate a nation for that calamity? Further than that and a greater calamity is it to leave a people without any religious faith whatever. This is the recorded convic- tion of the wisest men in every generation. And beyond all doubt these free Public Li- braries in one respect contribute to this dan- ger. In nearly every one of them, on de- mand you can obtain any of the books that contain the most virulent attacks upon relig- ious belief for the last hundred years. And what is to be done? We can not send Samsons through the world to pull them down. We can not boy- cott them like the symposium magazines we should be summoned for taxes all the same. There remains only reform. Every rate- payer with a conscience for his country should agitate for a stricter censorship over all books of a dangerous tendency and the appointment of competent and upright cen- 1 76 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. sors. As no discrimination is to be hoped for in favor of any particular theological works, owing to the unhappy confusion introduced by the sects, eliminate that department alto- gether from the public libraries allow no books of any kind treating of religion. That is about the best that can be done and any body of united rate-payers could easily insist on it. 3. Legislators declare that this had to be done in the Public School system. The mul- titude of contending sects, they said, left them no choice but to drop religion altogether from public education. This may be a good argument to make use of for purifying the Public Libraries, where the omission can do no harm. But unfortunately such action, as applied to daily training of young children, consti- tutes the greatest of all dangers to the relig- ious faith of a country, and, as experience is every day abundantly proving, is accountable for the vast amount of religious indifference among the adult population wherever that system prevails. It is a fallacy to say that dropping all re- ligion out of education was the only choice PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 177 left to settle the question. There is more than one way of settling it. If the body of men in charge of state af- fairs deem it, in their might, incumbent upon them to prescribe what kind of education the people's children shall receive a right which is by no means incontestable then .rather than close the school-room door upon all religion they should have first tried, if they themselves still retain any due reverence for God's rights, less sweeping and less perilous measures. The people are divided into two classes. One maintains that religion forms a part and the most important part of education. The other says it does not. Meanwhile the State, assuming the duty of educating the na- tion, levies taxes for the purpose from all and yet positively refuses to have anything to say to religion. In the eyes of the first class, and they are no inconsiderable number, as the State fails in an essential part of its duty, they question the justice of the tax. But as they can not resist the might of the State they obey the law under protest, and peacefully "suggest another way out of the difficulty. They say, Remit us our proportion of this publig 178 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. tax which we promise to apply to the educa- tion that includes religious training for our children. That seems perfectly fair and just. Legislators reply that this would be cum- brous and troublesome. Yes, but if it is fair and just and right, is it not worth the trouble? Does it not make the trouble a duty to that class of citizens? They also make answer that it would breed divisions in the country to the danger of the State. The advocates of religious training meet this with denial. They protest their loyalty to the Constitution and offer any guarantee the State may see fit to exact, in the way of inspection of their schools and vigilance over their methods, in proof of their good faith. It is objected, in the third place, that it would break up uniformity in the standard of national education, which everybody admits ought to be maintained. Well, so do the religious educators admit it, and profess themselves ready to adopt the State standard in all secular branches where they do not clash with their religious views, which is only likely to happen in the sub- ject of history and they are moreover will- ing that the efficiency of their schools should be tested by State educational experts. PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 179 Could any demand be more manifestly fair than theirs, surrounded by such safeguards? Why is it not granted then? Because there is another large class who want to fling over all religion and who know that the present system admirably helps their desires. This is a proof of the danger to all belief which results from these schools. And (2) there is another equally large class whom, unhappily, sectarian jealousy and long-cherished animosity to another section of their fellow-citizens place in opposition to everything desired by them "We will not listen to any demand you make or any plea you put forth/' they say; "we suspect and distrust you." Shame! And this is a coun- try that boasts of perfect freedom and tolera- tion! In face of such opposition it can only be hoped that time will bring a more enlight- ened and kinder feeling. Meanwhile it rests upon those who care for the preservation of religious faith to do their part as citizens to remove prejudice. This prejudice rests on the hollowest of cries, yet one that always gains the people's ear and excites their alarm. Whenever the demand is heard for sanction and aid to schools with religious training in l8o THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. their programme, the cry is raised, "Our great national school system is in danger!" It rings through the land and at once rallies multitudes of people in opposition, who never thought about the question, who do not even understand what the danger may be or how or w T hence it is to come. It will be a duty to say and to show to such people that the national school system is not in danger, that this cry is as false as it is cap- tious, that the real danger is loss of a people's religious faith and the forfeit to the nation's detriment, of the greatest moral force for order and right conduct in this world. "The home and the church," it is said again, "are the places for religious training, they are sufficient to avert this danger." No doubt the home and the church bear their share of good influence upon the child, but experience show r s that this influence does not reach far enough and as often as not is more than outweighed by the loose example the child witnesses in the religionless school. The child ought to be habituated to a rever- ence for religion and impressed with its great importance in this life and for the next. But how expect the child to deem that important PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. l8l about which he never hears his teachers say one word on any of the six days of his weekly school-life? And if anything is ever said about it, it is more often than not a sneer from an agnostic teacher or a mockery of it in the mouths of his companions. No, it must be taken as generally true that unless religious ideas are interwoven with the chief occupation of the child's daily life, he will value them very little in his riper years. It is not, then, unfair to assert that one of the greatest dangers to religious belief in our times is the system of purely worldly educa- tion imposed on so many countries to-day in spite of the unceasing protest of the oldest church in the world and the two hundred and fifty millions of its members. 4. Another and no slight danger is the extreme worldliness and luxurious living of the rich. Think of the vast sums expended on their purely selfish tastes and pursuits. Take a peep into those splendid and costly club-houses the soft lounge of the Sybarite and Epicurean. Think of the floating palace pleasure yachts, the gorgeous villas at the summer resorts, the brilliant equipages and the dazzling toilettes, male and female. We 182 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. shudder at the polygamous Turk and the un- bridled animalism of the Oriental, but who keeps up those hundreds of costly and name- less establishments of licentiousness in every Christian city? Place side by side in your thoughts what you have learned of Christian- ity and its counsels, and say what could pos- sibly be in common between the one picture and the other? The luxury-loving rich are of the "eat, drink, to-morrow we die" class, and their example, like a contagion, spreads down through the ranks of the less favored of fortune in a reduced degree. Until these people wake up to the dread reality that here is not the place of final satisfaction and final reward, that it is a species of most reckless gambling to stake all on their few years here, faith can find no place among them or give anything to hope for. 5. Fiction which is turned out by the ton to amuse the leisure hour, is another danger. What does the best of it parade across its stage as representative of human society ? Why, a thronging crowd of unadulterated heathens. Even in the exquisitely refined and delicate stories of Miss Jane Austen, whom Lord Macaulay so highly praised, and in the PRESENT DAY DANGERS TO BELIEVERS. 183 admittedly clean novels of such masters as Thackeray and Dickens, you would never for a moment be reminded that you were read- ing about the inhabitants of a world once vis- ited by a Divine Teacher and a Divine Re- deemer. Say what people may, that can not help having the effect of slowly lulling the constant reader into an unholy and unsafe forgetfulness, and forming the fascinated reader into the mould and stamp of his favor- ite hero and heroine "These people seem to have got on famously without much ado about religion, why not I?" he is apt to say. The returning agnostic must not fail to take account of these five dangers and health- ily exercise his faith in not only avoiding but doing battle against their deadly tendencies. In the following brief and final chapter I offer a few hints to smooth the w r ay for some minds whom the many mysteries of faith hin- der and perplex without reason as will be seen. CHAPTER XII. MYSTERIES. We have to swallow a lot of "camels" in this world around us, why hesitate about a few more? From where I am sitting now I can see, in a bee line, the great Lick Observatory six- teen atmospheric miles away, it is thirty-two by the road. It looks just like a coach and sits on the summit of the range. Yet I know that under that little white dome, there is the largest telescope yet mounted in the world; and there are sidereal telescopes, elaborate photographic instruments, quadrants, sex- tants, true meridians what not? There is a trained staff of observers and distinguished mathematicians who live up there in six months of cloud and snow, five thousand feet above the heads and away from the converse of their fellows, to discover for us the secrets of the stars. It cost nearly a million dollars to instal that small establishment. And how lit- tle, how very little, they have been able to tell (W) MYSTERIES. 185 us; and without at all depreciating their great devotedness and industry how useless in the practical affairs of men has even that little proved to be! They have given us a few pic- tures. But as well photograph a "Fruit- vale" orange or a squash-melon, for all those pictures tell in reality of Mars or the moon. It was up there they discovered the fifth moon of Jupiter, a fact w r hich Professor Ball informed his readers, in the London News, was of "vast importance." In the hard real- ities of life and its personal concerns what is it to me whether Jupiter has five moons or fifty? They make stupendous calculations about the distances, the gravity and motions of planets, stars, double stars, comets and nebulae. Curious no doubt, but they are still gazing into mystery, and are as far from solving the familiar riddles close around them as ever. They have made great advances in knowledge of the sun. But who will tell us what heat really is, and why it acts so pecul- iarly? That sun is one million times the bulk of our earth; it is ninety-three millions of miles distant very well. The flood of heat cast out by a bulk like that ought to en- tirely envelop and keep in equal warmth all 186 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. parts of a small globe like the earth. So one would fancy. But ask Dr. Nansen to tell you what he saw and felt last year at the North Pole. No obliquity of the earth's axis will ever satisfy me as an explanation of that. But here is the real mystery of heat. It travels all the ninety-three millions of miles to come to us and for all that distance up to within a few feet it is cold, icy cold, proof, rise up straight into that sunshine in a bal- loon; in an hour or two you will be a frost- bitten corpse, the same sun still shining on you. Yet what enormous initial heat must have been projected to warm that little bed out there in the garden and make those spring flo\vers look so gay this morning! Last w r eek Professor Holden and his friends up at the "Lick" had several feet of snow all round them, while we were sitting in shirt sleeves and wearing sunhats from the heat down here! The illustration of the glass of a hot-house usually offered in explanation of this solves not for me the mystery why a thing that was icy cold becomes blazing hot by mere contact with the atmosphere, or by coming under it so to speak. Yet you be- lieve in heat. It is a thing that will blister MYSTERIES. 1 87 you if you do not believe in it. You, at the same time, really know nothing at all about the thing itself. Up at that "Lick" they will tell you the weight of this great earth enormous the figures in pounds would reach from here to there. Yet this tremendous bulk is float- ing about in, apparently, nothing! When we lie down upon it at night or step abroad upon it in the day, how do we know it will not give way under us and leave us there? We do not know at all, because everybody will tell you, if they are straight and honest, that au fond it is a mystery to us, yet you be- lieve it will not give way, you never heard of such a thing. Centripetal and centrifugal forces keep it up. Yes, of course, but what really is the thing, the res of that force, no one ever has told or ever will be able to tell us. Again, this earth is round. Some belated people still say it is not, but I know it is, be- cause some years ago I left the shore of that neighboring bay of San Francisco on the train, traveling eastward, and without ever turning back I sailed in again through its Golden Gate at an exactly opposite point of 188 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. the compass! Well, two-thirds of its vast,, round surface is water; why doesn't it spill? In the twenty-four days' stretch across the great Pacific we all believed it would not spill, but why, not a soul of us knew. Of course, most of us did know about "diurnal motion," and "pressure of atmosphere," and such other school-boy explanation, but the whole vast phenomenon and its nicety of arrangement who can ever comprehend? While I write, too, there is a beautiful little creeper called the "Bridal-veil" silently throwing its small, tender tentacles around that porch there, climbing the training laths as skilfully as a sailor-boy shins a halyard. What is it makes it do that? What is the force within it which pushes and guides? We all believed it would surely do that, as soon as this spring-time was old enough and the birds were singing again but how, the wisest of us do not know. These and a score of other things "as fa- miliar as household words" mystify us, yet we delight to believe in them all because they give us delight. And yet we grumble and question and doubt and say we can not pos- sibly believe a few other mysterious or mirac- MYSTERIES. 189 ulous things because we can not see through them at once. How absurd of us! And they come to us, too, on a word we ought to respect at leat that millions as good as we did respect and believe. It is backed, moreover, by a promise that if we but humbly-patient enough, this film-covered glass through which the light comes only very "darkly" will some day be shattered and the whole infinite range of knowledge and its unraveled secrets will be in full view with a whole eternity to revel in satiating this craving of ours to know. It is worth wait- ing for ever so patiently ever so humbly, is it not? and vastly better, you will agree, than the "exterior darkness" where the other people are to be forever who are both impa- tient and proud. The men of science object that in matters of faith or belief we surrender our reason. There is a fallacy, and not an honest one, in that assertion. It is not our reason we sur- render. It is our understanding. Our rea- son supplies us with valid and sufficient mo- tives for believing what we can not under- 190 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. stand even in the common things of life. Our reason we are never forbidden to use, but many objects are withdrawn from our un- derstanding and though it can not always serve us, is no hindrance to our belief. CHAPTER XIII. FURTHER DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. There are particular points of doctrine which some allege to be a block in the way of their believing, or at least a cause of their doubting and their unrest of mind. With such persons I have had no small ex- perience. I have met them on the high- ways of the world on the decks of ocean steamers, in railways and stage-coaches, in out-of-the-way towns of the New World, on lonely sheep-farms, in hotels and in private homes. It may be useful to relate this experience, and it may prove helpful to others like them, to subjoin the answers to their difficulties. I remember a young person on board the S. S. Rhotomahana coasting around New Zea- land saying so earnestly: "If I could only know for certain what God wants me to do, there is nothing, it seems to me, that I would not do for Him. * * * No, no, not what (191) IQ2 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. is in books or what men say I want Him to tell me Himself." Reply. You want what nobody else in the world is privileged to have is that reasonable? He certainly gave instruc- tions fully enough what each one is to do they have been handed down by tradition accurately enough. True, men have confused some parts of them but still on proper inquiry they are determinable and millions agree about them unreasonable expectation is fool- ish and futile. I remember the wealthy young squatter, as the Arumac drew out from wharf to resume her Australian coasting trip, looking wearily over the busy scene and saying, "What is the meaning of it all?" that is, the life of men the world we had been discussing. Reply. Unaided by information from the Author of it we never can know. Hence the need of revelation, and our duty to consult it and submit to what it tells us. Guesses from the data around us will never answer your question. I remember the celebrated meteorologist laying down for a smoking-room audience DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 193 a sympathetic one in mid-ocean, that the only comfortable way to live was just to fol- low all the instincts of nature when it can be conveniently done, they must be right, else we should not have them. Reply. It is honorable to be a naturalist in botany and the laws of storms as you are but dishonor and shame and remorse are sure to follow the naturalism you advocate outside your profession there is nothing more certain than that, as abundant experience around us in the world shows, law courts and jails are the sad necessities imposed by the "in- stincts of nature" that you would have men follow when it pleased them therefore there is something wrong with nature human nature in many respects since it leads to such disaster. It needs restraint and discipline and only when corrected by a higher teach- ing it can be trusted at all. I remember the young American sugar- planter, exiled in the tropics, guessing that whoever put him in this world would "look after him all right/' and if he were to go on existing forever the same disposer of him 194 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. would no doubt continue to do so, he "guessed he'd leave it just like that." Reply. -If He put you here just like a piece of furniture a table or a rocking-chair, no doubt he would but if He put you here and gave you the means expressly designed for looking after yourself, do not be too sure that He will not hold you responsible for not making use of them. And that you could not pos- sibly make a mistake about it, He told you what way he wanted you and ex- pected you to use them in looking after yourself at least thousands of your fellow-beings intelligent fellow-beings quite as intelligent as you, perhaps much more so, think He has. An En- glish writer of repute declared that he "would rather be an atheist and believe there was no God, than believe there was a God who having created rational beings, gave them no intimation of His will nor made any communication to them whatever the former is a daring creed, but the other is a foolish one." I remember the famous humorist serious DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 195 for the moment, while we plowed the At- lantic, w r anting to know how the God, repre- sented to us by the preachers, could be a pos- sibility in view of such a world as this is: and the English mechanic-engineer saying with an air of relief, but as if the relief were not quite comfortable, "Yes, a good many people now say there is no such being at all." Reply. The humorist in question is a well- known persifleur of religion perhaps since Voltaire's time no other author certainly none in the English tongue, has done so much harm to religious be- lief by sneers veneered with wit than he. He acknowledged on that very after- noon that he had passed a most irre- ligious youth got no instruction and knew nothing of religion but what he afterwards picked up himself. Besides, on his own admission, and to judge from a few choice personal anecdotes, that portion of his existence had been none of the cleanest. However, I told him he was going against the universal sense of mankind in every time and place, which is not a safe thing to do, and that the reason this world, as it is, 196 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. did not better reflect the Supreme Being in all His goodness was owing to the gift of free will to men and the exceedingly bad use that was made of it "bringing death into the world and all our woe." And the bad use that many still con- tinue to make of it. For our friend the engine-maker I might have quoted the opening of a certain Psalm "The fool says in his heart there is no God." But if any good is to be done to such people you must never be offensive to them. Prove to them there is a God by the very -necessity of the case no other way of accounting for our world and its teeming life. I remember the exceedingly agreeable and perfectly gentlemanly young "station owner," fond of reading in the lonely evenings to the sound of the Pacific surf; very advanced in his opinions about "prehistoric man" and the myths of revelation. Though reared in the Church of England and married to a convent- educated and Catholic wife he declared his utter inability to believe what his Christian neighbors seemed to do so easily. Reply. See the danger of reading books by DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 1 97 subtle and -accomplished speculators without any previous training for argu- ment and never having heard the proper explanations of the leading facts of rev- elation. Pre-historic man solves no mystery of the creation it pushes it back a step, that's all. But pre-historic man has by no means been certainly discovered. He has turned out to be a mistake of the geolo- gists, or at least many skilled in that experimental investigation geology it can hardly be called a science, cer- tainly not an exact one admit that the evidence for him is only slenderly par- tial therefore entirely inconclusive. Thirdly, what does it matter to us, as a practical question, how old our race is; the individual responsibility for individ- ual conduct remains for each one of us, and that is what should chiefly oc- cupy our attention. Again, we should be chary of talking of myths where so much that is mysterious and inexpli- cable to us lies under our very eyes all around. There is a point in all hu- man reasoning where something must 198 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. be taken without proof, if reason itself is not to sink into the void where folly reigns, and madness rages. As to inability to believe like his neighbors were he as humble as they were; had he confessed his sins and re- pented of them as they had; had he quietly and trustfully prayed daily as they do, belief would have been as easy to him as to them. Without those things it is easy to no one. Nor is the question of personal sin a rash judg- ment. Without certain fixed moral re- straints and instructive guidance in youth, it is impossible for any one to escape falling into temptation, and hav- ing sinned, and sin remaining, a parti- tion is raised between God and the soul. Until that is removed the peace of be- lieving will never come. It was not for nothing we were told, "Blessed are the clean of heart for they shall see God." This implies its converse, Unblessed are the unclean of heart, for they can not see God. I remember the Queensland "slop-shop" keeper who told me to write him down an DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 199 atheist. He said this was a country of free thought, and he did not want any more trouble than his business gave him. Reply. True, every one was free, before the law, to think as he pleased, but there was a higher law before which he was not free, -else why did he not with equal freedom think he was not to die; think that he could arrange for his continued existence just as it suited him; that, he could not do. Therefore, there was a Power superior to him of which he had better take account. His business no doubt demanded attention and should have it, but a day would come when business and all he ever gained by it should stay behind and he would have to go forth alone, as little consulted as when he was sent here. Is it not a lit- tle daring, then, to brave a Power so much greater than he and not try to find out what that Power requires to be done beyond mere business, which is not the ultimate end of man? I remember the old fellow on an American "ranch" who boasted being then in the very "sere leaf," indeed that he never had 200 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. done anything wrong (in his numerous family such a thing as prayer was unknown) ; he was not afraid to die. He had been pretty suc- cessful after a hard struggle in this life, and if there happened to be another life, he would struggle there too, and no doubt meet with the same success. Moreover, he had been a good Mason and everybody knew that* the Free Masons were too great a body to fear anything or anybody! "They were all right." Reply. A seared conscience is the greatest of calamities. It is the eternal judg- ment already passed. It is a most dif- ficult thing to revivify with new sap. But it is the only chance. It may be done by convincing this self-satisfied soul that he had done wrong, by omis- sion for instance. "Remember to keep holy my Sabbath day," was that never infringed in course of your long life? "Thou shalt adore thy God and Him only shalt thou serve." You rarely, if ever, even acknowledged Him by prayer, and so forth. As for that con- fidence in the great Masonic body, be not deceived about their importance or help. Why, they were unheard of be- DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 2OI fore the seventeenth century and orig- inated among the Socinians and other free-thought Protestants of these com- paratively recent times. As a mutual help society you may have derived cer- tain money benefits from it, but its methods are suspect to all candid minds. If all its objects are good why act like conspirators and bind people by oath and (sometimes) under penalty of death to secrecy ? It becomes apparent every day that their methods are either foolish or wicked. They are losing caste among all sensible and re- spectable people, and it may be safely predicted that, in time, this sensational association will die oblivion's death like all other absurd conspiracies. The first notice ever taken of them by the Popes was in 1738. Clement XII. ex- plained who they were and what were their objects, and forbade all Catholics to have anything to do with them. If they had existed always throughout Europe is it likely that the watchful head of European society, the Pope, would never have heard of them before or noticed them? most unlikely. 202 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. This condition of soul in old age always arises from keeping the mind in culpable religious ignorance through life. If people would read even the Catechism occasionally this could never happen. I remember the Colonial young lady High school graduate who professed to be- lieve in nothing and was heard to long for some one to arise who should free the world from this "bother" about religion. Reply. (I regret to say that this case is but a type of numerous young ladies to be met in the Colonies, as an outcome of free, compulsory and secular education. While I was in Wellington, N. Z., a young girl of 19 walked out one fine summer morning from her parents' well-to-do home, furnished with sketch- ing materials, and sat down in the pub- lic park apparently for a practise in drawing of which she was rather fond. After a while she there deliberately took a pistol from her pocket and blew her brains out!) The best remedy for our young friend, whom everybody ad- mitted to be as amiable as she was fair. DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 203 turned out to be association with a good Catholic family in which there were well-brought-up young girls like herself, who did not preach to her or at her, but who won her by the happy and unostentatious example of their own lives and in time of need did her gentle and generous service. I remember the amiable and hospitable lady born far south of the Equator, who was "trying Theosophy;" liked it very well, but had not got so far as to reconcile herself to the fact that her four beautiful children had already been cats or mice or snakes, may be, in the preexistence of the second or third piano-sphere; her husband was a Rosecrucian and very deep in the occult. Reply. I gave her a "Life of Madame Bla- vatsky," by a gentleman of St. Peters- burg, whose work has been translated into English and published at the cost of the London "Psychical Research Society/ 7 That work must conclu- sively end forever, in all reasonable and respectable minds, the theosophic craze. On her own evidence this woman is proved to be but a clever ad- 204 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. venturess, who did not stick at the meanest tricks of a common charlatan to deceive and delude her dupes. This book may be had from any London book agent, and is most useful to have just now to lay Maliatmas and spooks. I remember the man who was puzzled to know if Christ were God and came to re- deem the w r orld, why was it not visibly re- deemed? Did the world as we see it look as if it were redeemed? The world is full of sin and suffering and death. Then he told a story of a poor old negro Methodist of Caro- lina who had had "salvation" preached at him all his life, and who was very religious in his own bothered way; one day an earthquake happened that shook things up "pretty con- siderable" and scared the old man so that he took to his prayers. "O A'mighty God," he said, "you come right down heah and fix things up, but don't you send yo' Son dis time, come yo'self dis job is too big and mebbe He can't do it." He excused the pro- fanity by the great simplicity of the poor, old soul, but he had no doubt but the same idea was struggling through the old darkey's brain that was such a trouble to his own mind. The thing was de facto not accomplished. DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 205 Reply. Redemption, as has always been ex- plained, does not primarily regard the earthly condition of the race. Its ef- fect is to make it possible for man to re- gain a title to the "eternal inheritance" "facia redemptions" the price hav- ing been paid for him. The title had been hopelessly lost to him, an infinite reparation was needed co-equal with the character of Him who was wronged by revolt against His command. This was done through the Incarnation; and through that alone could it have been effected. But it has not ended man's state of probation it now gives him a powerful and salutary motive for effort; he is assured that he can earn the great reward and his earning power, so to speak, is made effective and secure. It is not accurate to say that there are no effects visible in the world from the Incarnation and its work. A vast change for the better has come over the lives of men, w r ho by the good use of their free will have lent themselves to the influence of Christianity. Com- parisons of Christian lives \vith the 206 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. most cultured among ancient peoples, prove this beneficial change beyond all doubt. And the cotemporary knowledge we have of peoples not yet Christianized affords evidence of Christianity's elevating and civilizing influence. If sin abounds and its necessary shadow suffering, it conies from the perverse use of a will left free to choose evil courses, which unfortunately the majority do, in spite of and in opposition to the teachings and protests of Christianity; and so have apparently discredited by their conduct the work of the Redemption. Death for the good is not an evil; you ought to be a little more advanced in reasoning power and intelligence than the "negro from Carolina." I remember the proprietor of a New Zea- land homestead picturesquely situated by the "wide Pacific strand" a man of more than average education, who was very aggressive against all things of faith. His mind had even taken an angry turn. His mother, to whom he had been much attached, had died in the slow suffering of cancer. This in- DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 207 censed him against the supernal Power he used to say, "If I could only get at it !" He assumed the role of an infidel propa- gandist on all occasions even with his poor workmen. He had only two children. One had been baptized by the care of the grand- mother, who was "an Anglican;" when she died he kept the second unbaptized as an experiment to show off against "the other fel- low." He had made his gentle and amiable little wife as great an unbeliever as himself. Reply. He was reared in the Anglican com- munion. Time has sadly demonstrated that private judgment is the portico of free thought, which means thought ut- terly unbridled and unlicensed a thing that is fast making human society un- bearable for reasonable and civilized men. Mrs. Besant, the wife of an An- glican parson, has also informed the world that the sight of her first baby, agonizing in diphtheria, steeled her heart against God and religion. It is as unfair as it is shallow to charge to God every particular of the condition of secondary causes who are free agents and endowed with faculties for self-help 2O8 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. and mutual protection. It looks a fair bargain that the First Cause should have given over a portion of His crea- tion to such agents furnished with suf- ficient capital, so to speak, to get along. He added to it besides a great liberality of treatment, never interfering with them for their allotted time, withdraw- ing his visible presence lest it should inconvenience or hamper them in any way; and for all that only exacting a reasonable service and acknowledg- ment. The accidents of all kinds oc- curring in this temporary condition of things (and sickness and diseases are among them) regard the secondary agents. To expect Him to interfere in every case exceeds the limits of His part of the bargain as a Provisor generalis the primary Providence. It is much to have been assured by Him, that full and just compensation shall be made to those who submissively suffer; "Merces tua magna nimis." It is charged that it is inhumane in Him to look on at suffering, able to relieve and cure, and not doing so; even men DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 2OQ would not be so unfeeling were it in their power. But this is making God human merely. We hear a good deal from infidels about anthropomorphism, which obtains, say they, when be- lievers reduce God merely to human dimensions in their conception of Him. But what are they doing in the case dis- cussed? Why, they are supposing God to be exactly like the human being, and blaming Him for not being so. A perpetual interference for relief of every pang or pain no matter how prolonged would upset the whole established order, which no rational being, at present, looks for. If this state were final perhaps we might, with a show of reason, look to Him for help at every turn. But it is not final, we know; and the general expectation is that the day of full compensation and explana- tion will surely come. With regard to the stupid and unfair experiment of this man with his unbap- tized boy, the same explanation holds good as was given above about redemp- tion. The effects await on the action 2IO THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. of free will and its use, and the sacra- ment chiefly refers to the spiritual order and the eternal future state. It is not a visible and miraculous transformation in the present; no one pretends that it is. The titled Poet who returned a Buddhist from Japan delights to dwell on the superiority of manners and bear- ing of Japanese children over Christian children. Besides that this depends on what kind of Christian children he has been acquainted with; he forgets that we learn from other travelers in that country, as intelligently ob- servant as he, that the Japs in gen- eral even from a tender age, are the most shamelessly lascivious of peoples and the Chinese, as is well known, are hardly better. Finally, with regard to this man's wish "to get at" the great First Cause- merely to fancy this little five-feet long thing with a bald head "getting at" the mighty Maker of the universe, has something so sublimely ludicrous in it that it would amuse if its diabolic blas- phemy did not terrify. DIFFICULTIES AJSTD THEIR ANSWERS. 211 I remember the souls troubled about prayer. One said that it was talking into a great silence; it was hard not to grow tired of saying things all by yourself to which no sound or word was ever heard in reply; that it required a force of imagination, which many people do not possess, to fancy God present with us or listening when we pray. Reply. Prayer of course is not like a human conversation. It is impossible without faith. Prepared by what faith teaches about it; that there is a God who is in- terested in us because he owns us; who wishes us to look on Him as a Father and expects us to depend on and con- fide in Him; who is all powerful, able and willing to help in all things for our good then with such conviction in mind, it will appear far from talking into void, or tiresome or needing imagina- tion. At the same time every one must confess to a kind of natural need of communing about himself with some one. This comes from the fact of our individuality. The peculiar and dis- tinct personality each one has, makes us uncomfortable to feel alone and iso- 212 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. lated amid the accidents and fortunes of a temporary existence. This is a natural predisposition to prayer. It is evidenced in the child telling all about its little self and its concerns to its mother or its care-taker. Nor does the same want ever leave the man, which proves the reasonableness of the assertions of faith. Another had given up prayer because it seems so unmanly cow r ardly in fact to grovel perpetually, to bepraise and beg. Reply. An unmanly or cowardly act is to re- fuse to face a danger or to endure a hardship or to shirk a painful or labori- ous task when duty and a greater good call on us to do and dare. Where do we do any of these mean things in prayer? We feel our dependence, knowing we have been created by a Power superior to ourselves exalting the qualities of that Creator, idealizing His great and good attributes, is so far from groveling that it exalts our idea of ourselves increases our esteem for ourselves and gives us courage. It is only fair and just in us to acknowledge DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 213 our dependence, and manly, too. We ask to be strengthened as to what He wants us to do, and made ready to do it at any cost or trouble to ourselves. Recognizing in ourselves an inherent weakness to do what is good and noble, we seek His help and encouragement to overcome our sluggish inclinations. What is cowardly or unmanly in all that? Why, it is brave and manly, and rational. We break His commands and sue for pardon. If we did not, it would be con- tempt of the High Court and most in- sulting to Him. Among ourselves men do not commend or admire the brag- gart or desperado who violates his country's laws and despises its courts of justice. The man who assaults a battery of Maxim guns with a pea- shooter or a pop-gun is not set down among the manly and the brave he is a fool. Not less a fool is the man who daunts the Omnipotent and braves the eternal punishment. You have to study the difference be- tween the brave man and a fool. 214 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Another was troubled at seeing people in long hours of prayer before the altar at such times as the Quarant 'ore, or Nuns and Monks in their chapels they come and go and never the slightest notice taken of them, or at least sign of approval how wearisome! Reply. These good people know what they are doing. They are quite satisfied about the silence, recognize it as part of the trial of faith, and are content to await the end, knowing that the day for silence will be over soon and knowl- edge of all things imparted. I was once surprised to find in a novel of the sensuous school this sentence: "When men and women rise from prayer and find themselves better, that prayer is answered." That is the only notice those good souls want or expect. Another foun-rl a great difficulty in the text of Matt. vi:7, where much speaking in prayer is forbidden by our Lord; in fact He there confines all prayer to one short form the Our Father and the direct contradiction to that in the voluminous prayer-books and Breviaries is sanctioned and enjoined by the Church. DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 215 Reply. That text is aimed at the correction of one special abuse the ostentatious and empty piety of the Pharisees as may plainly be seen by reading the whole passage. In other places, when not addressing Himself to an abuse, our Lord incul- cates frequent and repeated prayer and gave the example Himself of lo.ng prayer prolix-ins orabat. The Our Father is a short form, it is true, but prayers of all kinds no matter how long are nothing but the expan- sions of that divine compendium, as ascetic writers often demonstrated. Another adduced puzzling cases of people who prayed long and earnestly for a mani- festly good thing and were not heard one especially about people weakly addicted to the drink habit. He had known some who were so ashamed and conscious of that terrible \veakness that they left nothing undone, fol- lowed strictly every spiritual advice, novenas, communions, confessions, for help, and to no avail they fell again and again. Reply. It is nowhere taught that miracles follow prayers on all occasions. 2l6 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. Neither must it be looked for, that prayer should result in loss of will- power in the petitioner in any given ac- tion or habit one's will is not sud- denly taken away and grace substituted for it. We must be satisfied to strug- gle against temptation aided by grace, with a will very much inclined to the evil whose habit we culpably began. In the case cited there were relapses, it is true, but to my knowledge there were intervals of abstention and im- provement and that was a decided gain. We can not know the workings of an individual soul or what flaw there may be in its disposition to account for fail- ure, but it is there, be assured, lies the cause. Our Lord promised that every- thing we ask the Father in His name shall be granted yes, but it must be in everything in matter and disposition entirely worthy of the holy name we ask in. I remember the soul distressed by the sight of a crucifix; the thought would keep rising, What kind of a Being or Justice can that be who could look on a spectacle so horrible and DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 217 be pleased or placated or appeased by it or even accept it at all? Then the question would come If that is God if Christ is God have we not the curious situation of God offering Himself to Himself Himself suf- fering that His own self or His own Justice may be satisfied? There are souls would rather suffer any loss themselves than accept anything so cruel from another. Reply. This opens up the whole mystery of the Incarnation, and it is a very great one. We can never hope to fathom that here below. Convince yourself of having been assured on very good au- thority, accepted by millions as wise as you, that unless that happened it would fare very badly with you and with all this world. Relieve yourself also with the opinion that all the cruel details of that sacrifice were not essential because a word an act one tear of a divine and human person, would have been price enough for many condemned races all his actions being of infinite value but Christ chose Himself to un- dergo them to increase men's notion of the great guilt of sin and offer a strik- 2l8 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. ing contradiction in His own person to pride, lust and guilty indulgences to which they are, as everybody knows, and as He foreknew, so prone. It is not accurate to say that God of- fered Himself to Himself barely. There was present in the offering a human na- ture suffering, too, and whose suffer- ings clothed round by a divine person- ality, became infinite in value and Co- equal with the magnitude of an offense done to infinite justice and majesty. About souls suffering loss rather than accept for themselves so cruel a sacri- fice they little know what they are talking about. On the assurance of revelation there is nothing more certain than that if that loss did overtake them they would be eternally sorry for their pride-inspired and ignorant folly. I remember others disturbed by reading about the world in the time of Christ. It was in a very bad state there were teeming pop- ulations in the farther East, in India, Thibet, China, Japan Brahmins, Buddhists, Confu- cians, Shinto idol worshipers. Black Africa was crowded with naked savage cannibals DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 219 reveling in lust, slaughter, blood, cruelty worse than the horrors there to-day, no doubt. The vast Roman Empire had altars for im- pure idols and temples for a hundred gods. The islands of antipodean seas were peopled as now, with fearful flesh-eating tribes. Christ came to teach and to save all, yet He seemed to take no care at all about these hundreds of millions, living and dying while He lived. He never alluded to their exist- ence. His work was restricted very local. A very small number knew he was there at all, and fewer still knew him for the Messiah, and when He died, notwithstanding all His miracles, scarcely any at all believed or were converted. Reply. The same difficulty shadows the whole history of the Jews. It lies in the words chosen people. The fact is certainly be- fore us that they were divinely favored before all other and more numerous peoples. At the same time it clears away a good deal of the mystery to re- member that all peoples in the far-back centuries were Hebrews once all of the one stock. The human race was once small in number, but in the growth 220 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. and vast increase there was a disper- sion-process and a winnowing accord- ing to deserts; and God dealt to each the measure of His justice and treatment of His wisdom, that they deserved from Him. Abraham and his seed deserved best from Him and so were made His favored agents. The rest were left to wander apart and left to their own de- vices, just as we see most of them still yellow, red, brown and black men idolaters and cannibals. Christ did not choose to appear si- multaneously and preach to them all, though being divine. He might have done so, it is true. Equally true that millions still remain ignorant of Him and His divine mission. But to argue with justice from this and similar facts regarding peoples, we should know the whole state of the case concerning the history of their conduct and deal- ings with God. Manifestly we do not know and never can know that, so it is but reasonable to assume a neutral, if a waiting, attitude. Had Christ come in that clearly superhuman character, then DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 221 the present order of trial would have there and then ended. Belief should have been compelled and faith dis- pensed with. That kind of coming, how r ever, is promised and will happen then all things shall be made manifest. As to the fewness of the converted, notwithstanding all the miracles our Lord performed, it must be remem- bered that the immense numbers 5,000 after one sermon and 3,000 after another who became Christians im- mediately on the apostle's preaching Christ crucified and risen, must have been those who had seen Him and wit- nessed His miracles, and some the sub- jects of them in their own persons, else they would never have yielded so readily. I remember those again who were sad- dened in mind and doubtful of a divine good- ness by the cruelties of life; the hideous de- formities and diseases, the slow agony of wasting cancers and leprosy and the like; the blood-thirstiness that breaks out in all man- kind, savage and civilized alike; then the cruelties of the animal world; all the fierce 222 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. beasts and poisonous things; tigers, lions, snakes, jaguars, wild elephants, sharks and sword-fish, vultures, hawks, eagles the butcher-bird that impales its living food on a thorn and sits waching its writhings the sea louse that eats into the spinal marrow of the whale and drives the monster mad the Kea of New Zealand that digs its beak into the flesh of the live sheep for the kidney fat and only that who gave them all those piti- less instincts? Reply. Why should such things trouble your mind? Have you personally any great reason to complain of God's good- ness to you? If unhappily there arc people subject to the fearful ills that flesh is heir to, as a consequence of the aboriginal blight of evil, has not God imparted instincts of compassion and mutual help to his creatures? All are not so afflicted far from it only the few, very few, comparatively, and it generally comes from the accidents oc- casioned 'by secondary causes; and is it not beautiful to see the sane always ready to succor the unsound, exhibit- ing rare and unselfish virtue and confer- DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 223 ring comparative happiness on the af- flicted? Men are thus made the vice- gerents the secondary Providence of God to one another in the world. The old scholastics have discussed the ani- mals and their ways. It was their opin- ion that having been made for man and originally subject to him, it was part of his penalty when he fell, that the animals should break away from him into a wild state and become his enemies, and thus diverted, by his fault, from their original destination, they have ramped about, soured lost waste parts of the creation, in fact, ever since; but the Creator has not left man at their mercy; man still holds the upper hand, in the main, as everybody knows. Human blood-thirstiness is the ruinous part of a structure that once was noble, and which still shows not unsightly bits of what it originally was. It can only be accounted for on the ground of the fall into moral evil the failure in the first trial of free will another part of sin's penalty. The instances of set and deliberate 224 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. cruelty of animals are far from being authenticated, nor are such practises uniform and habitual. A sheep farmer of long experience in New Zealand told me that the Kea bird learned to locate the kidney fat of the sheep from his habit of prowling about the station slaughter- yard and picking at the sheep-skins spread out to dry with the wool down. The most toothsome bit was this fat in the region of the kidneys or liver, and when the skins were not there to be picked, he went for the sheep on the hills and, locating the part where he got his so-appetizing morsel, he fas- tened his claws in the wool and sunk his beak in the soft flesh above the haunches, even then he did not always strike the fat directly either, or neatly! Other birds, from imitative habit, copied the knowing ones and so this curious custom of theirs came to be. For the rest, what are animals to you ; you have not created them; you are not responsible for them? They are very near us, and they are as far away from us as mystery; they are strangers DIITU I L I II-.S AND THEIR ANSWERS. 225 to us in reality. They live their own peculiar life and there's an end of it. I remember others, and they were many, who were incensed against the doctrine of Hell. Some felt that a Being who could look on at the tortures of his own crea- ture for eternity, could not be an object of any one's love, admiration and adoration; others, that they were doing God a service, vindicating Him, by repudiating what they called a horrible doctrine; others asserted that it was a fiction invented by men to hold other men in subjection by force of terror a horrid nightmare imposed on human minds by the designing and so on. Reply. Xo doubt Hell is an awful doctrine. Xo use in saying that it is easy to be calmly reconciled to it. But there is no use either in denying it. Viewing the minds of men as a whole 1 , ^ every time it formed an inseparable portion of religious belief. This extrinsic evidence throws doubt at once on your denial. But the thing is so awful that pre- sented even as doubtful it should urge every one to take no risk, to seek fur- ther and make himself very sure lie is 15 226 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. making no mistake about what may result in such frightful disaster to him- self. For it is said to be eternal and a punishment. Then he should remember that if this be so, no amount of assertion or repu- diation on his part can in the least alter the fact. And if our Lord ever revealed anything about the unseen in unmis- takable terms, it was this sombre fact. There is one comfort at any rate. We are not there yet, and there are ways of escaping going there. And the ways are so well known and within easy reach, that we can be morally sure of never having to go there if we like. The only reason why any one goes to that dreadful place is that he departs from life in a state of overt rebellion and contempt for the great Creator who gave him his being. Where else could he go? Surely he could not expect to be cordially greeted and richly re- warded and welcomed hospitably, after such reckless and daring conduct as his. Those \vho have power in this world are not accustomed to w r elcome to their DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 227 homes and dine and be hail-fellows with the men who despise their author- ity and trample on the laws such a thing was never heard of. Do you think it will be any different in the realm beyond the grave? The love of God comes irresistibly with serving Him and acknowledging Him above all with a good conscience. The truth is a good deal of this questioning about Hell arises from not having a good con- science and knowing very well why having got into scrapes by sinning freely, it takes a lot of whistling to keep up courage, like the boy passing through the graveyard. When you pass in your walks by a convict-prison, you know very well there is a painful state of things going on there fellow- beings undergoing severe and often dreadful punishment. You return to your dinner none the less with appetite unimpaired. You do not rail against the judge and are not the least angry witli the jury who convicted. Why? Be- cause you very sensibly say Justice de- manded it. But it need not be eternal 228 THE REACTION FROM SCIENCE. To say that you must be in a position to understand all about God's justice, which you are not, that being infinite and above our limited comprehension. Besides between you and me is there anything less than the sanction of eter- nal punishment that will restrain the run of men from vice? You know there is not. Your rearrangement of things for God is to say it without wish- ing to be impolite, an impertinence. It does not concern us; we are not mas- ters here. If there is one thing clearer than another it is that we are wholly dependent otherwise we could settle down comfortably and arrange to 'stay in life as long as we pleased. But we can not stay. Some one will call some day. So it is wisest to prepare to go in submission, and you may be sure everything will be right with us then. The general disposition of things here below and our destinies are not in our hands, but it is given to us to make the best of them and, turning them to our advantage, we need not go to Hell. But enough the famous and devout DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR ANSWERS. 22Q author of the "Imitation" propounds rather dogmatically that "they who travel much are rarely (without emphasis) sanctified" by the way how did he know since he never went anywhere? but be that as it may, the widely- traveled meet by the waysides and on the high-roads of life many odd specimens of hu- manity and fall in with curious phases of hu- man psychology. If their experiences take a little of the spiritual shine off themselves, there is left them a compensation from the good or instruction or pleasure that others may derive from reading them, even in the very humble way here presented. THE END. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. r j m SfcNV .'."J T^D 21 A-SOm-3 'fi2 General Library U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES NIVKRSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRA