As captured January 14, 2025

2 files changed, 27198 insertions, 27198 deletions

diff --git a/74798-0.txt b/74798-0.txt
index 25fd001..817d5b6 100644
--- a/74798-0.txt
+++ b/74798-0.txt
@@ -1,12270 +1,12270 @@
-

-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***

-

-

-

-

-

-

-TOLERANCE

-

-

-

-

-                                TOLERANCE

-

-                                   _By_

-                         HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON

-

-    _The final end of the State consists not in dominating over

-    men, restraining them by fear, subjecting them to the will of

-    others. Rather it has for its end so to act that its citizens

-    shall in security develop soul and body and make free use of

-    their reason. For the true end of the State is Liberty._

-

-                                                            SPINOZA.

-

-    _Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future. I will wait

-    for Humanity at the crossroads, three hundred years hence._

-

-                                                    LUIGI LUCATELLI.

-

-                              [Illustration]

-

-                                _NEW YORK_

-                             BONI & LIVERIGHT

-                                   1925

-

-                     COPYRIGHT 1925 [Illustration] BY

-                          BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

-                       PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

-

-                              [Illustration]

-

-

-

-

-TO THE MEMORY OF

-

-JOHN W. T. NICHOLS

-

-

-

-

-CONTENTS

-

-

-                                                        PAGE

-

-          PROLOGUE                                        11

-

-  CHAPTER

-

-       I. THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE                        17

-

-      II. THE GREEKS                                      28

-

-     III. THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT                      68

-

-      IV. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS                        80

-

-       V. IMPRISONMENT                                   104

-

-      VI. THE PURE OF LIFE                               114

-

-     VII. THE INQUISITION                                126

-

-    VIII. THE CURIOUS ONES                               146

-

-      IX. THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD                  160

-

-       X. CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL

-            AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR                  168

-

-      XI. RENAISSANCE                                    172

-

-     XII. THE REFORMATION                                181

-

-    XIII. ERASMUS                                        195

-

-     XIV. RABELAIS                                       212

-

-      XV. NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD                         223

-

-     XVI. THE ANABAPTISTS                                246

-

-    XVII. THE SOZZINI FAMILY                             257

-

-   XVIII. MONTAIGNE                                      269

-

-     XIX. ARMINIUS                                       275

-

-      XX. BRUNO                                          286

-

-     XXI. SPINOZA                                        292

-

-    XXII. THE NEW ZION                                   307

-

-   XXIII. THE SUN KING                                   321

-

-    XXIV. FREDERICK THE GREAT                            326

-

-     XXV. VOLTAIRE                                       330

-

-    XXVI. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA                               352

-

-   XXVII. THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION                  361

-

-  XXVIII. LESSING                                        372

-

-    XXIX. TOM PAINE                                      387

-

-     XXX. THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS                         393

-

-

-

-

-TOLERANCE

-

-

-

-

-TOLERANCE

-

-

-

-

-PROLOGUE

-

-

-Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.

-

-To the north, to the south, to the west and to the east stretched the

-ridges of the Hills Everlasting.

-

-A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a deep worn gully.

-

-It came out of the Mountains of the Past.

-

-It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.

-

-It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the humble needs of

-the villagers.

-

-In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and had filled their

-casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy life.

-

-The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the shady corners where they

-had spent their day, pondering over the mysterious pages of an old book.

-

-They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who would have

-preferred to play with the pretty pebbles, brought down from distant

-lands.

-

-Often these words were not very clear.

-

-But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten race. Hence they

-were holy.

-

-For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was venerable. And those

-who dared to gainsay the wisdom of the fathers were shunned by all decent

-people.

-

-And so they kept their peace.

-

-Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused the common share

-of the products of the garden?

-

-Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the narrow streets

-of the little town, vague stories of men and women who had dared to ask

-questions.

-

-They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.

-

-A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range that hid the

-sun.

-

-Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.

-

-The years came and the years went by.

-

-Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Out of the darkness crept a man.

-

-The nails of his hands were torn.

-

-His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of long marches.

-

-He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.

-

-Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he was carried to a

-cot.

-

-In the morning throughout the village it was known: “He has come back.”

-

-The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They had always known

-that this was to be the end.

-

-Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll away from the foot

-of the mountains.

-

-And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their heads and

-whispered burning words.

-

-They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law. Bitterly this man

-had sinned against the wishes of Those Who Knew.

-

-As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought to trial.

-

-They meant to be lenient.

-

-They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother. They recalled

-the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert these thirty years ago.

-

-The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be obeyed.

-

-The Men Who Knew would see to that.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the people stood

-around in respectful silence.

-

-He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders bade him sit down.

-

-He refused.

-

-They ordered him to be silent.

-

-But he spoke.

-

-Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought those who but a

-short time before had been his comrades.

-

-“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be rejoiced. I have come

-back from beyond the mountains. My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands

-have felt the touch of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.

-

-“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my father.

-

-“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north lay the

-ranges from the Beginning of Time.

-

-“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush and a hasty shaking

-of heads. When I insisted, I was taken to the rocks and shown the

-bleached bones of those who had dared to defy the Gods.

-

-“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love those who are

-brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to me from their sacred books. The

-Law, they explained, had ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The

-Valley was ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the

-fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the mountains were

-of the Gods. What lay beyond was to remain unknown until the End of Time.

-

-“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as they have lied to

-you.

-

-“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as rich as any. And men

-and women of our own flesh and blood. And cities resplendent with the

-glories of a thousand years of labor.

-

-“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen the promise of a

-happier life. Follow me and I shall lead you thither. For the smile of

-the Gods is the same there as here and everywhere.”

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.

-

-“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege! A fit

-punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason. He dares to scoff at

-the Law as it was written down a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”

-

-And they took up heavy stones.

-

-And they killed him.

-

-And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that it might lie

-there as a warning to all who questioned the wisdom of the ancestors.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Then it happened a short time later that there was a great drought. The

-little Brook of Knowledge ran dry. The cattle died of thirst. The harvest

-perished in the fields, and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.

-

-The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened. Everything would

-all come right in the end, they prophesied, for so it was writ in their

-most Holy Chapters.

-

-Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They were so very old.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Winter came.

-

-The village was deserted.

-

-More than half of the populace died from sheer want.

-

-The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the mountains.

-

-But the Law said “No!”

-

-And the Law must be obeyed.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-One night there was a rebellion.

-

-Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into silence.

-

-Feebly the Old Men protested.

-

-They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot. They bewailed the

-ingratitude of their children, but when the last wagon pulled out of the

-village, they stopped the driver and forced him to take them along.

-

-The flight into the unknown had begun.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It was no easy task to

-discover the road he had mapped out.

-

-Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the first cairn was

-found.

-

-From there on the trip was less difficult.

-

-The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the woods and amidst

-the endless wilderness of rock.

-

-By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.

-

-Silently the people looked at each other.

-

-“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and the Old Men were

-wrong....

-

-“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....

-

-“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the Old Men sit in

-our carts and chant their ancient lays....

-

-“He saved us, and we slew him....

-

-“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we could have known at

-the time....”

-

-Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and they drove their

-cows and their goats into the pastures and they built themselves houses

-and laid out their fields and they lived happily for a long time

-afterwards.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave pioneer in the

-fine new edifice which had been erected as a home for the Wise Old Men.

-

-A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley, but when the

-spot was reached where his body ought to have been, it was no longer

-there.

-

-A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.

-

-A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail (now a magnificent

-highway). It gave the name of the man who had first defied the dark

-terror of the unknown, that his people might be guided into a new freedom.

-

-And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some day (so we hope) it

-shall no longer be.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER I

-

-THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE

-

-

-In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became ruler of the eastern

-half of the Roman Empire.

-

-This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the much disputed railroad

-junction of the late war) had no use for “book-learnin’.” It was by

-his orders that the ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally

-suppressed. And it was he who closed the doors of the only Egyptian

-temple that had continued to do business centuries after the valley of

-the Nile had been invaded by the monks of the new Christian faith.

-

-This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far from the

-first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men could remember, the

-spot had been dedicated to the worship of Isis and for some curious

-reason, the Goddess had survived where all her African and Greek and

-Roman rivals had miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth

-century, the island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of

-picture writing was still understood and where a small number of priests

-continued to practice a trade which had been forgotten in every other

-part of the land of Cheops.

-

-And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His Imperial

-Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were declared state

-property, the statues and images were sent to the museum of

-Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters were thrown into

-jail. And when the last of them had died from hunger and neglect, the

-age-old trade of making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.

-

-All this was a great pity.

-

-If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little less thorough

-and had saved just a few of those old picture experts in a sort of

-literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made the task of the historian a

-great deal easier. For while (owing to the genius of Champollion) we can

-once more spell out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly

-difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their message to

-posterity.

-

-And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient world.

-

-What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left us whole

-brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind when they exclaimed

-piously, “Who shall ever be able to understand the counsel of the Gods

-in Heaven?” How did they feel towards those divine spirits which they

-invoked so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret, whose

-commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of their most holy city?

-Why were they at once the most tolerant of men, encouraging their priests

-to study the high heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and

-at the same time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous

-punishments upon those of their neighbors who had committed some breach

-of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?

-

-Until recently we did not know.

-

-We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand of Sinai and

-deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And everywhere in Mesopotamia and

-Egypt we did our best to find the key that should unlock the front door

-of this mysterious store-house of wisdom.

-

-And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered that the back

-door had been wide open all the time and that we could enter the premises

-at will.

-

-But that convenient little gate was not situated in the neighborhood of

-Akkad or Memphis.

-

-It stood in the very heart of the jungle.

-

-And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan temple.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in contact with what

-they were pleased to call “wild men” or “savages.”

-

-The meeting had not been a pleasant one.

-

-The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the white men, had

-welcomed them with a salvo of spears and arrows.

-

-The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.

-

-After that there had been little chance for a quiet and unprejudiced

-exchange of ideas.

-

-The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing

-loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees and deserved all that was

-coming to him.

-

-Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau

-began to contemplate the world through a haze of sentimental tears.

-His contemporaries, much impressed by his ideas, pulled out their

-handkerchiefs and joined in the weeping.

-

-The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite subjects. In their

-hands (although they had never seen one) he became the unfortunate victim

-of circumstances and the true representative of all those manifold

-virtues of which the human race had been deprived by three thousand years

-of a corrupt system of civilization.

-

-Today, at least in this particular field of investigation, we know better.

-

-We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated animals, from

-which as a rule he is not so very far removed.

-

-In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble. The savage,

-but for the grace of God, is our own self under much less favorable

-conditions. By examining him carefully we begin to understand the early

-society of the valley of the Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia

-and by knowing him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange

-hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin crust of

-manners and customs which our own species of mammal has acquired during

-the last five thousand years.

-

-This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On the other hand a

-realization of the conditions from which we have escaped, together with

-an appreciation of the many things that have actually been accomplished,

-can only tend to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything

-it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among our distant

-cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.

-

-This is not a handbook of anthropology.

-

-It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.

-

-But tolerance is a very broad theme.

-

-The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten

-track, Heaven alone knows where we will land.

-

-I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state exactly and

-specifically what I mean by tolerance.

-

-Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the human race and

-all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It therefore behooves an

-humble student to go to that authority which is accepted as final by

-the largest number of those who speak the language in which this book is

-written.

-

-I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

-

-There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written: “Tolerance (from Latin

-_tolerare_—to endure):—The allowance of freedom of action or judgment

-to other people, the patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from

-one’s own or the generally received course or view.”

-

-There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this book I shall

-let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.

-

-And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a definite policy, I

-shall return to my savages and tell you what I have been able to discover

-about tolerance in the earliest forms of society of which we have any

-record.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-It is still generally believed that primitive society was very simple,

-that primitive language consisted of a few simple grunts and that

-primitive man possessed a degree of liberty which was lost only when the

-world became “complex.”

-

-The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers and

-missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central Africa and the

-Polar regions and Polynesia show the exact opposite. Primitive society

-was exceedingly complicated, primitive language had more forms and tenses

-and declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was a slave not

-only to the present, but also to the past and to the future; in short, an

-abject and miserable creature who lived in fear and died in terror.

-

-This may seem far removed from the popular picture of brave red-skins

-merrily roaming the prairies in search of buffaloes and scalps, but it is

-a little nearer to the truth.

-

-And how could it have been otherwise?

-

-I have read the stories of many miracles.

-

-But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival of man.

-

-How and in what manner and why the most defenseless of all mammals should

-have been able to maintain himself against microbes and mastodons and ice

-and heat and eventually become master of all creation, is something I

-shall not try to solve in the present chapter.

-

-One thing, however, is certain. He never could have accomplished all this

-alone.

-

-In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality in the

-composite character of the tribe.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single idea, an

-all-overpowering desire to survive.

-

-This was very difficult.

-

-And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to the one

-supreme demand—to live.

-

-The individual counted for nothing, the community at large counted for

-everything, and the tribe became a roaming fortress which lived by itself

-and for itself and of itself and found safety only in exclusiveness.

-

-But the problem was even more complicated than at first appears. What

-I have just said held good only for the visible world, and the visible

-world in those early times was a negligible quantity compared to the

-realm of the invisible.

-

-In order to understand this fully we must remember that primitive people

-are different from ourselves. They are not familiar with the law of cause

-and effect.

-

-If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence, send

-for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid of the stuff as soon

-as he can. My ability to recognize cause and effect tells me that the

-poison ivy has caused the rash, that the doctor will be able to give me

-something that will make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine

-will prevent a repetition of this painful experience.

-

-The true savage would act quite differently. He would not connect the

-rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in a world in which past,

-present and future are inextricably interwoven. All his dead leaders

-survive as Gods and his dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all

-continue to be invisible members of the clan and they accompany each

-individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him and sleep with him

-and they stand watch over his door. It is his business to keep them at

-arm’s length or gain their friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will

-be immediately punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all

-those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune

-which comes as the revenge of the Gods.

-

-He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the ordinary

-not to a primary cause but to interference on the part of an invisible

-spirit and when he notices a rash on his arms he does not say, “Damn that

-poison ivy!” but he mumbles, “I have offended a God. The God has punished

-me,” and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion to

-counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm” that shall prove

-stronger than the charm which the irate God (and not the ivy) has thrown

-upon him.

-

-As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he lets it grow

-right there where it has always grown. And if perchance the white man

-comes with a can of kerosene and burns the shrub down, he will curse him

-for his trouble.

-

-It follows that a society in which everything happens as the result of

-the direct personal interference on the part of an invisible being must

-depend for its continued existence upon a strict obedience of such laws

-as seem to appease the wrath of the Gods.

-

-Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed. His ancestors

-had devised it and had bestowed it upon him and it was his most sacred

-duty to keep that law intact and hand it over in its present and perfect

-form to his own children.

-

-This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in progress, in

-growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.

-

-But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year before last,

-and it is typical of all low forms of society that the people see no

-possible reason why they should improve what (to them) is the best of all

-possible worlds because they never knew any other.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent a change in the

-laws and in the established forms of society?

-

-The answer is simple.

-

-By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to regard common police

-regulations as an expression of the divine will, or in plain language, by

-a rigid system of intolerance.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant of human

-beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten to add that given the

-circumstances under which he lived, it was his duty to be intolerant. Had

-he allowed any one to interfere with the thousand and one rules upon

-which his tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind, the

-life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and that would have

-been the greatest of all possible crimes.

-

-But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group of people,

-relatively limited in number, protect a most complex system of verbal

-regulations when we in our own day with millions of soldiers and

-thousands of policemen find it difficult to enforce a few plain laws?

-

-Again the answer is simple.

-

-The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He accomplished by

-shrewd calculation what he could not do by force.

-

-He invented the idea of “taboo.”

-

-Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression. Such things are

-rarely the product of a sudden inspiration. They are the result of long

-years of growth and experiment. Let that be as it may, the wild men of

-Africa and Polynesia devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a

-great deal of trouble.

-

-The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know more or less what it

-means. Our own world is full of taboos, things we simply must not do or

-say, like mentioning our latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving

-our spoon in our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very

-serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette and rarely

-interfere with our own personal happiness.

-

-To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the utmost

-importance.

-

-It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had been “set apart”

-from the rest of the world, that they (to use the Hebrew equivalent) were

-“holy” and must not be discussed or touched on pain of instant death and

-everlasting torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who

-dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the priesthood was

-created to maintain the taboo is a problem which had not yet been solved.

-As tradition is much older than religion, it seems more than likely

-that taboos existed long before the world had heard of sorcerers and

-witch-doctors. But as soon as the latter had made their appearance, they

-became the staunch supporters of the idea of taboo and used it with such

-great virtuosity that the taboo became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric

-ages.

-

-When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt, those countries were

-still in a state of development in which the taboo counted for a great

-deal. Not a taboo in the crude and primitive form as it was afterwards

-found in New Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of

-conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we are all

-familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.

-

-Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely unknown in those

-lands at that early age.

-

-What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by

-ignorance.

-

-But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part

-of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of

-action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of

-dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the

-ideal of our modern age.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in

-prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.”

-

-The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the

-individual.

-

-And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs

-to the Greeks.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER II

-

-THE GREEKS

-

-

-How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the

-Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries

-with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in

-politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven

-knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for

-a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or

-another during his career, has tried to give an answer.

-

-Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and

-physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with

-ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call

-“the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and

-shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings.

-

-I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such

-laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them.

-But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy

-accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them

-and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which

-might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal.

-

-It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field

-of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s book, offer the

-following historical axiom.

-

-According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life (animate

-existence as differentiated from inanimate existence) began when for once

-all physical and chemical elements were present in the ideal proportion

-necessary for the creation of the first living cell.

-

-Translate this into terms of history and you get this:

-

-“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a very high form of

-civilization is only possible when all the racial, climatic, economic and

-political conditions are present in an ideal proportion or in as nearly

-an ideal condition and proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”

-

-Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.

-

-A race with the brain development of a cave-man would not prosper, even

-in Paradise.

-

-Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would not have composed

-fugues, Praxiteles would not have made statues if they had been born

-in an igloo near Upernivik and had been obliged to spend most of their

-waking hours watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.

-

-Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been

-obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And

-Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had

-been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow

-domains.

-

-In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the

-climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust

-or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly

-bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which

-afterwards moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates

-were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the

-climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from

-good.

-

-In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture was

-backward and there was little commerce outside of the caravan route

-which passed through the country from Africa to Asia and vice versa.

-Furthermore, in Palestine politics were entirely dominated by the priests

-of the temple of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the

-development of any sort of individual enterprise.

-

-In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The race was strong

-and trade conditions were good. The country, however, suffered from a

-badly balanced economic system. A small class of ship owners had been

-able to get hold of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial

-monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had at an early date

-fallen into the hands of the very rich. The poor, deprived of all excuse

-for the practice of a reasonable amount of industry, grew callous and

-indifferent and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and went

-to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her rulers.

-

-In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization, certain of

-the necessary elements for success were always lacking.

-

-When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur, in Greece in

-the fifth century before our era, it lasted only a very short time, and

-strange to say, even then it did not take place in the mother country but

-in the colonies across the Aegean Sea.

-

-In another book I have given a description of those famous island-bridges

-which connected the mainland of Asia with Europe and across which the

-traders from Egypt and Babylonia and Crete since time immemorial had

-traveled to Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise

-and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be found on the western coast

-of Asia Minor in a strip of land known as Ionia.

-

-A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow bit of mountainous

-territory, ninety miles long and only a few miles wide, had been

-conquered by Greek tribes from the mainland who there had founded a

-number of colonial towns of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus

-were the best known, and it was along those cities that at last the

-conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion that

-civilization reached a point which has sometimes been equaled but never

-has been surpassed.

-

-In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the most active and

-enterprising elements from among a dozen different nations.

-

-In the second place, there was a great deal of general wealth derived

-from the carrying trade between the old and the new world, between Europe

-and Asia.

-

-In the third place, the form of government under which the colonists

-lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance to develop their talents

-to the very best of their ability.

-

-If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that in countries

-devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate does not matter much. Ships

-can be built and goods can be unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does

-not get so cold that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are

-flooded, the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily

-weather reports.

-

-But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly favorable to

-the development of an intellectual class. Before the existence of books

-and libraries, learning was handed down from man to man by word of mouth

-and the town-pump was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest

-of universities.

-

-In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump for 350 out of

-every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors made such excellent use

-of their climatic advantages that they became the pioneers of all future

-scientific development.

-

-The first of whom we have any report, the real founder of modern

-science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in the sense that he had

-robbed a bank or murdered his family and had fled to Miletus from parts

-unknown. But no one knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian

-or a Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned racial

-experts) or a Semite?

-

-It shows what an international center this little old city at the mouth

-of the Meander was in those days. Its population (like that of New York

-today) consisted of so many different elements that people accepted their

-neighbors at their face value and did not look too closely into the

-family antecedents.

-

-Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook of philosophy,

-the speculations of Thales do not properly belong in these pages, except

-in so far as they tend to show the tolerance towards new ideas which

-prevailed among the Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town

-on a muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region, when the Jews

-were still captives in the land of Assyria and when northern and western

-Europe were naught but a howling wilderness.

-

-In order that we may understand how such a development was possible, we

-must know something about the changes which had taken place since the

-days when Greek chieftains sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the

-plunder of the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were still

-the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization. They were

-over-grown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house,

-full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the

-many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not

-forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and

-bananas.

-

-The relationship between these boisterous paladins and their Gods was as

-direct and as simple as their attitude towards the serious problems of

-every-day existence. For the inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the

-world of the Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this

-earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals. Exactly

-where and when and how man and his Gods had parted company was a more

-or less hazy point, never clearly established. Even then the friendship

-which those who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their

-subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no way been

-interrupted and it had remained flavored with those personal and intimate

-touches which gave the religion of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.

-

-Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that Zeus was a

-very powerful and mighty potentate with a long beard who upon occasion

-would juggle so violently with his flashes of lightning and his

-thunderbolts that it seemed that the world was coming to an end. But

-as soon as they were a little older and were able to read the ancient

-sagas for themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those

-terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their nursery

-and who now appeared in the light of a merry family-party—everlastingly

-playing practical jokes upon each other and taking such bitter sides in

-the political disputes of their mortal friends that every quarrel in

-Greece was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the denizens

-of the aether.

-

-Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings, Zeus remained a

-very great God, the mightiest of all rulers and a personage whom it was

-not safe to displease. But he was “reasonable” in that sense of the word

-which is so well understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was

-reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper way. And best

-of all, he had a sense of humor and did not take either himself or his

-world too seriously.

-

-This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a divine figure,

-but it offered certain very distinct advantages. Among the ancient Greeks

-there never was a hard and fast rule as to what people must hold true

-and what they must disregard as false. And because there was no “creed”

-in the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and a class

-of professional priests, ready to enforce them with the help of the

-secular gallows, the people in different parts of the country were able

-to reshape their religious ideas and ethical conceptions as best suited

-their own individual tastes.

-

-The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of Mount Olympus,

-showed of course much less respect for their august neighbors than did

-the Asopians who dwelled in a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The

-Athenians, feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own

-patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great liberties

-with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose valleys were far

-removed from the main trade routes, clung tenaciously to a simpler faith

-and frowned upon all levity in the serious matter of religion, and as

-for the inhabitants of Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound

-for the village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo (who

-was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the greatest of all divine

-spirits and deserved the special homage of those who came from afar and

-still had a couple of drachmas in their pocket.

-

-The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to set the Jews

-apart from all other nations, would never have been possible if the life

-of Judaea had not centered around a single city which was strong enough

-to destroy all rival places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an

-exclusive religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.

-

-In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither Athens nor Sparta

-ever succeeded in establishing itself as the recognized capital of a

-united Greek fatherland. Their efforts in this direction only led to long

-years of unprofitable civil war.

-

-No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists offered

-great scope for the development of a very independent spirit of thought.

-

-The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the Bible of the

-Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They were just books. They were

-never united into “The Book.” They told the adventures of certain

-wonderful heroes who were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of

-the generation then living. Incidentally they contained a certain amount

-of religious information because the Gods, without exception, had taken

-sides in the quarrel and had neglected all other business for the joy of

-watching the rarest prize-fight that had ever been staged within their

-domain.

-

-The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either directly or

-indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva or Apollo never even

-dawned upon the Greek mind. These were a fine piece of literature and

-made excellent reading during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they

-caused children to feel proud of their own race.

-

-And that was all.

-

-In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city

-filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich

-with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and

-contented populace, Thales was born. In such a city he worked and taught

-and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed

-greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that

-his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average

-Miletian may have heard the name of Thales, just as the average New

-Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,

-and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe

-and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through

-a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper.

-

-That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got

-hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least

-greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries,

-is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going

-citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict

-which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of

-gravity.

-

-The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty

-by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern

-science.” And we can almost see the headlines in the “Miletus Gazette”

-saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.”

-

-But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck

-out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain,

-that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his

-wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before

-Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had

-already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical

-and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those

-intelligent enough to make use of it.

-

-Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.

-

-Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared

-to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial

-chamber in the heart of a pyramid.

-

-The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior

-of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the

-peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms.

-

-All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded

-the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will

-of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of

-the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s

-cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the

-treasury.

-

-Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of

-his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors

-along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was

-an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual

-sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man

-to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an elementary knowledge

-of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th

-of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would

-find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of

-Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness.

-

-Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the

-Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous

-eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack

-of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities

-(following a famous precedent established a few years previously during

-a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and

-had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to

-those whom they favored.

-

-For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where

-he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will,

-subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence

-of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own

-image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the

-same if there had been no more important engagement that particular

-afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast

-in Halicarnassus.

-

-Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he

-laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed

-(and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all

-things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world

-on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of

-time.

-

-Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It

-is possible that he may have put his ideas into concrete form (for the

-Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not

-a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our

-knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of

-information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these,

-however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with

-wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was

-typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.”

-But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is

-found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite

-as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.

-

-To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad and indifferent,

-was the supreme measure of all things. Wherefore they spent their leisure

-time patiently studying this strange creature as he was and not as they

-thought that he ought to be.

-

-This made it possible for them to remain on the most amicable terms with

-their fellow citizens and allowed them to wield a much greater power

-than if they had undertaken to show their neighbors a short cut to the

-Millennium.

-

-They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.

-

-But by their own example they managed to show how a true understanding of

-the forces of nature must inevitably lead to that inner peace of the soul

-upon which all true happiness depends and having in this way gained the

-good-will of their community they were given full liberty to study and

-explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture within those

-domains which were popularly believed to be the exclusive property of the

-Gods. And as one of the pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the

-long years of his useful career.

-

-Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks apart, although he

-had examined each little piece separately, and had openly questioned all

-sorts of things which the majority of the people since the beginning of

-time had held to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully

-in his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his

-heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.

-

-And once he had shown the way, there were many others eager to follow.

-

-There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who left Asia Minor

-for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent the following years as a

-“sophist” or private tutor in different Greek cities. He specialized

-in astronomy and among other things he taught that the sun was not a

-heavenly chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a

-red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger than the

-whole of Greece.

-

-When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from Heaven killed him for

-his audacity, he went a little further in his theories and stated boldly

-that the moon was covered with mountains and valleys and finally he even

-hinted at a certain “original matter” which was the beginning and the end

-of all things and which had existed from the very beginning of time.

-

-But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover, he trod

-upon dangerous ground, for he discussed something with which people were

-familiar. The sun and the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek

-did not care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But when

-the professor began to argue that all things had gradually grown and

-developed out of a vague substance called “original matter”—then he went

-decidedly too far. Such an assertion was in flat contradiction with the

-story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated

-the world by turning bits of stone into men and women. To deny the truth

-of a most solemn tale which all little Greek boys and girls had been

-taught in their early childhood was most dangerous to the safety of

-established society. It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their

-elders and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the subject of

-a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian Parents’ League.

-

-During the monarchy and the early days of the republic, the rulers of the

-city would have been more than able to protect a teacher of unpopular

-doctrines from the foolish hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants.

-But Athens by this time had become a full-fledged democracy and the

-freedom of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore,

-Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority of the people,

-was himself a favorite pupil of the great astronomer, and the legal

-prosecution of Anaxagoras was welcomed as an excellent political move

-against the city’s old dictator.

-

-A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader in

-one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a law passed which

-demanded “the immediate prosecution of all those who disbelieved in the

-established religion or held theories of their own about certain divine

-things.” Under this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison.

-Finally, however, the better elements in the city prevailed. Anaxagoras

-was allowed to go free after the payment of a small fine and move to

-Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he died, full of years and honor, in the

-year 428 B.C.

-

-His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official

-suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras was forced

-to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind and two centuries later they

-came to the notice of one Aristotle, who in turn used them as a basis

-for many of his own scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a

-thousand years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid Muhammad

-ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës), the great Arab physician who in

-turn popularized them among the students of the Moorish universities of

-southern Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote them

-down in a number of books. These were duly carried across the Pyrenees

-until they reached the universities of Paris and Boulogne. There they

-were translated into Latin and French and English and so thoroughly were

-they accepted by the people of western and northern Europe that today

-they have become an integral part of every primer of science and are

-considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.

-

-But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation after his

-trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach doctrines which were at

-variance with popular belief. And then, during the last years of the

-fifth century, a second case took place.

-

-The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering teacher who

-hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian colony in northern Greece.

-This spot already enjoyed a doubtful reputation as the birthplace of

-Democritus, the original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the

-law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the largest

-number of people the greatest amount of happiness obtainable with the

-smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore was regarded as a good

-deal of a radical and a fellow who should be under constant police

-supervision.

-

-Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to Athens and there,

-after many years of study, proclaimed that man was the measure of all

-things, that life was too short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry

-into the doubtful existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought

-to be used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and more

-thoroughly enjoyable.

-

-This statement, of course, went to the very root of the matter and it

-was bound to shock the faithful more than anything that had ever been

-written or said. Furthermore it was made during a very serious crisis in

-the war between Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of

-defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most evidently

-it was not the right moment to incur the wrath of the Gods by an inquiry

-into the scope of their supernatural powers. Protagoras was accused of

-atheism, of “godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the

-courts.

-

-Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and Protagoras, although

-a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.

-

-He fled.

-

-Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked, and it seems

-that he was drowned, for we never hear of him again.

-

-As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence, he was really

-not a philosopher at all but a young writer who harbored a personal

-grudge against the Gods because they had once failed to give him their

-support in a law-suit. He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance

-that finally his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts

-of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just then enjoyed

-great popularity among the people of northern Hellas. For this unseemly

-conduct he was condemned to death. But ere the sentence was executed,

-the poor devil was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth,

-continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully died of his own

-bad temper.

-

-And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the most famous case

-of Greek intolerance of which we possess any record, the judicial murder

-of Socrates.

-

-When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and

-that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later

-times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible

-example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of

-the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this

-brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the

-spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece

-in the fifth century before our era.

-

-For Socrates, at a time when the common people still firmly believed in

-a large number of divine beings, made himself the prophet of an only

-God. And although the Athenians may not always have known what he meant

-when he spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration

-which told him what to do and say), they were fully aware of his very

-unorthodox attitude towards those ideals which most of his neighbors

-continued to hold in holy veneration and his utter lack of respect for

-the established order of things. In the end, however, politics killed the

-old man and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the crowd)

-had really very little to do with the outcome of the trial.

-

-Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children and little

-money. The boy therefore had never been able to pay for a regular

-college course, for most of the philosophers were practical fellows and

-often charged as much as two thousand dollars for a single course of

-instruction. Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study of

-useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere waste of time

-and energy. Provided a person cultivated his conscience, so he reasoned,

-he could well do without geometry and a knowledge of the true nature of

-comets and planets was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.

-

-All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken nose and the

-shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with the loafers on the corner

-of the street and his nights listening to the harangues of his wife (who

-was obliged to provide for a large family by taking in washing, as her

-husband regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible

-detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and expeditions

-and ex-member of the Athenian senate was chosen among all the many

-teachers of his day to suffer for his opinions.

-

-In order to understand how this happened, we must know something about

-the politics of Athens in the days when Socrates rendered his painful but

-highly useful service to the cause of human intelligence and progress.

-

-All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was executed) Socrates

-tried to show his neighbors that they were wasting their opportunities;

-that they were living hollow and shallow lives; that they devoted

-entirely too much time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost

-invariably squandered the divine gifts with which a great and mysterious

-God had endowed them for the sake of a few hours of futile glory and

-self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly convinced was he of man’s high

-destiny that he broke through the bounds of all old philosophies and

-went even farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught

-that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached that “man’s

-invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate measure of all

-things and that it is not the Gods but we ourselves who shape our

-destiny.”

-

-The speech which Socrates made before the judges who were to decide

-his fate (there were five hundred of them to be precise and they had

-been so carefully chosen by his political enemies that some of them

-could actually read and write) was one of the most delightful bits of

-commonsense ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.

-

-“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has the right to tell

-another man what he should believe or to deprive him of the right to

-think as he pleases,” and further, “Provided that man remain on good

-terms with his own conscience, he can well do without the approbation

-of his friends, without money, without a family or even a home. But

-as no one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough

-examination of all the pros and cons of every problem, people must be

-given a chance to discuss all questions with complete freedom and without

-interference on the part of the authorities.”

-

-Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong statement

-at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian war there had been

-a bitter struggle in Athens between the rich and the poor, between

-capital and labor. Socrates was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and

-evil in both systems of government and who tried to find a compromise

-which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course, had made

-him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but thus far they had been too

-evenly balanced to take action against him.

-

-When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent Democrats

-gained complete control of the state and expelled the aristocrats,

-Socrates was a doomed man.

-

-His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the city before it

-was too late and this would have been a very wise thing to do.

-

-For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During the greater

-part of a century he had been a sort of vocal “columnist,” a terribly

-clever busy-body who had made it his hobby to expose the shams and the

-intellectual swindles of those who regarded themselves as the pillars

-of Athenian society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His

-name had become a household word throughout eastern Greece. When he said

-something funny in the morning, by night the whole town had heard about

-it. Plays had been written about him and when he was finally arrested and

-taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of Attica who was

-not thoroughly familiar with all the details of his career.

-

-Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like that honorable

-grain merchant who could neither read nor write but who knew all about

-the will of the Gods and therefore was loudest in his accusations)

-were undoubtedly convinced that they were rendering a great service to

-the community by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of the

-so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could only lead to

-laziness and crime and discontent among the slaves.

-

-It is rather amusing to remember that even under those circumstances,

-Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous virtuosity that a majority

-of the jury was all for letting him go free and suggested that he might

-be pardoned if only he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of

-debating, of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave

-his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not bother them with

-his eternal doubts.

-

-But Socrates would not hear of it.

-

-“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the

-still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road

-to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and

-I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”

-

-After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to

-death.

-

-Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy ship which made an

-annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet returned from its voyage and until

-then, the Athenian law did not allow any executions. The whole of this

-month the old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system

-of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity to escape, he

-refused to go. He had lived his life and had done his duty. He was tired

-and ready to depart. Until the hour of his execution he continued to talk

-with his friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right

-and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things of the spirit

-rather than those of the material world.

-

-Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon his couch and

-settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.

-

-For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this terrible

-outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove themselves from the

-scene of their former activities.

-

-But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed their former

-occupation as public teachers, and within a dozen years after the death

-of the old philosopher, his ideas were more popular than ever.

-

-The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult period. It was five

-years since the struggle for the leadership of the Greek peninsula had

-ended with the defeat of Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans.

-This had been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to say

-that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never wrote a line

-worth remembering or contributed a single idea to the sum total of human

-knowledge (with the exception of certain military tactics which survive

-in our modern game of football) thought that they had accomplished

-their task when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the

-Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the Athenian mind

-had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A decade after the end of the

-Peloponnesian war, the old harbor of the Piraeus was once more filled

-with ships from all parts of the world and Athenian admirals were again

-fighting at the head of the allied Greek navies.

-

-Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated by his

-own contemporaries, had made the city the intellectual capital of the

-world—the Paris of the fourth century before the birth of Christ.

-Whosoever in Rome or Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a

-fashionable education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit a

-school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.

-

-For this ancient world, which we modern people find so difficult to

-understand properly, took the problem of existence seriously.

-

-Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of pagan civilization,

-the impression has gained ground that the average Roman or Greek was

-a highly immoral person who paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous

-Gods and for the rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners,

-drinking vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the pretty

-prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a change he went to war and

-slaughtered innocent Germans and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of

-shedding blood.

-

-Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there were a great

-many merchants and war contractors who had accumulated their millions

-without much regard for those ethical principles which Socrates had so

-well defined before his judges. Because these people were very wealthy,

-they had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that they

-enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded as commendable

-representatives of the civilization of their day.

-

-We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions as one of

-the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and her colonies. We look at the

-ruins of the forty room palace which the old profiteer built out of his

-ill-gotten gains. And we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”

-

-Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who was one of the

-house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find ourselves in the company

-of a spirit as lofty and as exalted as ever lived.

-

-I know that the making of generalizations about our neighbors and

-about other nations is one of the most popular of indoor sports, but

-let us not forget that Epictetus, the philosopher, was quite as truly

-a representative of the time in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the

-imperial flunkey, and that the desire for holiness was as great twenty

-centuries ago as it is today.

-

-Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from that which is

-practiced today. It was the product of an essentially European brain and

-had nothing to do with the Orient. But the “barbarians” who established

-it as their ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were

-our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy of life

-which was highly successful if we agree that a clear conscience and a

-simple, straightforward life, together with good health and a moderate

-but sufficient income, are the best guarantee for general happiness

-and contentment. The future of the soul did not interest these people

-overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special sort of mammal

-which by reason of its intellectual application had risen high above

-the other creatures which crawled upon this earth. If they frequently

-referred to the Gods, they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons”

-or “aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name, but Zeus

-in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical a value as x or y in the

-problems of Euclid and meant just as much or as little.

-

-Life it was which interested those men and next to living, art.

-

-Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied and following

-the method of reasoning which Socrates had originated and made popular,

-they achieved some very remarkable results.

-

-That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world they went to

-absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more than human. But Plato is the

-only one among all the teachers of antiquity who from sheer love for a

-perfect world ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.

-

-This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved disciple of

-Socrates and became his literary executor.

-

-In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates had ever said

-or thought into a series of dialogues which might be truthfully called

-the Socratian Gospels.

-

-When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain of the more

-obscure points in his master’s doctrines and explained them in a series

-of brilliant essays. And finally he conducted a number of lecture courses

-which spread the Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond

-the confines of Attica.

-

-In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and unselfish

-devotion that we might almost compare him to St. Paul. But whereas St.

-Paul had led a most adventurous and dangerous existence, ever traveling

-from north to south and from west to east that he might bring the Good

-Tidings to all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged from

-his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to come to him.

-

-Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent wealth

-allowed him to do this.

-

-In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through his mother

-could trace his descent to no one less than Solon. Then as soon as he

-came of age he inherited a fortune more than sufficient for his simple

-needs.

-

-And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly traveled to the

-Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to follow a few of the lectures in

-the Platonic University.

-

-For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young men of his time.

-He served in the army, but without any particular interest in military

-affairs. He went in for outdoor sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly

-good runner, but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium.

-Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal of his

-time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and paid a short visit

-to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather Solon had done before

-him. After that, however, he returned home for good and during fifty

-consecutive years he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners

-of a pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the river

-Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the Academy.

-

-He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched

-over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our

-modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and

-believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he

-taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful

-bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful

-institutions to beautiful ideas.

-

-This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain

-definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his

-zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they

-made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which

-has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by

-the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and

-reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of

-those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private

-income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound

-distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to

-have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the

-members of the “upper class.”

-

-Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval

-scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became

-a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.

-

-For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his

-conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in

-the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

-

-For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian

-sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded

-with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He

-had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in

-the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat

-and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated

-by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land,

-and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew

-convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average

-citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state

-of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of

-his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for

-all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these

-regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded

-like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that

-liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a

-short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.

-

-The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas

-Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped

-from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams.

-He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas

-ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states,

-whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun

-and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast

-Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the

-banks of the Indus River.

-

-But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon the unruly

-democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest

-of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under

-eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks.

-

-I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man

-who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added

-so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an

-intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans

-and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without

-exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.

-

-At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in

-Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university.

-After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336

-when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden

-near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and

-soon attracted pupils from all over the world.

-

-Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing

-the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last

-beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more

-energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other

-cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either

-too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of

-those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the

-glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded

-the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years

-after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught

-still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the

-limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and

-mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word

-for free thinking and unbelief.

-

-If they had had their own way, they would have forced him to leave their

-country. But they wisely kept these opinions to themselves. For this

-short-sighted, stoutish gentleman, famous for his good taste in books

-and in clothes, was no negligible quantity in the political life of that

-day, no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town by a

-couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the son of a Macedonian

-court-physician and he had been brought up with the royal princes.

-And furthermore, as soon as he had finished his studies, he had been

-appointed tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been the

-daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed the friendship and

-the protection of the most powerful ruler the world had ever seen and the

-regent who administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s absence

-on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm should befall one who had

-been the boon companion of his imperial master.

-

-No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death reached Athens than

-Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered what had happened to

-Socrates and felt no desire to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had

-carefully avoided mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his

-distaste for the democratic form of government and his lack of belief

-in the sovereign abilities of the common people were known to all. And

-when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst of fury, expelled the Macedonian

-garrison, Aristotle moved across the Euboean Sound and went to live in

-Calchis, where he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the

-Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.

-

-At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what positive

-grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as usual in that nation of

-amateur orators, his case was inextricably mixed up with politics and

-his unpopularity was due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few

-local ward-bosses, rather than to the expression of any startlingly new

-heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance of Zeus.

-

-Nor does it matter very much.

-

-The days of the small independent republics were numbered.

-

-Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European heritage of

-Alexander and Greece became one of their many provinces.

-

-Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the Romans in most

-matters were even more tolerant than the Greeks of the Golden Age had

-been and they permitted their subjects to think as they pleased, provided

-they did not question certain principles of political expediency upon

-which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had, since time

-immemorial, been safely builded.

-

-All the same there existed a subtle difference between the ideals which

-animated the contemporaries of Cicero and those which had been held

-sacred by the followers of such a man as Pericles. The old leaders of

-Greek thought had based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions

-which they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and

-meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without the preliminary

-study. They were merely indifferent, and were proud of the fact. They

-were interested in practical things. They were men of action and had a

-deep-seated contempt for words.

-

-If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath an old olive

-tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of government or the influence

-of the moon upon the tides, they were more than welcome to do so.

-

-If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some practical use,

-then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise, together with

-singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture and science, this business

-of philosophizing had better be left to the Greeks and to the other

-foreigners whom Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world

-with those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.

-

-Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention to the

-administration of their ever increasing domains; they would drill the

-necessary companies of foreign infantry and cavalry to protect their

-outlying provinces; they would survey the roads that were to connect

-Spain with Bulgaria; and generally they would devote their energies to

-the keeping of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and

-nations.

-

-Let us give honor where honor is due.

-

-The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected a structure

-which under one form or another has survived until our own time, and that

-in itself is no mean accomplishment. As long as the necessary taxes were

-paid and a certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct

-laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes enjoyed a very

-large degree of liberty. They could believe or disbelieve whatever they

-pleased. They could worship one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples

-full of Gods. It made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to

-profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling empire

-were forever reminded that the “pax Romana” depended for its success upon

-a liberal application of the principle of “live and let live.” They must

-under no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or with the

-strangers within their gates. And if perchance they thought that their

-Gods had been insulted, they must not rush to the magistrate for relief.

-“For,” as the Emperor Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if

-the Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely

-take care of themselves.”

-

-And with such scant words of consolation, all similar cases were

-instantly dismissed and people were requested to keep their private

-opinions out of the courts.

-

-If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle down among the

-Colossians, they had a right to bring their own Gods with them and erect

-a temple of their own in the town of Colossae. But if the Colossians

-should for similar reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they

-must be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal freedom of

-worship.

-

-It has often been argued that the Romans could permit themselves the

-luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude because they felt an

-equal contempt for both the Colossians and the Cappadocians and all the

-other savage tribes who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been

-true. I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand years,

-a form of almost complete religious tolerance was strictly maintained

-within the greater part of civilized and semi-civilized Europe, Asia and

-Africa and that the Romans developed a technique of statecraft which

-produced a maximum of practical results together with a minimum of

-friction.

-

-To many people it seemed that the millennium had been achieved and that

-this condition of mutual forbearance would last forever.

-

-But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built upon force.

-

-Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had destroyed herself.

-

-The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand battlefields.

-

-For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens

-had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial

-empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.

-

-At last the reaction set in.

-

-Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted by the impossible

-task of a single city ruling an entire world.

-

-And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people grew tired of life and

-lost the zest for living.

-

-They had come to own all the country-houses, all the town-houses, all the

-yachts and all the stage-coaches they could ever hope to use.

-

-They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the world.

-

-They had eaten everything, they had seen everything, they had heard

-everything.

-

-They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been everywhere,

-they had made love to all the women from Barcelona to Thebes. All the

-books that had ever been written were in their libraries. The best

-pictures that had ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest

-musicians of the entire world had entertained them at their meals.

-And, as children, they had been instructed by the best professors and

-pedagogues who had taught them everything there was to be taught. As a

-result, all food and drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull,

-all women had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed

-into a burden which a good many people were willing to drop at the first

-respectable opportunity.

-

-There remained only one consolation, the contemplation of the Unknown and

-the Invisible.

-

-The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent Roman any

-longer took stock in the silly nursery rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.

-

-There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics and

-the Cynics, all of whom preached charity and self-denial and the virtues

-of an unselfish and useful life.

-

-But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in the books of Zeno

-and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch, which were to be found in every

-cornerstore library.

-

-But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found to lack the

-necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans began to clamor for a certain

-amount of “emotion” with their spiritual meals.

-

-Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they really were, if

-we associate the idea of religion with a desire to lead useful and noble

-lives) could only appeal to a very small number of people, and almost all

-of those belonged to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of

-private instruction at the hands of competent Greek teachers.

-

-To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies meant less than

-nothing at all. They too had reached a point of development at which a

-good deal of the ancient mythology seemed the childish invention of rude

-and credulous ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as their

-so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence of any and all

-personal Gods.

-

-Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do under such

-circumstances. They paid a formal and outward tribute of respect to the

-official Gods of the Republic and then betook themselves for real comfort

-and happiness to one of the many mystery religions which during the last

-two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the ancient city on the

-banks of the Tiber.

-

-The word “mystery” which I have used before was of Greek origin. It

-originally meant a gathering of “initiated people”—of men and women whose

-“mouth had been shut” against the betrayal of those most holy secrets

-which only the true members of the mystery were supposed to know and

-which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a college fraternity or

-the cabalistic incantations of the Independent Order of Sea-Mice.

-

-During the first century of our era, however, a mystery was nothing more

-nor less than a special form of worship, a denomination, a church. If a

-Greek or a Roman (if you will pardon a little juggling with time) had

-left the Presbyterian church for the Christian Science church, he would

-have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.” For the

-word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of the Lord,” is of comparatively

-recent origin and was not known in those days.

-

-If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish

-to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next

-Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five

-columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported

-from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries

-and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and

-salvation everlasting.

-

-Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of

-imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had

-made this unavoidable. From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern

-Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the

-mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly

-outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been

-forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic

-laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public

-drunkenness and many other things that were even worse.

-

-Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen

-strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become

-as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.

-

-As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto the world a

-primary system of abstract truth and a practical code of conduct, based

-upon virtue, they now supplied the people of foreign lands who insisted

-upon images and incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and

-Dionysus and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above suspicion as

-far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless enjoying immense

-popularity.

-

-The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had frequented the

-shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar with their great God Baal

-(the arch-enemy of Jehovah) and with Astarte his wife, that strange

-creature to whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all

-his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very heart of

-Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized as the official

-protector of the city of Carthage during her long struggle for the

-supremacy of the Mediterranean and who finally after the destruction of

-all her temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the shape

-of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.

-

-But the most important of all, because highly popular among the soldiers

-of the army, was a deity whose broken images can still be found

-underneath every rubbish pile that marks the Roman frontier from the

-mouth of the Rhine to the source of the Tigris.

-

-This was the great God Mithras.

-

-Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of Light and Air and

-Truth, and he had been worshiped in the plains of the Caspian lowlands

-when our first ancestors took possession of those wonderful grazing

-fields and made ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards

-became known as Europe. To them he had been the giver of all good things

-and they believed that the rulers of this earth exercised their power

-only by the grace of his mighty will. Hence, as a token of his divine

-favor, he sometimes bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit

-of that celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded, and

-although he is gone and his name has been forgotten, the kindly saints

-of the Middle Ages, with their halo of light, remind us of an ancient

-tradition which was started thousands of years before the Church was ever

-dreamed of.

-

-But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly long time,

-it has been very difficult to reconstruct his life with any degree

-of accuracy. There was a good reason for this. The early Christian

-missionaries abhorred the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more

-bitter than that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their

-heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their most serious

-rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible to remove everything that

-might possibly remind people of his existence. In this task they

-succeeded so well that all Mithras temples have disappeared and that

-not a scrap of written evidence remains about a religion which for

-more than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as Methodism or

-Presbyterianism is in the United States of today.

-

-However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a careful perusal

-of certain ruins which could not be entirely destroyed in the days before

-the invention of dynamite, we have been able to overcome this initial

-handicap and now possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting

-God and the things for which he stood.

-

-Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously born of a

-rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle, several nearby shepherds came to

-worship him and make him happy with their gifts.

-

-As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange adventures. Many

-of these remind us closely of the deeds which had made Hercules such a

-popular hero with the children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was

-often very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had engaged in

-a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten him. But he was so generous

-in his victory, that the sun and he had become like brothers, and were

-often mistaken for each other.

-

-When the God of all evil had sent a drought which threatened to kill

-the race of man, Mithras had struck a rock with his arrow, and behold!

-plentiful water had gushed forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman

-(for that was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to achieve

-his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had heard of it, had

-warned one man, had told him to build a big boat and load it with his

-relatives and his flocks and in this way had saved the human race from

-destruction. Until finally, having done all he could to save the world

-from the consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven to

-rule the just and righteous for all time.

-

-Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged to go through an

-elaborate form of initiation and were forced to eat a ceremonious meal

-of bread and wine in memory of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and

-his friend the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism in

-a font of water and do many other things which have no special interest

-to us, as that form of religion was completely exterminated more than

-fifteen hundred years ago.

-

-Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon a footing of

-absolute equality. Together they prayed before the same candle-lit

-altars. Together they chanted the same holy hymns and together they took

-part in the festivities which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of

-December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore they abstained

-from all work on the first day of the week, which even today is called

-Sun-day in honor of the great God. And finally when they died, they were

-laid away in patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good

-should enter into their just reward and the wicked should be cast into

-the fire everlasting.

-

-The success of these different mysteries, the widespread influence of

-Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points to a condition far removed

-from religious indifference. Indeed the early centuries of the empire

-were a period of restless search after something that should satisfy the

-emotional needs of the masses.

-

-But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened. A small

-vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga, the starting point for

-the overland route to Europe. Among the passengers were two men not

-overburdened with luggage.

-

-Their names were Paul and Barnabas.

-

-They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport and was well

-versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.

-

-It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.

-

-Christianity had set out to conquer the world.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER III

-

-THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT

-

-

-The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used

-as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine

-origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest

-that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans

-were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest

-missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.

-

-Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the

-soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate

-folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the

-Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere

-along the bay of Naples.

-

-But they were only part of the story.

-

-Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence

-of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the

-Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.

-

-There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking

-tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an

-uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and

-women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village

-beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own

-hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore had

-been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very

-real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis

-and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and

-thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by

-hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of

-years ago.

-

-Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the anointed, as the

-Greek missionaries called him, had been on this earth only a short time

-ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to

-him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the

-Emperor Tiberius.

-

-And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from

-the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken

-with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had

-actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon

-when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the

-Roman governor.

-

-We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular

-appeal of this new faith.

-

-It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy

-and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage

-over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly

-expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which

-radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the

-exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The

-slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the

-high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives

-beheld the rays of a new hope.

-

-At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free.

-

-No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the

-great of this world.

-

-On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father.

-

-They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.

-

-They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters

-who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas.

-

-For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity was the

-first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance.

-

-Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the

-soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in

-a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with

-the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon

-rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of

-private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures

-have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies,

-brotherhoods and federations; when they have begun to obey a single

-directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes

-and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest,

-then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers

-and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the

-early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true

-founders of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early

-development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in

-all history.

-

-The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the ancient empire

-was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side

-it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and

-charity which the Master himself had taught. But on the other side it

-found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism

-which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart

-from the rest of the world.

-

-In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance

-and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men

-which was as efficient as it was illogical.

-

-To understand how this could have happened, we must go back once more to

-the days of Paul and to the first fifty years after the death of Christ,

-and we must firmly grasp the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform

-movement within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely

-nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened the rulers

-of the Jewish state and no one else.

-

-The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when Jesus lived had

-understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally they had feared the

-ultimate consequences of an agitation which boldly threatened to question

-a spiritual monopoly which was based upon nothing more substantial than

-brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they had been forced

-to act in a spirit of panic and had sent their enemy to the gallows

-before the Roman authorities had had time to intervene and deprive them

-of their victim.

-

-What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible to say. He was

-killed long before he was able to organize his disciples into a special

-sect nor did he leave a single word of writing from which his followers

-could conclude what he wanted them to do.

-

-In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in disguise.

-

-The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection of

-ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free to follow the

-spirit of their master’s words rather than the letter of his law. Had

-they been bound by a book, they would very likely have devoted all their

-energies to a theological discussion upon the ever enticing subject of

-commas and semi-colons.

-

-In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional scholars

-could have possibly shown the slightest interest in the new faith and

-Christianity would have gone the way of so many other sects which begin

-with elaborate written programs and end when the police are called upon

-to throw the haggling theologians into the street.

-

-At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize what

-tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman Empire, it is a matter

-of surprise that the authorities took practically no steps to quell a

-movement which was fully as dangerous to the safety of the state as an

-invasion by Huns or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this

-eastern prophet had caused great excitement among their house slaves,

-that the women were forever telling each other about the imminent

-reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that quite a number of old men

-had solemnly predicted the impending destruction of this world by a ball

-of fire.

-

-But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had gone into

-hysterics about some new religious hero. Most likely it would not be the

-last time, either. Meanwhile the police would see to it that these poor,

-frenzied fanatics did not disturb the peace of the realm.

-

-And that was that.

-

-The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act. The

-followers of the new mystery went about their business in a most

-exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow the government. At

-first, several slaves had expected that the common fatherhood of God and

-the common brotherhood of man would imply a cessation of the old relation

-between master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had hastened

-to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was an invisible and

-intangible kingdom of the soul and that people on this earth had better

-take things as they found them, in expectation of the final reward which

-awaited them in Heaven.

-

-Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of matrimony as

-established by the harsh laws of Rome, had rushed to the conclusion that

-Christianity was synonymous with emancipation and full equality of rights

-between men and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a number

-of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to refrain from all

-those extremes which would make their church suspect in the eyes of the

-more conservative pagans and had persuaded them to continue in that state

-of semi-slavery which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and Eve had

-been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most commendable respect

-for the law and as far as the authorities were concerned, the Christian

-missionaries could therefore come and go at will and preach as best

-suited their own individual tastes and preferences.

-

-But as has happened so often in history, the masses had shown themselves

-less tolerant than their rulers. Just because people are poor it does

-not necessarily follow that they are high-minded citizens who could be

-prosperous and happy if their conscience would only permit them to make

-those compromises which are held to be necessary for the accumulation of

-wealth.

-

-And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by free meals and

-free prize-fights, was no exception to this rule. At first it derived a

-great deal of rough pleasure from those sober-faced groups of men and

-women who with rapt attention listened to the weird stories about a God

-who had ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal,

-and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for the hoodlums who

-pelted their gatherings with stones and dirt.

-

-The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a detached view of

-this new development.

-

-The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted of certain

-solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified occasions and paid for in

-cash. This money went toward the support of the church officers. When

-thousands of people began to desert the old shrines and went to another

-church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests were faced

-by a very serious reduction in their salary. This of course did not

-please them at all, and soon they were loud in their abuse of the godless

-heretics who turned their backs upon the Gods of their fathers and burned

-incense to the memory of a foreign prophet.

-

-But there was another class of people in the city who had even better

-reason to hate the Christians. Those were the fakirs, who as Indian Yogis

-and Pooughies and hierophants of the great and only mysteries of Isis

-and Ishtar and Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and

-easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle classes. If the

-Christians had set up a rival establishment and had charged a handsome

-price for their own particular revelations, the guild of spook-doctors

-and palmists and necromancers would have had no reason for complaint.

-Business was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not mind if a

-bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a plague upon

-their silly notions!—refused to take any reward. Yea, they even gave

-away what they had, fed the hungry and shared their own roof with the

-homeless. And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and

-they never could have done this unless they were possessed of certain

-hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no one thus far had been

-able to discover.

-

-Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers. It was

-the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited

-peasants from all parts of the empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious

-laws that rule the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those

-who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no

-apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The

-hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay

-for one is a fine neighbor and a good fellow. But the man who holds

-himself aloof and refuses to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum,

-who does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being dragged

-through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a spoil-sport and an enemy

-of the community at large.

-

-When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that part of Rome

-inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was set for the first

-organized attacks upon the Christians.

-

-At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of drunken

-conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire that he might get rid

-of the slums and rebuild the city according to his own plans. The crowd,

-however, knew better. It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who

-were forever telling each other about the happy day when large balls of

-fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the wicked would go up in

-flames.

-

-Once this story had been successfully started, others followed in rapid

-succession. One old woman had heard the Christians talk with the dead.

-Another knew that they stole little children and cut their throats and

-smeared their blood upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course,

-no one had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous

-practices, but that was only because they were so terribly clever and had

-bribed the police. But now at last they had been caught red-handed and

-they would be made to suffer for their vile deeds.

-

-Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this occasion, we

-know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems, were among the victims for

-thereafter their names are never heard again.

-

-That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished nothing, it

-is needless to state. The noble dignity with which the martyrs accepted

-their fate was the best possible propaganda for the new ideas and for

-every Christian who perished, there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager

-to take his place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act

-of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year 68), the

-Christians returned to their old haunts and everything was as it had been

-before.

-

-By this time the Roman authorities were making a great discovery. They

-began to suspect that a Christian was not exactly the same thing as a Jew.

-

-We can hardly blame them for having committed this error. The historical

-researches of the last hundred years have made it increasingly clear that

-the Synagogue was the clearing-house through which the new faith was

-passed on to the rest of the world.

-

-Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had always been most

-careful in observing the ancient laws of his fathers and that he had

-addressed himself almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. Once, and then

-only for a short time, had he left his native country, but the task

-which he had set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his

-fellow-Jews. Nor was there anything in what he had ever said which could

-have given the average Roman the impression that there was a deliberate

-difference between Christianity and Judaism.

-

-What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had clearly seen the

-terrible abuses which had entered the church of his fathers. He had

-loudly and sometimes successfully protested against them. But he had

-fought his battles for reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned

-upon him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some one had

-mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he would have rejected

-the idea as preposterous. But like many a reformer before his day and

-after, he had gradually been forced into a position where compromise

-was no longer possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a

-fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of reform, who

-were deeply perplexed when they suddenly found themselves at the head

-of a brand new party “outside” the organization to which they belonged,

-whereas they were merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”

-

-For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity (to use the name

-long before it had been coined) was the religion of a small Jewish sect

-which had a few adherents in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and

-Galilee and which had never been heard of outside of the province of

-Syria.

-

-It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen of Jewish

-descent, who had first recognized the possibilities of the new doctrine

-as a religion for all the world. The story of his suffering tells us

-how bitterly the Jewish Christians had been opposed to the idea of a

-universal religion instead of a purely national denomination, membership

-to which should only be open to people of their own race. They had hated

-the man who dared preach salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly

-that on his last visit to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered

-the fate of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the fury

-of his enraged compatriots.

-

-But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman soldiers to

-protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal town from where he

-could be shipped to Rome for that famous trial which never took place.

-

-A few years after his death, that which he had so often feared during his

-lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold actually occurred.

-

-Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place of the temple of

-Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor of Jupiter. The name of the

-city was changed to Aelia Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of

-the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they were

-either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed to live within

-several miles of the ruins on pain of death.

-

-It was the final destruction of their holy city which had been so

-disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several centuries afterwards,

-in the little villages of the Judaean hinterland colonies might have

-been found of strange people who called themselves “poor men” and who

-waited with great patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end

-of the world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the old

-Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time to time we hear them

-mentioned in books written during the fifth and sixth centuries. Far away

-from civilization, they developed certain strange doctrines of their own

-in which hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After the

-seventh century however we no longer find any trace of these so-called

-Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious Mohammedans had killed them all.

-And, anyway, if they had managed to exist a few hundred years longer,

-they would not have been able to avert the inevitable.

-

-Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into one large

-political union, had made the world ready for the idea of a universal

-religion. Christianity, because it was both simple and practical and

-full of a direct appeal, was predestined to succeed where Judaism and

-Mithraism and all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail.

-But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of certain

-rather unpleasant characteristics which only too clearly betrayed its

-origin.

-

-The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe

-had carried a message of hope and mercy.

-

-But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.

-

-He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.

-

-But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.

-

-And his name was Religious Intolerance.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER IV

-

-THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

-

-

-The early church was a very simple organization. As soon as it became

-apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death

-of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and

-that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a

-good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of

-government.

-

-Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews) had come together

-in the synagogue. When the rift had occurred between the Jews and the

-Gentiles, the latter had betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house

-and if none could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the

-curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone quarry.

-

-At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath, but when

-bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians

-increased, the latter began to drop the habit of keeping the Sabbath-day

-and preferred to meet on Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had

-taken place.

-

-These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to the popular as

-well as to the emotional character of the entire movement. There were no

-set speeches or sermons. There were no preachers. Both men and women,

-whenever they felt themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in

-meeting to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes, if we

-are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout brethren, “speaking with

-tongues,” had filled the heart of the great apostle with apprehension for

-the future. For most of them were simple folk without much education. No

-one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations but very often

-they got so excited that they raved like maniacs and while a church may

-survive persecution, it is helpless against ridicule. Hence the efforts

-of Paul and Peter and their successors to bring some semblance of order

-into this chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.

-

-At first these efforts met with little success. A regular program seemed

-in direct contradiction to the democratic nature of the Christian faith.

-In the end, however, practical considerations supervened and the meetings

-became subject to a definite ritual.

-

-They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to placate the Jewish

-Christians who might be present). Then the congregation united in a song

-of praise of more recent composition for the benefit of the Roman and the

-Greek worshipers.

-

-The only prescribed form of oration was the famous prayer in which Jesus

-had summed up his entire philosophy of life. The preaching, however, for

-several centuries remained entirely spontaneous and the sermons were

-delivered only by those who felt that they had something to say.

-

-But when the number of those gatherings increased, when the police,

-forever on the guard against secret societies, began to make inquiries,

-it was necessary that certain men be elected to represent the Christians

-in their dealings with the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken

-highly of the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities

-which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny vessels which were

-tossed upon a turbulent sea and were very much in need of a clever pilot

-if they were to survive the fury of the angry ocean.

-

-And so the faithful came together once more and elected deacons and

-deaconesses, pious men and women who were the “servants” of the

-community, who took care of the sick and the poor (an object of great

-concern to the early Christians) and who looked after the property of the

-community and took care of all the small daily chores.

-

-Still later when the church continued to grow in membership and the

-business of administration had become too intricate for mere amateurs,

-it was entrusted to a small group of “elders.” These were known by their

-Greek name of Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”

-

-After a number of years, when every village or city possessed a Christian

-church of its own, the need was felt for a common policy. Then an

-“overseer” (an Episkopos or Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire

-district and direct its dealings with the Roman government.

-

-Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the empire, and

-those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem and Carthage and Rome

-and Alexandria and Athens were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who

-were almost as important as the civil and military governors of their

-provinces.

-

-In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over that part of the

-world where Jesus had lived and suffered and died enjoyed the greatest

-respect. But after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the generation which

-had expected the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared

-from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in his ruined palace saw

-himself deprived of his former prestige.

-

-And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was taken by

-the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the civilized world and who

-guarded the sites where Peter and Paul, the great apostles of the west,

-had suffered their martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.

-

-This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa, the common

-expression of love and respect bestowed upon members of the clergy.

-In the course of centuries, the title of Papa however became almost

-exclusively associated in people’s minds with the particular “Father”

-who was the head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the

-Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of Rome, and not by

-any chance the Bishop of Constantinople or the Bishop of Carthage. This

-was an entirely normal development. When we read in our newspaper about

-“the President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.” We

-know that the head of our government is meant and not the President of

-the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President of Harvard University or the

-President of the League of Nations.

-

-The first time the name occurred officially in a document was in the

-year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital of a highly successful

-empire and the power of the bishops was entirely overshadowed by that of

-the emperors. But during the next three hundred years, under the constant

-menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors of Caesar

-began to look for a new home that would offer them greater safety. This

-they found in a city in a different part of their domains. It was called

-Byzantium, after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said to

-have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated on the straits

-which separated Europe from Asia and dominating the trade route between

-the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, it controlled several important

-monopolies and was of such great commercial importance that already

-Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this rich fortress.

-

-Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of Alexander and

-after having been for a short while part of Macedonia it had finally been

-incorporated into the Roman Empire.

-

-And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its Golden Horn

-filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the

-center of the empire.

-

-The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven

-knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had

-come when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time; when

-one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the

-Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws

-made a thousand miles away.

-

-But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow some

-one good. With the emperors gone, the bishops remained behind as the

-most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible

-successors to the glory of the imperial throne.

-

-And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were

-shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office

-had attracted the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be

-the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a

-hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared

-to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate

-necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and failed.

-

-But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved

-consistently and persistently towards one goal. In all they did and said

-and thought they were guided by the desire to increase the glory of God

-and the strength and power of the organization which represented the

-divine will on earth.

-

-How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.

-

-While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which

-hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the

-empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand

-institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much

-useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but

-more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.

-

-The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought at a terrible

-cost.

-

-For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a

-palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in

-which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and

-mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary

-human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred

-years it developed into a new supertheocracy, compared to which the

-old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and

-carefree citizens.

-

-And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall

-now try to show you.

-

-Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Coliseum and

-within those wind-swept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where

-thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.

-

-But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions

-of the adherents of the new faith, these had very little to do with

-religious intolerance.

-

-They were purely political.

-

-The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed the greatest

-possible freedom.

-

-But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector,

-who bragged of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with

-foreign invasion and openly defied the laws of the land upon every

-suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an

-enemy of the state and was treated as such.

-

-That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the

-slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when

-he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary

-looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.

-

-A Roman police judge after all was only human. When he suddenly found

-himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him

-a very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience

-had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides

-he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use

-“tact” in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and

-argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles,

-very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.

-

-In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering

-the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified

-vindication of the supreme power of the state. But prison and torture

-meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until

-after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to

-leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.

-

-The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out between the

-authorities and their Christian subjects was long and painful. We

-possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims.

-According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century,

-several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one

-of the persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for their

-convictions could easily be enumerated.”

-

-On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early saints we

-find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of bloodshed that we

-begin to wonder how a religion exposed to these constant and murderous

-persecutions could ever have survived at all.

-

-No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call me a

-prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to myself and let my

-readers draw their own conclusions. By studying the lives of the Emperors

-Decius (249-251) and Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a

-fairly accurate opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance

-during the worst era of persecution.

-

-Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and liberal minded a ruler

-as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself unable to handle the problem of his

-Christian subjects successfully, they will derive some idea about the

-difficulties which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of

-the empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful to

-their oath of office or execute those of their relatives and neighbors

-who could not or would not obey those few and very simple ordinances upon

-which the imperial government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.

-

-Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality towards

-their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily extending the sphere of their

-influence.

-

-Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the request of the

-Christian members of the Roman senate who complained that it hurt their

-feelings to gather in the shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the

-removal of the statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years

-had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators protested.

-This did very little good and only caused a number of them to be sent

-into exile.

-

-It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted patriot of great

-personal distinction, wrote his famous letter in which he tried to

-suggest a compromise.

-

-“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian neighbors

-not live in peace and harmony? We look up to the same stars, we are

-fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky.

-What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the

-ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be

-only one path leading to an answer.”

-

-He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the danger which

-threatened the old Roman tradition of a broadminded religious policy.

-Simultaneously with the removal of the statue of Victory in Rome a

-violent quarrel had broken out between two contending factions of the

-Christians who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute gave rise

-to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance to which the

-world had ever listened. Themistius the philosopher, who was the author,

-had remained faithful to the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor

-Valens took sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox

-Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of his true

-duty.

-

-“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can hope to

-exercise any authority. That is the domain of the virtues and especially

-that of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion within that

-field causes hypocrisy and conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence

-it is much better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only

-by toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance is

-a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated his desire for

-a number of different religions. And God alone can judge the methods by

-which humanity aspires to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery.

-God delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him. He likes

-the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others, the Egyptians

-again others.”

-

-Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.

-

-The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was dead and all

-efforts to set back the clock of history were doomed beforehand. Life

-means progress, and progress means suffering. The old order of society

-was rapidly disintegrating. The army was a mutinous mob of foreign

-mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England and the other

-outlying districts had long since been surrendered to the barbarians.

-

-When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant young men who in

-centuries past had entered the service of the state found themselves

-deprived of all but one chance for advancement. That was a career in the

-Church. As Christian archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise

-the power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors, they

-could be certain of a fairly large public if they were willing to devote

-themselves exclusively to theological subjects. As Christian diplomats,

-they could be sure of rapid promotion if they were willing to represent

-the bishop of Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake

-the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous chieftain in

-the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And finally, as Christian financiers,

-they could hope to make fortunes administering those rapidly increasing

-estates which had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest

-landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.

-

-We have seen something of the same nature during the last five years.

-Up to the year 1914 the young men of Europe who were ambitious and did

-not depend upon manual labor for their support almost invariably entered

-the service of the state. They became officers of the different imperial

-and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher judicial positions,

-administered the finances or spent years in the colonies as governors

-or military commanders. They did not expect to grow very rich, but the

-social prestige of the offices which they held was very great and by the

-application of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty,

-they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable old age.

-

-Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal

-fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some

-few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a

-lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however,

-surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had been educated

-to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention.

-Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between

-an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry

-for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And so

-within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most of the former

-officers and state officials doing the sort of work which they would not

-have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly. Besides, as most

-of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in

-executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they have

-found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are

-today a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had

-ever expected to be.

-

-What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries ago.

-

-It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry

-back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan war to take

-orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple

-cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young

-men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes

-of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly. And therefore if they were

-both bright fellows (as they well may have been) they soon learned to

-appreciate the other fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully.

-For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things

-appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.

-

-Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that there shall

-be one small group of clever men and women who do the ruling and a much

-larger group of not-quite-so-bright men and women who shall do the

-obeying. The stakes for which these two groups play are at different

-periods known by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and

-Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance on the other.

-They have been called Empire and Church and Knighthood and Monarchy and

-Democracy and Slavery and Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious

-law which governs human development works the same in Moscow as it does

-in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound to neither time nor

-place. It has often manifested itself under strange forms and disguises.

-More than once it has worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its

-love for humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring

-about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath such

-pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and continues to hide the grim

-truth of that primeval law which insists that the first duty of man

-is to keep alive. People who resent the fact that they were born in a

-world of mammals are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us

-“materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they have always

-regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they are shocked to discover

-that it is a science which obeys the same iron rules which govern the

-rest of the universe. They might as well fight against the habits of

-parallel lines or the results of the tables of multiplication.

-

-Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.

-

-For then and only then can history some day be turned into something

-that shall have a practical value to the human race and cease to be the

-ally and confederate of those who profit by racial prejudice, tribal

-intolerance and the ignorance of the vast majority of their fellow

-citizens.

-

-And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him look for the

-proof in the chronicles of those centuries of which I was writing a few

-pages back.

-

-Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the

-first four centuries.

-

-Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of

-the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the

-Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterwards, when

-they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were

-attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart

-and soul. But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly

-master to a Heavenly ruler because the chances for advancement with the

-latter were infinitely greater.

-

-The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did

-not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new

-disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to

-be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical

-and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of

-politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took

-their faith more emotionally, were offered every possible opportunity

-to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence

-upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal

-holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their

-souls.

-

-In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion

-and contemplation.

-

-The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely

-a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from

-the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as

-ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast

-real-estate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less

-opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to

-harken back to the “good old days” when all true Christians had spent

-their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might

-again be happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been a

-natural development of the times.

-

-This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an

-enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the

-next thousand years and which was to give the Church a devoted group of

-very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was of

-Oriental origin.

-

-This need not surprise us.

-

-In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,

-civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point

-of exhaustion. In Egypt alone, ten different and separate cycles of

-culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied

-the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between

-the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter futility of

-all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples

-and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as

-an eager promise of life, a constant appeal to their newly regained

-energy and enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious

-experiences in a different mood.

-

-To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being

-alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from

-the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert

-that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore

-look upon the reality of existence.

-

-For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have

-had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people,

-have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of

-civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be

-accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors

-to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of

-the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual

-stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of

-the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian.

-When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group

-of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed

-from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully

-among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead

-to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very

-regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on

-the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby

-giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief

-to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a

-more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first

-religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century)

-hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who

-was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots

-who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so

-many fortresses of the Lord.

-

-Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from

-Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of

-people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its

-wickedness and its too insistent creditors.

-

-The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it

-necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed.

-Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in

-the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was

-disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which

-seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.

-

-“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become

-of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress?

-Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by

-the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in

-the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”

-

-The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic

-institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation

-goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His

-name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His

-parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his

-Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in

-the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that

-once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.

-

-There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame

-of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the

-number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had

-enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.

-

-He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European

-monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it

-showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to

-obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours

-which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled

-with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were

-expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful

-citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the

-Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of

-education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional

-ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.

-

-In return for their labors, the monks were decently clothed, received a

-sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they

-could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to

-work or to prayer.

-

-But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that

-the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and

-their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became

-the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity

-by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were

-expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the

-glory of the kingdom of God.

-

-The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had

-already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come

-to naught, the labors of the individual preachers must be followed up

-by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The

-monks now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book into the

-wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland.

-They plowed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school

-and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a

-civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.

-

-In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the entire Church, make

-use of all the manifold forces of the human spirit.

-

-The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of an opportunity to

-distinguish himself as the dreamer who found happiness in the silence of

-the woods. There was no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste.

-And the result was such an increase of power that soon neither emperor

-nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying humble attention

-to the wishes of those of his subjects who confessed themselves the

-followers of the Christ.

-

-The way in which the final victory was gained is not without interest.

-For it shows that the triumph of Christianity was due to practical

-causes and was not (as is sometimes believed) the result of a sudden and

-overwhelming outburst of religious ardor.

-

-The last great persecution of the Christians took place under the Emperor

-Diocletian.

-

-Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of the worst among those

-many potentates who ruled Europe by the grace of their body-guards. But

-he suffered from a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who

-are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely ignorant upon

-the subject of elementary economics.

-

-He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly going to pieces.

-Having spent all his life in the army, he believed the weak point lay

-in the organization of the Roman military system, which entrusted the

-defenses of the outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had

-gradually lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics,

-selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom they were

-supposed to keep at a safe distance from the frontiers.

-

-It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable system. He

-therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating a new field army,

-composed of young and agile men who at a few weeks’ notice could be

-marched to any particular part of the empire that was threatened with an

-invasion.

-

-This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a military

-nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money had to be produced in

-the form of taxes by the people in the interior of the country. As was

-to be expected, they raised a great hue and cry and claimed that they

-could not pay another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor

-answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his tax-gatherers

-certain powers thus far only possessed by the hangman. But all to no

-avail. For the subjects, rather than work at a regular trade which

-assured them a deficit at the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house

-and home and family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos.

-His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures and he solved

-the difficulty by a decree which shows how completely the old Roman

-Republic had degenerated into an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of

-his pen he made all government offices and all forms of handicraft and

-commerce hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers

-were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or not. The sons

-of bakers must themselves become bakers, although they might have greater

-aptitude for music or pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed

-to a life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they rowed across

-the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although technically they

-continued to be freemen, were constrained to live and die on the same

-piece of soil on which they had been born and were henceforth nothing but

-a very ordinary variety of slaves.

-

-To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence in his own ability

-either could or would tolerate the continued existence of a relatively

-small number of people who only obeyed such parts of his regulations and

-edicts as pleased them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for

-his harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember that he

-was fighting with his back against the wall and that he had good cause

-to suspect the loyalty of several million of his subjects who profited

-by the measures he had taken for their protection but refused to carry

-their share of the common burden.

-

-You will remember that the earliest Christians had not taken the trouble

-to write anything down. They expected the world to come to an end at

-almost any moment. Therefore why waste time and money upon literary

-efforts which in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from

-Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and when the story

-of Christ (after a hundred years of patient waiting) was beginning to

-be repeated with such strange additions and variations that a true

-disciple hardly knew what to believe and what not, the need was felt for

-some authentic book upon the subject and a number of short biographies

-of Jesus and such of the original letters of the apostles as had been

-preserved were combined into one large volume which was called the New

-Testament.

-

-This book contained among others a chapter called the Book of Revelations

-and therein were to be found certain references and certain prophecies

-about and anent a city built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built

-on seven hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days of

-Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this curious chapter

-carefully called the city of his abomination Babylon. But it took no

-great degree of perspicacity on the part of the imperial magistrate to

-understand what was meant when he read these pleasant references to the

-“Mother of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town that was

-drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs, foredoomed to become

-the habitation of all devils, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of

-every unclean and hateful bird, and more expressions of a similar and

-slightly uncomplimentary nature.

-

-Such sentences might have been explained away as the ravings of a poor

-fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he thought of his many friends

-who had been killed during the last fifty years. But they were part of

-the solemn services of the Church. Week after week they were repeated

-in those places where the Christians came together and it was no more

-than natural that outsiders should think that they represented the true

-sentiments of all Christians towards the mighty city on the Tiber. I do

-not mean to imply that the Christians may not have had excellent reason

-to feel the way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because he

-failed to share their enthusiasm.

-

-But that was not all.

-

-The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with an expression which

-the world thus far had never heard. That was the word “heretics.”

-Originally the name “heretic” was given only to those people who had

-“chosen” to believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.”

-But gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had chosen

-to believe certain doctrines which were not held “correct” or “sound”

-or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly established authorities of the

-Church and which therefore, to use the language of the Apostles, were

-“heretical, unsound, false and eternally wrong.”

-

-The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were technically

-free from the charge of heresy because they had remained outside of the

-fold of the Church and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be held

-to account for their private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter

-the imperial pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that

-“heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

-idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder, sedition and drunkenness”

-and a few other things which common decency prevents me from repeating on

-this page.

-

-All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction and

-misunderstanding led to persecution and once more Roman jails were filled

-with Christian prisoners and Roman executioners added to the number of

-Christian martyrs and a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was

-accomplished and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his

-home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from the business of

-ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the even more exciting pastime

-of raising great big cabbages in his back yard.

-

-His successor did not continue the policy of repression. On the contrary,

-since he could not hope to eradicate the Christian evil by force, he

-decided to make the best of a bad bargain and gain the good will of his

-enemies by offering them some special favors.

-

-This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having been the first to

-“recognize” the Christian church officially belongs to a man by the name

-of Constantine.

-

-Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning

-Historians before whom all emperors, kings, pontiffs, presidents and

-mayors who now enjoy the title of the “great” shall have to submit their

-claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will

-have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is

-the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.

-

-This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle field of

-Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus,

-was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his

-brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the

-executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.

-Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just

-before he marched against his most dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had

-made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the

-“second Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the

-Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and died a barbarian

-who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days

-tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of

-sacrificial sheep, all this was most considerately overlooked in view

-of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto

-his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess their

-private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place without fear of

-molestation.”

-

-For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century,

-as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians and when

-they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree,

-they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity

-of the official church of the state. But they knew how and in what manner

-this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and

-although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks

-the arrangement never quite lost its original character.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto

-Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all the enemies of my church and

-in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who

-disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting

-down thine enemies.”

-

-There have been other bargains during the history of the last twenty

-centuries.

-

-But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came

-to power.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER V

-

-IMPRISONMENT

-

-

-Just before the curtain rings down for the last time upon the ancient

-world, a figure crosses the stage which had deserved a better fate than

-an untimely death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”

-

-The Emperor Julian, to whom I refer, was a nephew of Constantine the

-Great and was born in the new capital of the empire in the year 331. In

-337 his famous uncle died. At once his three sons fell upon their common

-heritage and upon each other with the fury of famished wolves.

-

-To rid themselves of all those who might possibly lay claim to part of

-the spoils, they ordered that those of their relatives who lived in or

-near the city be murdered. Julian’s father was one of the victims. His

-mother had died a few years after his birth. In this way, at the age

-of six, the boy was left an orphan. An older half-brother, an invalid,

-shared his loneliness and his lessons. These consisted mostly of lectures

-upon the advantages of the Christian faith, given by a kindly but

-uninspired old bishop by the name of Eusebius.

-

-But when the children grew older, it was thought wiser to send them

-a little further away where they would be less conspicuous and might

-possibly escape the usual fate of junior Byzantine princes. They were

-removed to a little village in the heart of Asia Minor. It was a dull

-life, but it gave Julian a chance to learn many useful things. For his

-neighbors, the Cappadocian mountaineers, were a simple people and still

-believed in the gods of their ancestors.

-

-There was not the slightest chance that the boy would ever hold a

-responsible position and when he asked permission to devote himself to a

-life of study, he was told to go ahead.

-

-First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places where the old

-Greek philosophy continued to be taught. There he crammed his head so

-full of literature and science that there was no space left for the

-things he had learned from Eusebius.

-

-Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might study on the very

-spot hallowed by the recollections of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.

-

-Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and Constantius,

-his cousin and the one and only remaining son of Constantine, remembering

-that he and his cousin, the boy philosopher, were by this time the only

-two surviving male members of the imperial family, sent for Julian,

-received him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his

-own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and defend that

-province against the barbarians.

-

-It seems that Julian had learned something more practical from his Greek

-teachers than an ability to argue. When in the year 357 the Alamanni

-threatened France, he destroyed their army near Strassburg, and for good

-measure added all the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his

-own province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a fresh

-supply of books by his favorite authors and was as happy as his serious

-nature allowed him to be.

-

-When news of these victories reached the ears of the Emperor, little

-Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the event. On the contrary,

-elaborate plans were laid to get rid of a competitor who might be just a

-trifle too successful.

-

-But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When they heard that

-their commander-in-chief had been ordered to return home (a polite

-invitation to come and have one’s head cut off), they invaded his palace

-and then and there proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it

-be known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.

-

-Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.

-

-Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been in a remarkably

-good state of preservation. Julian was able to break all records by the

-speed with which he marched his troops from the heart of France to the

-shores of the Bosphorus. But ere he reached the capital, he heard that

-his cousin Constantius had died.

-

-And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the western world.

-

-Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do was impossible.

-It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent a man should have been

-under the impression that the dead past could ever be brought back to

-life by the use of force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by

-reconstructing an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating the

-deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed up in togas of a

-bygone age and talking to each other in a tongue that had disappeared

-from the face of the earth more than five centuries before.

-

-And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.

-

-All his efforts during the two short years of his reign were directed

-towards the reëstablishment of that ancient science which was now held in

-profound contempt by the majority of his people; towards the rekindling

-of a spirit of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt

-certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a single book and

-that independent study and investigation could only lead to unbelief and

-hell fire; towards the requickening of the joy-of-living among those who

-had the vitality and the enthusiasm of ghosts.

-

-Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have been driven to

-madness and despair by the spirit of opposition which met him on all

-sides. As for Julian, he simply went to pieces under it. Temporarily at

-least he clung to the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The

-Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and mud, yet he

-refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks might try to provoke him

-into another era of persecution, yet the Emperor persistently continued

-to instruct his officials “not to make any martyrs.”

-

-In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end to this strange

-career.

-

-It was the best thing that could have happened to this, the last and

-greatest of the Pagan rulers.

-

-Had he lived any longer, his sense of tolerance and his hatred of

-stupidity would have turned him into the most intolerant man of his age.

-Now, from his cot in the hospital, he could reflect that during his

-rule, not a single person had suffered death for his private opinions.

-For this mercy, his Christian subjects rewarded him with their undying

-hatred. They boasted that an arrow from one of his own soldiers (a

-Christian legionary) had killed the Emperor and with rare delicacy

-they composed eulogies in praise of the murderer. They told how, just

-before he collapsed, Julian had confessed the errors of his ways and had

-acknowledged the power of Christ. And they emptied the arsenal of foul

-epithets with which the vocabulary of the fourth century was so richly

-stocked to disgrace the fame of an honest man who had lived a life of

-ascetic simplicity and had devoted all his energies to the happiness of

-the people who had been entrusted to his care.

-

-When he had been carried to his grave the Christian bishops could at last

-consider themselves the veritable rulers of the Empire and immediately

-began the task of destroying whatever opposition to their domination

-might remain in isolated corners of Europe, Asia and Africa.

-

-Under Valentinian and Valens, two brothers who ruled from 364 to 378, an

-edict was passed forbidding all Romans to sacrifice animals to the old

-Gods. The pagan priests were thereby deprived of their revenue and forced

-to look for other employment.

-

-But the regulations were mild compared to the law by which Theodosius

-ordered all his subjects not only to accept the Christian doctrines,

-but to accept them only in the form laid down by the “universal” or

-“Catholic” church of which he had made himself the protector and which

-was to have a monopoly in all matters spiritual.

-

-All those who after the promulgation of this ordinance stuck to their

-“erroneous opinions”—who persisted in their “insane heresies”—who

-remained faithful to their “scandalous doctrines”—were to suffer the

-consequences of their willful disobedience and were to be exiled or put

-to death.

-

-From then on the old world marched rapidly to its final doom. In Italy

-and Gaul and Spain and England hardly a pagan temple remained. They were

-either wrecked by the contractors who needed stones for new bridges and

-streets and city-walls and water-works, or they were remodeled to serve

-as meeting places for the Christians. The thousands of golden and silver

-images which had been accumulated since the beginning of the Republic

-were publicly confiscated and privately stolen and such statues as

-remained were made into mortar.

-

-The Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple which Greeks and Romans and

-Egyptians alike had held in the greatest veneration for more than six

-centuries, was razed to the ground. There remained the university,

-famous all over the world ever since it had been founded by Alexander

-the Great. It had continued to teach and explain the old philosophies

-and as a result attracted a large number of students from all parts of

-the Mediterranean. When it was not closed at the behest of the Bishop

-of Alexandria, the monks of his diocese took the matter into their own

-hands. They broke into the lecture rooms, lynched Hypatia, the last

-of the great Platonic teachers, and threw her mutilated body into the

-streets where it was left to the mercy of the dogs.

-

-In Rome things went no better.

-

-The temple of Jupiter was closed, the Sibylline books, the very basis of

-the old Roman faith, were burned. The capital was left a ruin.

-

-In Gaul, under the leadership of the famous bishop of Tours, the old Gods

-were declared to be the predecessors of the Christian devils and their

-temples were therefore ordered to be wiped off the face of the earth.

-

-If, as sometimes happened in remote country districts, the peasants

-rushed forth to the defense of their beloved shrines, the soldiers were

-called out and by means of the ax and the gallows made an end to such

-“insurrections of Satan.”

-

-In Greece, the work of destruction proceeded more slowly. But finally in

-the year 394, the Olympic games were abolished. As soon as this center of

-Greek national life (after an uninterrupted existence of eleven hundred

-and seventy years) had come to an end, the rest was comparatively easy.

-One after the other, the philosophers were expelled from the country.

-Finally, by order of the Emperor Justinian, the University of Athens was

-closed. The funds established for its maintenance were confiscated. The

-last seven professors, deprived of their livelihood, fled to Persia

-where King Chosroes received them hospitably and allowed them to spend

-the rest of their days peacefully playing the new and mysterious Indian

-game called “chess.”

-

-In the first half of the fifth century, archbishop Chrysostomus could

-truthfully state that the works of the old authors and philosophers had

-disappeared from the face of the earth. Cicero and Socrates and Virgil

-and Homer (not to mention the mathematicians and the astronomers and

-the physicians who were an object of special abomination to all good

-Christians) lay forgotten in a thousand attics and cellars. Six hundred

-years were to go by before they were called back to life, and in the

-meantime the world would be obliged to subsist on such literary fare as

-it pleased the theologians to place before it.

-

-A strange diet, and not exactly (in the jargon of the medical faculty) a

-balanced one.

-

-For the Church, although triumphant over its pagan enemies, was beset by

-many and serious tribulations. The poor peasant in Gaul and Lusitania,

-clamoring to burn incense in honor of his ancient Gods, could be silenced

-easily enough. He was a heathen and the law was on the side of the

-Christian. But the Ostrogoth or the Alaman or the Longobard who declared

-that Arius, the priest of Alexandria, was right in his opinion upon the

-true nature of Christ and that Athanasius, the bishop of that same city

-and Arius’ bitter enemy, was wrong (or vice versa)—the Longobard or Frank

-who stoutly maintained that Christ was not “of the same nature” but of

-a “like nature only” with God (or vice versa)—the Vandal or the Saxon

-who insisted that Nestor spoke the truth when he called the Virgin Mary

-the “mother of Christ” and not the “mother of God” (or vice versa)—the

-Burgundian or Frisian who denied that Jesus was possessed of two natures,

-one human and one divine (or vice versa)—all these simple-minded but

-strong-armed barbarians who had accepted Christianity and were, outside

-of their unfortunate errors of opinion, staunch friends and supporters

-of the Church—these indeed could not be punished with a general anathema

-and a threat of perpetual hell fire. They must be persuaded gently that

-they were wrong and must be brought within the fold with charitable

-expressions of love and devotion. But before all else they must be given

-a definite creed that they might know for once and for all what they must

-hold to be true and what they must reject as false.

-

-It was that desire for unity of some sort in all matters pertaining to

-the faith which finally caused those famous gatherings which have become

-known as Oecumenical or Universal Councils, and which since the middle

-of the fourth century have been called together at irregular intervals

-to decide what doctrine is right and what doctrine contains the germ of

-heresy and should therefore be adjudged erroneous, unsound, fallacious

-and heretical.

-

-The first of those Oecumenical councils was held in the town of Nicaea,

-not far from the ruins of Troy, in the year 325. The second one,

-fifty-six years later, was held in Constantinople. The third one in

-the year 431 in Ephesus. Thereafter they followed each other in rapid

-succession in Chalcedon, twice again in Constantinople, once more in

-Nicaea and finally once again in Constantinople in the year 869.

-

-After that, however, they were held in Rome or in some particular town of

-western Europe designated by the Pope. For it was generally accepted from

-the fourth century on that although the emperor had the technical right

-to call together such meetings (a privilege which incidentally obliged

-him to pay the traveling expenses of his faithful bishops) that very

-serious attention should be paid to the suggestions made by the powerful

-Bishop of Rome. And although we do not know with any degree of certainty

-who occupied the chair in Nicaea, all later councils were dominated by

-the Popes and the decisions of these holy gatherings were not regarded

-as binding unless they had obtained the official approval of the supreme

-pontiff himself or one of his delegates.

-

-Hence we can now say farewell to Constantinople and travel to the more

-congenial regions of the west.

-

-The field of Tolerance and Intolerance has been fought over so repeatedly

-by those who hold tolerance the greatest of all human virtues and those

-who denounce it as an evidence of moral weakness, that I shall pay

-very little attention to the purely theoretical aspects of the case.

-Nevertheless it must be confessed that the champions of the Church follow

-a plausible line of reasoning when they try to explain away the terrible

-punishments which were inflicted upon all heretics.

-

-“A church,” so they argue, “is like any other organization. It is

-almost like a village or a tribe or a fortress. There must be a

-commander-in-chief and there must be a definite set of laws and

-by-laws, which all members are forced to obey. It follows that those

-who swear allegiance to the Church make a tacit vow both to respect the

-commander-in-chief and to obey the law. And if they find it impossible to

-do this, they must suffer the consequences of their own decisions and get

-out.”

-

-All of which, so far, is perfectly true and reasonable.

-

-If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in the articles

-of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn Methodist, and if for some

-reason he ceases to believe in the creed as laid down by the Methodist

-Church, he can become a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that

-matter, a Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open. There

-is no one outside his own hungry family to say him nay.

-

-But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and unlimited

-economic opportunities.

-

-The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple. It was far from

-easy to discover a region where the influence of the Bishop of Rome did

-not make itself felt. One could of course go to Persia or to India, as

-a good many heretics did, but the voyage was long and the chances of

-survival were small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self

-and one’s children.

-

-And finally, why should a man surrender his good right to believe what he

-pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception of the idea of Christ

-was the right one and that it was only a question of time for him to

-convince the Church that its doctrines needed a slight modification?

-

-For that was the crux of the whole matter.

-

-The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics, dealt with

-ideas which had a relative and not a positive value.

-

-A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the gallows because they

-cannot agree upon the absolute value of x would be no more absurd than

-a council of learned theologians trying to define the undefinable and

-endeavoring to reduce the substance of God to a formula.

-

-But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and intolerance

-got hold of the world that until very recently all those who advocated

-tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot ever possibly know who is right

-and who is wrong” did so at the risk of their lives and usually couched

-their warnings in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or

-two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they meant.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VI

-

-THE PURE OF LIFE

-

-

-Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a

-book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like

-this:

-

-[Illustration: I]

-

-In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.

-

-AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.

-

-But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two sides. Then

-the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The diameters are thrown out

-of gear. A few like AB and EF have been greatly shortened. Others, and

-especially CD, have been lengthened.

-

-[Illustration: II]

-

-Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake

-of argument suppose that

-

-    AB represents politics

-    CD     ”      trade

-    EF     ”      art

-    GH     ”      militarism

-

-In the figure I the perfectly balanced state, all lines are equally long

-and quite as much attention is paid to politics as to trade and art and

-militarism.

-

-But in figure II (which is no longer a perfect circle) trade has got an

-undue advantage at the expense of politics and art has almost entirely

-disappeared, while militarism shows a gain.

-

-Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the others will tend to

-disappear altogether.

-

-[Illustration: III]

-

-You will find this a handy key to a great many historical problems.

-

-Try it on the Greeks.

-

-For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain a perfect circle

-of all-around accomplishments. But the foolish quarrels between the

-different political parties soon grew to such proportions that all the

-surplus energy of the nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil

-wars. The soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending the

-country against foreign aggression. They were turned loose upon their own

-neighbors, who had voted for a different candidate, or who believed in a

-slightly modified form of taxation.

-

-Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at first became

-difficult, then became entirely impossible and fled to other parts of the

-world, where business enjoyed a greater degree of stability.

-

-The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the city, the arts

-escaped by way of the back door, never to be seen again. Capital sailed

-away on the fastest ship it could find within a hundred miles, and since

-intellectualism is a very expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible

-to maintain good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to

-Alexandria.

-

-What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who subsisted upon

-tradition and routine.

-

-And all this happened because the line of politics had grown out of all

-proportion, because the perfect circle had been destroyed, and the other

-lines, art, science, philosophy, etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.

-

-If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find that there the

-particular line called “political power” grew and grew and grew until

-there was nothing left of any of the others. The circle which had spelled

-the glory of the Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight,

-narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.

-

-And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the history of the

-medieval Church to this sort of mathematics, this is what you will find.

-

-The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain a circle of

-conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they had rather neglected the

-diameter of science, but since they were not interested in the life of

-the world, they could not very well be expected to pay much attention to

-medicine or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of small

-appeal to men and women who were making ready for the last judgment and

-who regarded this world merely as the ante-room to Heaven.

-

-But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored (however

-imperfectly) to lead the good life and to be as industrious as they were

-charitable and as kindly as they were honest.

-

-As soon, however, as their little communities had been united into a

-single powerful organization, the perfect balance of the old spiritual

-circle was rudely upset by the obligations and duties of the new

-international responsibilities. It was easy enough for small groups of

-half-starved carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of

-poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was founded. But the

-heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus of the western

-world, the richest landowner of the entire continent, could not live

-as simply as if he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in

-Pomerania or Spain.

-

-Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter

-representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing “foreign policy”

-were lengthened to such an extent that the diameters representing

-“humility” and “poverty” and “self-negation” and the other elementary

-Christian virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.

-

-It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly of the

-benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all know, lived in utter

-darkness. It is true they burned wax tapers in their churches and went

-to bed by the uncertain light of a sconce, they possessed few books,

-they were ignorant of many things which are now being taught in our

-grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums. But knowledge

-and intelligence are two very different things and of the latter, these

-excellent burghers, who constructed the political and social structure in

-which we ourselves continue to live, had their full share.

-

-If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently helpless

-before the many and terrible abuses in their Church, let us judge them

-mercifully. They had at least the courage of their convictions and they

-fought whatever they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for

-personal happiness and comfort that they frequently ended their lives on

-the scaffold.

-

-More than that we can ask of no one.

-

-It is true that during the first thousand years of our era, comparatively

-few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not, however, because the

-Church felt less strongly about heresy than she did at a later date, but

-because she was too much occupied with more important questions to have

-any time to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.

-

-In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe where Odin and

-the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.

-

-And in the second place, something very unpleasant had happened, which

-had wellnigh threatened the whole of Europe with destruction.

-

-This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance of a brand-new

-prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the conquest of western Asia and

-northern Africa by the followers of a new God who was called Allah.

-

-The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of “infidel dogs”

-and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us under the impression that Jesus

-and Mahomet represented ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as

-fire and water.

-

-But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the same race, they

-spoke dialects which belonged to the same linguistic group, they both

-claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather and they both looked

-back upon a common ancestral home, which a thousand years before had

-stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

-

-And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who were such close

-relatives have always regarded each other with bitter scorn and have

-fought a war which has lasted more than twelve centuries and which has

-not yet come to an end.

-

-At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon what might have

-happened, but there was a time when Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might

-have easily been gained for the Christian faith.

-

-The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of their time

-tending their flocks and therefore were much given to meditation.

-People in cities can drug their souls with the pleasures of a perennial

-county-fair. But shepherds and fisher folk and farmers lead solitary

-lives and want something a little more substantial than noise and

-excitement.

-

-In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions, but had

-shown a distinct preference for Judaism. This is easily explained, as

-Arabia was full of Jews. In the tenth century B.C., a great many of King

-Solomon’s subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism of

-their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred years later in

-586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, there had been a second

-wholesale exodus of Jews towards the desert lands of the south.

-

-Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the quest of the Jews

-after the one and only true God was entirely in line with the aspirations

-and ideals of the Arabian tribes.

-

-Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet will know how much

-the Medinite had borrowed from the wisdom contained in some of the books

-of the Old Testament.

-

-Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with his mother Hagar

-lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the heart of Arabia) hostile to the

-ideas expressed by the young reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary,

-they followed Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was a

-loving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept those miracles

-of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter made so much. And as for

-the resurrection, they flatly refused to believe in it. But generally

-speaking, they felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were

-willing to give it a chance.

-

-But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the hands of certain

-Christian zealots who with their usual lack of discretion had denounced

-him as a liar and a false prophet before he had fairly opened his

-mouth. That and the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that

-the Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods instead

-of one, made the people of the desert finally turn their backs upon

-Christianity and declare themselves in favor of the Medinese camel driver

-who spoke to them of one and only one God and did not confuse them with

-references to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one, but

-were one or three as it might please the convenience of the moment and

-the interests of the officiating priest.

-

-Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of

-which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which

-insisted that all other Gods were impostors.

-

-Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.

-

-Mahomet died in 632.

-

-Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had

-been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire.

-

-Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted

-Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of

-Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a

-Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off

-and the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted

-until the end of the seventeenth century.

-

-Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry

-her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what

-she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and

-Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable

-field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was

-done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety

-of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might

-revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects

-who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large,

-however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were

-honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the

-people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of

-order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife

-and highway robbery.

-

-But while this was happening along the frontier, things had not gone so

-well in the heart of the pontifical empire. Incessantly (to revert to

-the mathematics explained in the first pages of this chapter) the line

-of worldliness had been lengthened until at last the spiritual element

-in the Church had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a

-purely political and economic nature and although Rome was to grow in

-power and exercise a tremendous influence upon the development of the

-next twelve centuries, certain elements of disintegration had already

-made their appearance and were being recognized as such by the more

-intelligent among the laity and the clergy.

-

-We modern people of the Protestant north think of a “church” as a

-building which stands empty six days out of every seven and a place

-where people go on a Sunday to hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We

-know that some of our churches have bishops and occasionally these

-bishops hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves

-surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their collars turned

-backwards and we read in the papers that they have declared themselves

-in favor of dancing or against divorce, and then they go home again and

-nothing has happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.

-

-We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to be our own) with

-the sum total of all our experiences, both in life and in death.

-

-The State, of course, is something very different. The State may take

-our money and may kill us if it feels that such a course is desirable

-for the public good. The State is our owner, our master, but what is now

-generally called “the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or,

-if we happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.

-

-But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different. Then, the Church

-was something visible and tangible, a highly active organization which

-breathed and existed, which shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than

-the State would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes who

-accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced the ancient

-ideal of poverty did not foresee the consequences to which such a policy

-was bound to lead. In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and

-quite appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow upon

-the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own worldly goods.

-Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated administration which

-reached all the way from John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage

-to Upsala. Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks

-and scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different

-departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed. Think of the

-amount spent upon a courier service across an entire continent; the

-traveling expenses of diplomatic agents now going to London, then

-returning from Novgorod; the sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers

-in the style that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly

-princes on a footing of complete equality.

-

-All the same, looking back upon what the Church came to stand for and

-contemplating what it might have been under slightly more favorable

-circumstances, this development seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew

-into a gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the pope

-became an international autocrat who held all the nations of western

-Europe in a bondage compared to which the rule of the old emperors had

-been mild and generous.

-

-And then, when complete success seemed within certain reach, something

-happened which proved fatal to the ambition for world dominion.

-

-The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir among the masses

-and that is one of the most uncomfortable things that can happen to any

-religious organization.

-

-Heretics were nothing new.

-

-There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a single rule of

-faith from which people could possibly dissent and disputes, which

-had divided Europe and Africa and western Asia into hostile camps for

-centuries at a time, were almost as old as the Church herself.

-

-But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and Sabellianists and

-Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians hardly come within the

-scope of this book. As a rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as

-the other and there was little to choose between the intolerance of a

-follower of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.

-

-Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain obscure points

-of theology which are gradually beginning to be forgotten. Heaven forbid

-that I should drag them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting

-my time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh outbreak of

-theological fury. Rather, I am writing these pages to tell our children

-of certain ideals of intellectual liberty for which some of their

-ancestors fought at the risk of their lives and to warn them against that

-attitude of doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused such

-a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand years.

-

-But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very different story.

-

-Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious fellow with

-a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong translation of an obscure

-sentence in the Apocalypse or the mis-spelling of a holy word in the

-gospel of St. John.

-

-Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which during the reign

-of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the village of Nazareth went to his

-death, and behold! he stands revealed as the only true Christian!

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VII

-

-THE INQUISITION

-

-

-In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high

-honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as

-Innocent III took possession of the papal chair.

-

-He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided in the Lateran

-Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time of his ascension. An

-honor-student in the universities of Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever,

-full of energy and high ambition, he used his office so well that he

-could rightly claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone

-but of the entire world.”

-

-He set Italy free from German interference by driving the imperial

-governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering those parts of

-the peninsula which were held by imperial troops; and finally by

-excommunicating the candidate to the imperial throne until that poor

-prince found himself beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew

-entirely from his domains on the other side of the Alps.

-

-He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight

-of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number

-of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and

-generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show

-himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as

-an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these

-proceedings which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable

-minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a

-practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed

-a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this

-clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman

-jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian

-Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her

-eastern colonies and treated them accordingly.

-

-In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished

-and tactful person.

-

-The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last

-begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between

-a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public

-blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France

-and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs

-according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily

-reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to

-comply with the papal wishes.

-

-Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people

-were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV

-(known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just

-conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of

-Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was

-obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman

-tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of

-Trondhjem.

-

-And so it went.

-

-The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of

-war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who

-therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep

-interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly

-asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England,

-certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master

-were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it

-had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for

-having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta.

-

-From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person

-who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers

-and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.

-

-And yet, some there were found who had the courage to do this very thing

-as we shall now see.

-

-The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.

-

-Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have small gift for

-publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets they write to explain

-their ideas and to defend themselves against their enemies fall an easy

-prey to the ever watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to

-be in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed. Hence

-we depend for our knowledge of most heresies upon such information as we

-are able to glean from the records of their trials and upon such articles

-as have been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the

-express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan” to the truly

-faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized and warned against

-doing likewise.

-

-As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired

-individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty cellar somewhere in

-the lowest part of the slums, who refuses to touch decent Christian food

-but subsists entirely upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who

-keeps away from the company of women and mumbles strange prophecies about

-the second coming of the Messiah, who reproves the clergy for their

-worldliness and wickedness and generally disgusts his more respectable

-neighbors by his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.

-

-Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in making a nuisance of

-themselves, for that seems to be the fate of people who take themselves

-too seriously.

-

-Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost unholy zeal

-for a holy life, were dirty, looked like the devil and did not smell

-pleasantly and generally upset the quiet routine of their home town by

-their strange ideas anent a truly Christian existence.

-

-But let us give them credit for their courage and their honesty.

-

-They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.

-

-As a rule, they lost it.

-

-Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized. Eventually

-even those who believe in no organization at all must form a Society

-for the Promotion of Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish

-anything. And the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and

-wallowed in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct

-of self-preservation made them flock together and their feeling of

-insecurity forced them to surround their sacred doctrines by a double

-barrier of mystic rites and esoteric ceremonials.

-

-But of course the masses of the people, who remained faithful to the

-Church, were unable to make any distinction between these different

-groups and sects. And they bunched them all together and called them

-dirty Manichaeans or some other unflattering name and felt that that

-solved the problem.

-

-In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists of the Middle

-Ages. Of course I do not use the latter name as indicating membership in

-a certain well-defined political party which a few years ago established

-itself as the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer to a

-vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays bestow upon all

-their personal enemies from the landlord who comes to collect the rent

-down to the elevator boy who neglects to stop at the right floor.

-

-A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a most objectionable

-person. But as he could not very well try him upon any positive charges,

-he condemned him upon hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable

-advantages over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure

-followed by the regular courts of law but which sometimes suffers from a

-lack of accuracy and is responsible for a great many judicial murders.

-

-What made this all the more reprehensible in the case of the poor

-Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of the original sect, a Persian

-by the name of Mani, had been the very incarnation of benevolence and

-charity. He was an historical figure and was born during the first

-quarter of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his father,

-Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.

-

-He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and spent the years

-of his youth in a community as international, as polyglot, as pious, as

-godless, as material and as idealistically-spiritual as the New York of

-our own day. Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of

-east and west and south and north had its followers among the crowds that

-visited the great commercial centers of Mesopotamia. Mani listened to

-all the different preachers and prophets and then distilled a philosophy

-of his own which was a _mixtum-compositum_ of Buddhism, Christianity,

-Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a dozen old

-Babylonian superstitions.

-

-Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his followers

-sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated that Mani merely

-revived the old Persian myth of the Good God and the Evil God who are

-eternally fighting for the soul of man and that he associated the ancient

-God of Evil with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became his

-Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that Heavenly Father whom we

-find revealed within the pages of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that

-is where Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that the

-body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing; that all people

-should try to rid themselves of their worldly ambitions by the constant

-mortification of the flesh and should obey the strictest rules of diet

-and behavior lest they fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil)

-and burn in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos about

-things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed for his followers a

-menu composed exclusively of cold water, dried vegetables and dead fish.

-This latter ordinance may surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea,

-being cold-blooded animals, have always been regarded as less harmful to

-man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren of the dry land,

-and the self-same people who would rather suffer death than eat a veal

-chop cheerfully consume quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of

-conscience.

-

-Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for women. He forbade

-his disciples to marry and advocated the slow extinction of the human

-race.

-

-As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally by the

-Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been the exponent, Mani

-regarded them all with horror and instead of being submerged in water,

-his candidates for holy orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.

-

-At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to explain his

-ideas unto all mankind. First he visited India and China where he was

-fairly successful. Then he turned homeward to bring the blessings of his

-creed to his own neighbors.

-

-But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived of much

-secret revenue by the success of these unworldly doctrines turned against

-him and asked that he be killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the

-protection of the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded

-by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious questions,

-Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They took him to the walls

-of the town and crucified him and flayed his corpse and publicly exposed

-his skin before the city gate as an example to all those who might feel

-inclined to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.

-

-By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean church

-itself was broken up. But little bits of the prophet’s ideas, like so

-many spiritual meteors, were showered far and wide upon the landscape of

-Europe and Asia and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc

-among the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them up, had

-examined them and had found them singularly to their taste.

-

-Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I do not know.

-

-Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Danube.

-Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed immense popularity in Germany

-and France. There the followers of the new creed called themselves by the

-Oriental name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,” and

-so widespread was the affliction that all over western Europe the word

-“Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the same as “heretic.”

-

-But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a definite religious

-denomination. No effort was made to establish a new sect. The Manichaean

-ideas exercised great influence upon a large number of people who would

-have stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout sons of the

-Church. And that made this particular form of heresy so dangerous and so

-difficult of detection.

-

-It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose a disease

-caused by microbes of such gigantic structure that their presence can be

-detected by the microscope of a provincial board-of-health.

-

-But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who can maintain their

-incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet illumination, for they shall

-inherit the earth.

-

-Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was therefore the most

-dangerous expression of all social epidemics and it filled the higher

-authorities of that organization with a terror not felt before the more

-common varieties of spiritual afflictions.

-

-It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of the staunchest

-supporters of the early Christian faith had shown unmistakable symptoms

-of the disease. Yea, great Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and

-indefatigable warrior of the Cross, who had done more than any one else

-to destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have been at

-heart considerable of a Manichaean.

-

-Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the stake in the year

-385 and who gained the distinction of being the first victim of the law

-against heretics, was accused of Manichaean tendencies.

-

-Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have fallen under the

-spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.

-

-They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading the Old Testament

-and finally, during the twelfth century, promulgated that famous order by

-which all clergymen were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not

-to forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of abstinence

-were soon to make upon one of the greatest leaders of spiritual reform,

-causing that most lovable of men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish

-a new monastic order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly

-earned him the title of the Buddha of the West.

-

-But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty and humility

-of soul began to filter down to the common people, at the very moment

-when the world was filled with the din of yet another war between emperor

-and pope, when foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross

-and the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable bits of

-territory along the Mediterranean shores, when hordes of Crusaders were

-rushing home with the ill-gotten plunder they had taken from friend and

-enemy alike, when abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a

-staff of courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass that

-they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed something very

-unpleasant was bound to happen, and it did.

-

-Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent with the state

-of the Church made themselves felt in that part of France where the old

-Roman tradition of culture had survived longest and where civilization

-had never been quite absorbed by barbarism.

-

-You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of

-a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the

-Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is

-its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns

-and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an

-abundance of sunshine and rain.

-

-While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds

-of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had

-already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give

-birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations

-of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and

-Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications

-in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the

-northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.

-

-In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to

-make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.

-

-But there had not been anything which, however remotely, could be

-construed into open rebellion. Here and there in certain small villages

-certain people were beginning to hint that their priests might live as

-simply and as unostentatiously as their parishioners; who refused (oh,

-memory of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went forth to

-war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they might read and study the

-Gospels for themselves; who let it be known that they did not approve

-of capital punishment; who denied the existence of that Purgatory which

-six centuries after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed as

-part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important detail) refused

-to surrender a tenth of their income to the Church.

-

-Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions against clerical

-authority were sought out and sometimes, if they were deaf to persuasion,

-they were discreetly put out of the way.

-

-But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed necessary to

-call together a meeting of all the bishops of the Provence to discuss

-what measures should be taken to put a stop to this very dangerous and

-highly seditious agitation. They duly convened and continued their

-debates until the year 1056.

-

-By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary forms of

-punishment and excommunication did not produce any noticeable results.

-The simple country folk who desired to lead a “pure life” were delighted

-whenever they were given a chance to demonstrate their principles of

-Christian charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail and

-if perchance they were condemned to death, they marched to the stake with

-the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the

-place left vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a dozen

-fresh candidates for holiness.

-

-Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between the papal

-delegates who insisted upon more severe persecutions and the local

-nobility and clergy who (knowing the true nature of their subjects)

-refused to comply with the orders from Rome and protested that violence

-only encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the voice of

-reason and therefore was a waste both of time and energy.

-

-And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement received a fresh

-impetus from the north.

-

-In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way of the Rhone,

-there lived a merchant by the name of Peter Waldo. A very serious man,

-a good man, a most generous man, almost fanatically obsessed by his

-eagerness to follow the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that

-it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for

-a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Thirty generations of

-Christians had tried to explain just what Jesus had actually meant when

-he uttered these words. Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He

-divided whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and refused

-to accumulate fresh wealth.

-

-John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”

-

-Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and had carefully

-stipulated under what conditions it might perhaps be desirable for the

-laity to study the holy books directly and without the assistance of a

-priest.

-

-Peter Waldo did not see it that way.

-

-John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”

-

-Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.

-

-And when he discovered that the things he found did not tally with the

-conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated the New Testament into his own

-language and spread copies of his manuscript throughout the good land of

-Provence.

-

-At first his activities did not attract much attention. His enthusiasm

-for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most likely he could be persuaded to

-found some new and very ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those

-who wished to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the

-existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.

-

-Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets for those

-people whose excess of faith might make them troublesome.

-

-But all things must be done according to rule and precedent. And in that

-respect the “pure men” of the Provence and the “poor men” of Lyons were

-terrible failures. Not only did they neglect to inform their bishops

-of what they were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed

-the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good Christian

-without the assistance of a professional member of the priesthood and

-that the Bishop of Rome had no more right to tell people outside of

-his jurisdiction what to do and what to believe than the Grand Duke of

-Tartary or the Caliph of Bagdad.

-

-The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and truth compels me

-to state that she waited a long time before she finally decided to

-exterminate this heresy by force.

-

-But an organization based upon the principle that there is only one

-right way of thinking and living and that all other ways are infamous

-and damnable is bound to take drastic measures whenever its authority is

-being openly questioned.

-

-If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive and this

-consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite action and devise

-a series of punishments that should put terror into the hearts of all

-future dissenters.

-

-The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of Albi which was

-a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the Waldenses (who bore the name of

-their founder, Peter Waldo) living in countries without great political

-value and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected as

-the first of her victims.

-

-The murder of a papal delegate who for several years had ruled the

-Provence as if it were so much conquered territory, gave Innocent III an

-excuse to interfere.

-

-He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses and the

-Waldenses.

-

-Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition against

-the heretics would be excused from paying interest on their debts; they

-would be absolved from all past and future sins and for the time being

-they would be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of

-law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the people of

-northern Europe.

-

-Why should they bother about going all the way to Palestine when a

-campaign against the rich cities of the Provence offered the same

-spiritual and economic rewards as a trip to the Orient and when a man

-could gain an equal amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term

-of service?

-

-For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and the worst elements

-among the nobility and gentry of northern France and southern England,

-of Austria, Saxony and Poland came rushing southward to escape the local

-sheriff and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense of

-the prosperous Provençals.

-

-The number of men, women and children hanged, burned, drowned,

-decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders is variously given.

-I have not any idea how many thousands perished. Here and there, whenever

-a formal execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete

-figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty thousand,

-according to the size of each town.

-

-After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers were in a

-quandary how to know who were heretics and who were not. They placed

-their problem before the papal delegate, who followed the army as a sort

-of spiritual adviser.

-

-“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and kill them all. The

-Lord will know his own people.”

-

-But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de Montfort, a veteran of

-the real crusades, who distinguished himself most of all by the novelty

-and the ingenuity of his cruelties. In return for his valuable services,

-he afterwards received large tracts of land in the country which he had

-just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.

-

-As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more

-inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their

-own until the days of the Reformation.

-

-The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and

-hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition.

-But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines

-were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin

-Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly

-which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.

-

-All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As

-far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle

-of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous

-command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished

-to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall

-and that several of the guests had remained away, had said unto his

-servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once

-more been fulfilled.

-

-“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.

-

-The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was

-not solved until many years later.

-

-Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special

-courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the

-Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of

-Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they

-came to be known simply as the Inquisition.

-

-Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the

-mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have

-visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of

-rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow

-hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an

-endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.

-

-Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth

-century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of

-sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the

-phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant

-prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those

-who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should

-never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.

-

-Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight

-ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages,

-and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the

-most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space.

-For there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an

-International Court of Arbitration.

-

-There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries and

-created for all sorts of purposes.

-

-The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of Spain and the Holy

-Inquisition of Rome. The former was a local affair which watched over the

-heretics in the Iberian peninsula and in the American colonies.

-

-The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and burned Joan of Arc

-in the northern part of the continent as it burned Giordano Bruno in the

-southern.

-

-It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never killed any one.

-

-After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical judges, the convicted

-heretic was surrendered to the secular authorities. These could then do

-with him what they thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death

-penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience and

-might even find themselves excommunicated or deprived of their support

-at the papal court. If, as sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped

-this fate and was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only

-increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement for the rest

-of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial prisons.

-

-As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror of going insane

-in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many prisoners confessed all sorts

-of crimes of which they were totally innocent that they might be found

-guilty of heresy and thus be put out of their misery.

-

-It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing to be

-hopelessly biased.

-

-It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds of

-thousands of harmless people in all parts of the world were overnight

-lifted from their beds at the mere whispered hearsay of some loquacious

-neighbors; that they were held for months or for years in filthy

-cells awaiting an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and

-qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never informed of the

-nature of the accusation that was brought against them; that they were

-not allowed to know the names of those who had acted as witnesses against

-them; that they were not permitted to communicate with their relatives

-or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest their innocence,

-they could be tortured until all the limbs of their body were broken;

-that other heretics could testify against them but were not listened to

-if they offered to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally

-that they could be sent to their death without the haziest notion as to

-the cause of their terrible fate.

-

-It seems even more incredible that men and women who had been buried for

-fifty or sixty years could be dug out of their graves, could be found

-guilty “in absentia” and that the heirs of people who were condemned

-in this fashion could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a

-century after the death of the offending parties.

-

-But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended for their

-maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods that were confiscated,

-absurdities of this sort were by no means an uncommon occurrence

-and frequently the grandchildren were driven to beggary on account

-of something which their grandfather was supposed to have done two

-generations before.

-

-Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago when Czarist

-Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember the agent provocateur. As

-a rule the agent provocateur was a former burglar or a retired gambler

-with a winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly known

-that his sorrow had made him join the revolution and in this way he often

-gained the confidence of those who were genuinely opposed to the imperial

-government. But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new friends,

-he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward and went to the next

-city, there to repeat his vile practices.

-

-During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, southern and

-western Europe was overrun by this nefarious tribe of private spies.

-

-They made a living denouncing those who were supposed to have criticized

-the Church or who had expressed doubts upon certain points of doctrine.

-

-If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the business of

-such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.

-

-As he could rest assured that torture would make his victims confess, no

-matter how innocent they might be, he ran no risks and could continue his

-trade ad infinitum.

-

-In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced by this

-system of allowing anonymous people to denounce those whom they suspected

-of spiritual deficiencies. At last, no one dared trust his nearest and

-dearest friends. Members of the same family were forced to be on their

-guard against each other.

-

-The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the inquisitorial work

-made excellent use of the panic which their methods created and for

-almost two centuries they lived on the fat of the land.

-

-Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying causes of the

-Reformation was the disgust which a large number of people felt for those

-arrogant beggars who under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the

-homes of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable beds,

-who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they be treated as

-honored guests and who were able to maintain themselves in comfort by the

-mere threat that they would denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition

-if ever they were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had come

-to regard as their just due.

-

-The Church of course could answer to all this that the Inquisition merely

-acted as a spiritual health officer whose sworn duty it was to prevent

-contagious errors from spreading among the masses. It could point to the

-leniency shown to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could

-not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even claim that few

-people ever suffered the penalty of death unless they were apostates and

-were caught in a new offense after having forsworn their former errors.

-

-But what of it?

-

-The same trick by which an innocent man was changed into a desperate

-criminal could afterwards be used to place him in an apparent position of

-recantation.

-

-The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been close friends.

-

-And what are a few faked documents between spies?

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER VIII

-

-THE CURIOUS ONES

-

-

-Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; the

-intolerance of laziness, the intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance

-of self-interest.

-

-The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in

-every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in

-small villages and old-established towns, and it is not restricted to

-human beings.

-

-Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his

-placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn

-of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley

-Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows

-that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles

-through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape.

-

-Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time learning the defunct

-dialects of Polynesian islands that the language of dogs and cats and

-horses and donkeys has been sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude

-says to his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an outburst

-of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For Dude is no longer young

-and therefore is “set” in his ways. His horsey habits were all formed

-years and years ago and therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and

-habits seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners and

-habits will be declared wrong until the end of his days.

-

-It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes parents shake

-their heads over the foolish behavior of their children, which has caused

-the absurd myth of “the good old days”; which makes savages and civilized

-creatures wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a great

-deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all people with a new

-idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.

-

-Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively harmless.

-

-We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later. In ages past it

-has caused millions of people to leave home, and in this way it has been

-responsible for the permanent settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited

-land which otherwise would still be a wilderness.

-

-The second variety is much more serious.

-

-An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance, a very dangerous

-person.

-

-But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack of mental

-faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then he erects within his soul a

-granite bulwark of self-righteousness and from the high pinnacle of this

-formidable fortress, he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not

-share his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed to

-live.

-

-People suffering from this particular affliction are both uncharitable

-and mean. Because they live constantly in a state of fear, they easily

-turn to cruelty and love to torture those against whom they have a

-grievance. It was among people of this ilk that the strange notion

-of a predilected group of a “chosen people” first took its origin.

-Furthermore, the victims of this delusion are forever trying to bolster

-up their own courage by an imaginary relationship which exists between

-themselves and the invisible Gods. This, of course, in order to give a

-flavor of spiritual approbation to their intolerance.

-

-For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging Danny Deever

-because we consider him a menace to our own happiness, because we hate

-him with a thousand hates and because we just love to hang him.” Oh,

-no! They get together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and

-for days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever. When finally

-sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps committed some petty sort

-of larceny, stands solemnly convicted as a most terrible person who has

-dared to offend the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect

-who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution therefore

-becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit upon the judges who have the

-courage to convict such an ally of Satan.

-

-That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people are quite as apt to

-fall under the spell of this most fatal delusion as their more brutal and

-blood-thirsty neighbors is a commonplace both of history and psychology.

-

-The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of a thousand poor

-martyrs were most assuredly not composed of criminals. They were decent,

-pious folk and they felt sure that they were doing something very

-creditable and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.

-

-Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have rejected the idea as

-an ignoble confession of Moral weakness. Perhaps they were intolerant,

-but in that case they were proud of the fact and with good right. For

-there, out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny Deever,

-clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of pantaloons adorned with

-little devils, and he was going, going slowly but surely, to be hanged in

-the Market Place. While they themselves, as soon as the show was over,

-would return to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and

-beans.

-

-Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting and thinking

-correctly?

-

-Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would not the rôles be

-reversed?

-

-A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one and hard to answer

-when people feel sincerely convinced that their own ideas are the ideas

-of God and are unable to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.

-

-There remains as a third category the intolerance caused by

-self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of jealousy and as

-common as the measles.

-

-When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the favor of Almighty

-God could not be bought by the killing of a dozen oxen or goats, all

-those who made a living from the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple

-decried him as a dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed

-before he could do any lasting damage to their main source of income.

-

-When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus and there preached

-a new creed which threatened to interfere with the prosperity of the

-jewelers who derived great profit from the sale of little images of the

-local Goddess Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the

-unwelcome intruder.

-

-And ever since there has been open warfare between those who depend for

-their livelihood upon some established form of worship and those whose

-ideas threaten to take the crowd away from one temple in favor of another.

-

-When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle Ages, we must

-constantly remember that we have to deal with a very complicated problem.

-Only upon very rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only

-one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance. Most

-frequently we can discover traces of all three varieties in the cases of

-persecution which are brought to our attention.

-

-That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering thousands

-of square miles of land and owning hundreds of thousands of serfs,

-should have turned the full vigor of its anger against a group of

-peasants who had undertaken to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious

-Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth was entirely natural.

-

-And in that case, the extermination of heretics became a matter

-of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the intolerance of

-self-interest.

-

-But when we begin to consider another group of men who were to feel

-the heavy hand of official disapprobation, the scientists, the problem

-becomes infinitely more complicated.

-

-And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the Church

-authorities towards those who tried to reveal the secrets of nature, we

-must go back a good many centuries and study what had actually happened

-in Europe during the first six centuries of our era.

-

-The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the continent with the

-ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here and there a few pieces of the old

-Roman fabric of state had remained standing erect amidst the wastes of

-the turbulent waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these

-walls had perished. Their books had been carried away by the waves. Their

-art lay forgotten in the deep mud of a new ignorance. Their collections,

-their museums, their laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of

-scientific facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of

-uncouth savages from the heart of Asia.

-

-We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth century. Of

-Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople, then almost as far

-removed from central Europe as the Melbourne of today) the people of the

-west possessed hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely

-disappeared. A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters from the

-works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar of that time could find

-when he wanted to familiarize himself with the thoughts of the ancients.

-If he desired to learn their language, there was no one to teach it to

-him, unless a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of

-Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced them to find a

-temporary asylum in France or Italy.

-

-Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of those dated from

-the fourth and fifth centuries. The few manuscripts of the classics

-that survived had been copied so often and so indifferently that their

-contents were no longer understandable to any one who had not made a life

-study of paleography.

-

-As for books of science, with the possible exception of some of the

-simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer to be found in any of

-the available libraries and what was much more regrettable, they were no

-longer wanted.

-

-For the people who now ruled the world regarded science with a hostile

-eye and discouraged all independent labor in the field of mathematics,

-biology and zoology, not to mention medicine and astronomy, which had

-descended to such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of the

-slightest practical value.

-

-It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand such a state

-of affairs.

-

-We men and women of the twentieth century, whether rightly or wrongly,

-profoundly believe in the idea of progress. Whether we ever shall be able

-to make this world perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to

-be our most sacred duty to try.

-

-Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of progress seems to

-have become the national religion of our entire country.

-

-But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could not share such a view.

-

-The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and interesting things

-had lasted such a lamentably short time! It had been so rudely disturbed

-by the political cataclysm that had overtaken the unfortunate country

-that most Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed

-pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy fatherland,

-had become abject believers in the doctrine of the ultimate futility of

-all worldly endeavor.

-

-The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw their conclusions

-from almost a thousand years of consecutive history, had discovered a

-certain upward trend in the development of the human race and their

-philosophers, notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task

-of educating the younger generation for a happier and better future.

-

-Then came Christianity.

-

-The center of interest was moved from this world to the other. Almost

-immediately people fell back into a deep and dark abyss of hopeless

-resignation.

-

-Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference. He was conceived

-in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he died repenting of his sins.

-

-But there was a difference between the old despair and the new.

-

-The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so) that they were more

-intelligent and better educated than their neighbors and they felt rather

-sorry for those unfortunate barbarians. But they never quite reached the

-point at which they began to consider themselves as a race that had been

-set apart from all others because it was the chosen people of Zeus.

-

-Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape from its own

-antecedents. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as one of the

-Holy Books of their own faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish

-doctrine that their race was “different” from all others and that only

-those who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines

-could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed to perdition.

-

-This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to those who

-were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to believe themselves

-predilected favorites among millions and millions of their fellow

-creatures. During many highly critical years it had turned the Christians

-into a closely-knit, self-contained little community which floated

-unconcernedly upon a vast ocean of paganism.

-

-What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide

-towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject

-of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any

-of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas

-of their Church into the concrete form of written books. Eventually

-they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God.

-Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve

-was none of their concern.

-

-Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the

-origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians

-and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about

-these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely

-convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of

-Christ.

-

-There was for example the problem of our earth.

-

-The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of

-other stars.

-

-The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk

-on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe.

-

-It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular

-group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been

-brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first

-chapter of Genesis.

-

-When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of

-predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little

-more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity,

-of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But

-these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of

-existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to

-establish a fixed date for the beginning of time.

-

-In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun

-at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, and would end at

-another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed

-for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a

-universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians

-and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only

-cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and

-unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space.

-

-True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they

-were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No

-man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the

-faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books.

-

-One book was enough.

-

-That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every

-semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were

-divinely inspired.

-

-A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly amused if he

-had been told of a supposedly holy volume which contained scraps of

-ill-digested national history, doubtful love poems, the inarticulate

-visions of half-demented prophets and whole chapters devoted to the

-foulest denunciation of those who for some reason or another were

-supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s many tribal

-deities.

-

-But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble respect for

-the “written word” which to him was one of the great mysteries of

-civilization, and when this particular book, by successive councils of

-his Church, was recommended to him as being without error, flaw or slip,

-he willingly enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum total

-of everything that man had ever known, or ever could hope to know, and

-joined in the denunciation and persecution of those who defied Heaven

-by extending their researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and

-Isaiah.

-

-The number of people willing to die for their principles has always been

-necessarily limited.

-

-At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part of certain people

-is so irrepressible that some outlet must be found for their pent up

-energy. As a result of this conflict between curiosity and repression

-there grew up that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to

-be known as Scholasticism.

-

-It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was then that

-Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, gave birth to a son

-who has better claims to be considered the patron saint of the French

-nation than that good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of

-eight hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded his subjects’

-loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their own.

-

-When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus, as you may

-see this very day at the bottom of many an ancient charter. The signature

-is a little clumsy. But Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As

-a boy he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took up writing,

-his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent fighting the Russians and

-the Moors that he had to give up the attempt and hired the best scribes

-of his day to act as his secretaries and do his writing for him.

-

-For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the fact that only

-twice within fifty years had he worn “city clothes” (the toga of a Roman

-nobleman), had a most genuine appreciation of the value of learning, and

-turned his court into a private university for the benefit of his own

-children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.

-

-There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time, the new imperator

-of the west loved to spend his hours of leisure. And so great was his

-respect for academic democracy that he dropped all etiquette and as

-simple Brother David took an active share in the conversation and allowed

-himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.

-

-But when we come to examine the problems that interested this goodly

-company and the questions they discussed, we are reminded of the list of

-subjects chosen by the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.

-

-They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was true in the

-year 800 held equally good for 1400. This was not the fault of the

-medieval scholar, whose brain was undoubtedly quite as good as that of

-his successors of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the

-position of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete liberty

-of investigation, provided he does not say or do anything at variance

-with the chemical and medical information contained in the volumes of

-the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when

-chemistry was practically an unknown subject and surgery was closely akin

-to butchery.

-

-As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the medieval scientist

-with his tremendous brain capacity and his very limited field of

-experimentation reminds one somewhat of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon

-the chassis of a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with

-a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove his strange

-contraption according to the rules and regulations of the road he became

-slightly ridiculous and wasted a terrible lot of energy without getting

-anywhere in particular.

-

-Of course the best among these men were desperate at the rate of speed

-which they were forced to observe.

-

-They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting

-observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote ponderous volumes,

-trying to prove the exact opposite of what they held to be true, in order

-that they might give a hint of the things that were uppermost in their

-minds.

-

-They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus pocus; they wore

-strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles hanging from their

-ceilings; they displayed shelves full of bottled monsters and threw evil

-smelling herbs in the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors

-away from their front door and at the same time establish a reputation

-of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could be allowed to say

-whatever they liked without being held too closely responsible for their

-ideas. And gradually they developed such a thorough system of scientific

-camouflage that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they

-actually meant.

-

-That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves quite as

-intolerant towards science and literature as the Church of the Middle

-Ages had done is quite true, but it is beside the point.

-

-The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to their hearts’

-content, but they were rarely able to turn their threats into positive

-acts of repression.

-

-The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed the power to crush

-its enemies but it made use of it, whenever the occasion presented itself.

-

-The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like to indulge

-in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values of tolerance and

-intolerance.

-

-But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were placed

-before the choice of a public recantation or an equally public flogging.

-

-And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what they held to be

-true, and preferred to waste their time on cross-word puzzles made up

-exclusively from the names of the animals mentioned in the Book of

-Revelations, let us not be too hard on them.

-

-I am quite certain that I never would have written the present volume,

-six hundred years ago.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER IX

-

-THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD

-

-

-I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man

-who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five

-is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of

-the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort

-of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. I was

-taught to look upon all events of the past in the light of a definitely

-established order of things; a universe more or less competently managed

-by emperors and kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by

-congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury. Furthermore, in

-the days of my youth, the good Lord was still tacitly recognized as the

-ex-officio head of everything, and a personage who had to be treated with

-great respect and decorum.

-

-Then came the war.

-

-The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were

-abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret

-committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed

-by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially

-proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times.

-

-Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several

-centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.

-

-Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy.

-

-Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land,

-some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign

-papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known

-technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a

-careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.

-

-The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as an insufferable

-survival of the Dark Ages and we of the great republic of the west saved

-copies of the American comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks

-at home what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually were.

-

-Then came the great Russian revolution.

-

-For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist had howled that

-he was a poor, persecuted creature who enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as

-evidence thereof he had pointed to the strict supervision of all journals

-devoted to the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog

-turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the victorious friends of

-freedom abolish censorship of the press? By no means. They padlocked all

-papers and magazines which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the

-new masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia or Archangel

-(not much to choose) and in general showed themselves a hundred times

-more intolerant than the much maligned ministers and police sergeants of

-the Little White Father.

-

-It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community, which

-heartily believed in the motto of Milton that the “liberty to know, to

-utter and to argue freely according to our own conscience, is the highest

-form of liberty.”

-

-“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see the day when the

-Sermon on the Mount was declared to be a dangerous pro-German document

-which must not be allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million

-sovereign citizens and the publication of which would expose the editors

-and the printers to fines and imprisonment.

-

-In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to drop the further

-study of history and to take up short story writing or real estate.

-

-But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall stick to my job,

-trying to remember that in a well regulated state, every decent citizen

-is supposed to have the right to say and think and utter whatever he

-feels to be true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and

-comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners of polite

-society or break one of the rules of the local police.

-

-This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all official

-censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought to watch out for

-certain magazines and papers which are being printed for the purpose of

-turning pornography into private gain. But for the rest, I would let

-every one print whatever he liked.

-

-I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical person

-who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with the history of the last

-five hundred years. That period shows clearly that violent methods

-of suppression of the printed or spoken word have never yet done the

-slightest good.

-

-Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is contained in a

-small and hermetically closed space and subjected to a violent impact

-from without. A poor devil, full of half-baked economic notions, when

-left to himself will attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and

-as a rule will be laughed at for his pains.

-

-The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate sheriff, dragged

-to jail and condemned to thirty-five years of solitary confinement,

-will become an object of great pity and in the end will be regarded and

-honored as a martyr.

-

-But it will be well to remember one thing.

-

-There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as martyrs for good

-causes. They are tricky people and one never can tell what they will do

-next.

-

-Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If they have

-anything to say that is good, we ought to know it, and if not, they will

-soon be forgotten. The Greeks seem to have felt that way, and the Romans

-did until the days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief

-of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine personage, a

-second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand miles removed from all ordinary

-mortals, this was changed.

-

-The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of “offering insult

-to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a purely political misdemeanor and

-from the time of Augustus until the days of Justinian, many people were

-sent to prison because they had been a little too outspoken in their

-opinions about their rulers. But if one let the person of the emperor

-alone, there was practically no other subject of conversation which the

-Roman must avoid.

-

-This happy condition came to an end when the world was brought under

-the domination of the Church. The line between good and bad, between

-orthodox and heretical, was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead

-more than a few years. During the second half of the first century, the

-apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood of Ephesus in

-Asia Minor, a place famous for its amulets and charms. He went about

-preaching and casting out devils, and with such great success that he

-convinced many people of the error of their heathenish ways. As a token

-of repentance they came together one fine day with all their books of

-magic and burned more than ten thousand dollars worth of secret formulae,

-as you may read in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

-

-This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part of a group of

-repentant sinners and it is not stated that Paul made an attempt to

-forbid the other Ephesians from reading or owning similar books.

-

-Such a step was not taken until a century later.

-

-Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this same city of

-Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul was condemned and the

-faithful were admonished not to read it.

-

-During the next two hundred years, there was very little censorship.

-There also were very few books.

-

-But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian Church had

-become the official church of the Empire, the supervision of the written

-word became part of the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were

-absolutely forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the people

-were warned that they must read them at their own risk. Until authors

-found it more convenient to assure themselves of the approval of the

-authorities before they published their works and made it a rule to send

-their manuscripts to the local bishops for their approbation.

-

-Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his works would be

-allowed to exist. A book which one Pope had pronounced harmless might be

-denounced as blasphemous and indecent by his successor.

-

-On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes quite

-effectively against the risk of being burned together with their

-parchment offspring and the system worked well enough as long as books

-were copied by hand and it took five whole years to get out an edition of

-three volumes.

-

-All this of course was changed by the famous invention of Johann

-Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.

-

-After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising publisher was

-able to produce as many as four or five hundred copies in less than two

-weeks’ time and in the short period between 1453 and 1500 the people

-of western and southern Europe were presented with not less than forty

-thousand different editions of books that had thus far been obtainable

-only in some of the better stocked libraries.

-

-The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the number of available

-books with very serious misgivings. It was difficult enough to catch a

-single heretic with a single home made copy of the Gospels. What then of

-twenty million heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited

-volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority and it was

-deemed necessary to appoint a special tribunal to inspect all forthcoming

-publications at their source and say which could be published and which

-must never see the light of day.

-

-Out of the different lists of books which from time to time were

-published by this committee as containing “forbidden knowledge” grew that

-famous Index which came to enjoy almost as nefarious a reputation as the

-Inquisition.

-

-But it would be unfair to create the impression that such a supervision

-of the printing-press was something peculiar to the Catholic Church.

-Many states, frightened by the sudden avalanche of printed material that

-threatened to upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their

-local publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and had

-forbidden them to print anything that did not bear the official mark of

-approbation.

-

-But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today.

-And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the

-sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously

-that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called

-Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed

-works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of

-rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form

-of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however

-diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less

-than a couple of thousand years.

-

-But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly

-this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon

-their unfortunate subjects.

-

-Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had

-declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing

-which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any

-public attention.”

-

-The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the

-Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted

-to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves

-thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than

-that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany

-and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business

-it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon

-as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who

-raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the valuable

-information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible

-loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to

-work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold

-at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by

-an army of professional book-leggers.

-

-But the number of copies that could be carried across the frontier

-remained necessarily very small and in such countries as Italy and Spain

-and Portugal, where the Index was actually enforced until a short time

-ago, the results of this policy of repression became very noticeable.

-

-If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for progress, the

-reason was not difficult to find. Not only were the students in their

-universities deprived of all foreign text-books, but they were forced to

-use a domestic product of very inferior quality.

-

-And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from occupying themselves

-seriously with literature or science. For no man in his senses would

-undertake to write a book when he ran the risk of seeing his work

-“corrected” to pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond

-recognition by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial Board of

-Investigators.

-

-Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes in a

-wine-shop.

-

-Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his people, he wrote

-the story of Don Quixote.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER X

-

-CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR

-

-

-In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to

-those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of

-warning in many of the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his

-more timid friends.

-

-“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the Lutheran

-controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very careful how you handle

-it, because you might easily offend the Pope, who wishes you well.”

-

-Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge tells me that

-you are about to publish a book of short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do

-not incur the displeasure of the Emperor, who might be in a position to

-do you great harm.”

-

-Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty

-of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who

-must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived

-of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the

-clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.

-

-Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to

-the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these

-hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted

-to literature and the word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where

-historians come together.

-

-But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write

-a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and

-advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell.

-

-“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes

-the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most

-regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.”

-

-Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott

-a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say

-something about this in your story of tolerance.”

-

-And so on.

-

-No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether

-reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a

-volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a

-lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official

-form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the

-Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part

-of all good citizens.

-

-History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt.

-It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which

-are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and

-unseen.

-

-Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the modern spirit of

-intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled in our news sheets, it is

-possible to discern signs of a more hopeful future.

-

-For nowadays many things which previous generations would have accepted

-as self-evident and which would have been passed by with the remark that

-“it has always been that way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often

-our neighbors rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded

-as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our fathers and our

-grandfathers and not infrequently they are successful in their warfare

-upon some particularly obnoxious demonstration of the mob spirit.

-

-This book must be kept very short.

-

-I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful pawn-brokers,

-the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic supremacy, the dark ignorance of

-backwoods evangelists, the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis.

-These good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.

-

-But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the State,

-they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized countries, such a

-possibility is entirely precluded.

-

-Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more discomfort in any

-given community than the combined efforts of measles, small-pox and a

-gossiping woman. But private intolerance does not possess executioners of

-its own. If, as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes

-the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law and becomes a

-proper subject for police supervision.

-

-Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot prescribe to an

-entire nation what it shall think and say and eat and drink. If it tries

-to do this, it creates such a terrific resentment among all decent folk,

-that the new ordinance becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out

-even in the District of Columbia.

-

-In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the indifference of

-the majority of the citizens of a free country will allow it to go, and

-no further. Whereas official intolerance is practically almighty.

-

-It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.

-

-It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims of its meddlesome

-fury. It will listen to no argument. And ever again it backs up its

-decisions by an appeal to the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain

-the will of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were an

-exclusive possession of those who had been successful at the most recent

-elections.

-

-If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used in the sense

-of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention to the private

-variety, have patience with me.

-

-I can only do one thing at a time.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XI

-

-RENAISSANCE

-

-

-There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking

-himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles

-and boiled shirts and door-mats think of this world?

-

-But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the

-men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war

-a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there

-ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?

-

-All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.

-

-A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had

-hit the gas factory or not.

-

-The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by

-the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful.

-

-The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that

-by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least

-holding his own.

-

-Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object,

-could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a

-dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing

-signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different

-angle.

-

-But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world

-of their own. Even with the assistance of a couple of full-fledged

-professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited

-those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells

-might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might

-land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But

-then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might

-bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing

-any harm whatsoever.

-

-Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They

-too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a

-revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often

-they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are

-used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot.

-

-Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was

-consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the

-Renaissance.

-

-Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor

-Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton

-plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention

-the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the

-Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of

-their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary,

-images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three

-centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating,

-listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral

-ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios

-illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most

-ponderous of wood-cuts.

-

-This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for the Frobens and

-the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other new firms of printers who were

-making a fortune out of the invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but

-otherwise the literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly

-affect the state of that world in which the authors of the fifteenth

-and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves. The distinction of

-having contributed something new was restricted to only a very few heroes

-of the quill and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely

-discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had been successful

-and how much damage their writings had actually done. But first and last

-they managed to demolish a great many of the obstacles which stood in

-the way of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude for the

-thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of rubbish which otherwise

-would continue to clutter our intellectual front yard.

-

-Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily a

-forward-looking movement. It turned its back in disgust upon the recent

-past, called the works of its immediate predecessors “barbaric” (or

-“Gothic” in the language of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the

-same reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest upon

-those arts which seem to be pervaded with that curious substance known as

-the “classical spirit.”

-

-If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow for the liberty

-of conscience and for tolerance and for a better world in general, it

-was done in spite of the men who were considered the leaders of the new

-movement.

-

-Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there had been people

-who had questioned the rights of a Roman bishop to dictate to Bohemian

-peasants and to English yeomen in what language they should say their

-prayers, in what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much

-they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should read and how

-they should bring up their children. And all of them had been crushed by

-the strength of that super-state, the power of which they had undertaken

-to defy. Even when they had acted as champions and representatives of a

-national cause, they had failed.

-

-The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously into the

-river Rhine, were a warning to all the world that the Papal Monarchy

-still ruled supreme.

-

-The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner, told the humble

-peasants of Leicestershire that councils and Popes could reach beyond the

-grave.

-

-Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.

-

-The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully during

-fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could not be taken by assault.

-The scandals which had taken place within these hallowed enclosures;

-the wars between three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate

-and exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption of

-the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws were made for the purpose

-of being broken by those who were willing to pay for such favors; the

-utter demoralization of monastic life; the venality of those who used

-the recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to blackmail

-poor parents into paying large sums of money for the benefit of their

-dead children; all these things, although widely known, never really

-threatened the safety of the Church.

-

-But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and women who were

-not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters, who had no particular

-grievance against either pope or bishop, these caused the damage which

-finally made the old edifice collapse.

-

-What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish with his

-high ideals of Christian virtue was brought about by a motley crowd

-of private citizens who had no other ambition than to live and die

-(preferably at a ripe old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of

-this world and faithful sons of the Mother Church.

-

-They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They represented every

-sort of profession and they would have been very angry, had an historian

-told them what they were doing.

-

-For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.

-

-We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen such wondrous sights

-that his neighbors, accustomed to the smaller scale of their western

-cities, called him “Million Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he

-told them of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls that

-would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

-

-All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle

-in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the

-prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A

-gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar

-with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill.

-Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes

-of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the

-tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened

-to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way

-the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had

-never known before. For although Polo was a simple-minded fellow who

-firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had

-been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the

-heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories

-about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were

-so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical

-theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the

-previous twelve hundred years.

-

-Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He

-would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his

-near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out

-scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of

-enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.

-

-And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.

-

-For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when

-he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which

-threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every

-citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world

-was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the

-Old Testament had never even suspected.

-

-I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that

-rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the

-world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever

-the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and

-straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the

-travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring

-about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of

-the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which

-only a few years before would have brought them into contact with the

-agents of the Inquisition.

-

-Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on

-the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious

-systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But

-if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how

-could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be

-proven nor contradicted?

-

-Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla.

-He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman

-Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly

-proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces

-of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to

-Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their

-claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but

-a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the

-Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.

-

-Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians,

-carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that

-a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was

-both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be

-able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to

-exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this

-doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies

-and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side

-of this planet?

-

-What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world

-was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was the center of the universe, what

-were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage

-around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to

-contain some rather serious errors?

-

-I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of

-conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a

-most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three

-hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment.

-Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines

-of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same

-rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew

-something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue,

-like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the

-bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of

-the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste.

-

-But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business

-of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent

-with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the

-development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.

-

-Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus, there is an interval

-of almost two centuries. During these two centuries, the copyist and the

-printer never enjoyed an idle moment. And outside of the books published

-by the Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important piece

-of work which did not contain some indirect reference to the sad plight

-into which the world had fallen when the ancient civilizations of Greece

-and Rome had been superseded by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders

-and western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant monks.

-

-The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’ Medici were not

-particularly interested in ethics. They were practical men who made the

-best of a practical world. Outwardly they remained at peace with the

-Church because it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which was

-capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously took part

-in any of the several attempts at reform or questioned the institutions

-under which they lived.

-

-But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their continual

-search after new emotions, the very instability of their restless minds,

-caused a world which had been brought up in the conviction “We know” to

-ask the question “Do we really know?”

-

-And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future generations

-than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the assembled works of Raffael.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XII

-

-THE REFORMATION

-

-

-Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves.

-One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single

-motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university or refuse

-a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we proclaim that the true life of

-intellectual freedom can only be lived abroad or vow that we will never

-again leave the shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black

-white or white black, there are always a number of divergent reasons

-which have caused us to make our decision, and way down deep in our

-hearts we know this to be true. But as we would cut a sorry figure with

-the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with

-ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable

-and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public

-consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason

-why we did so and so.”

-

-But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible

-to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered

-a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a

-few minutes.

-

-We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing truth and therefore

-ever since the beginning of civilization people have tacitly agreed with

-each other that this should never under any circumstances be referred to

-in public.

-

-What we think in private, that is our own business. As long as we

-maintain an outward air of respectability, we are perfectly satisfied

-with ourselves and merrily act upon the principle “You believe my fibs

-and I will believe yours.”

-

-Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception to this generous

-rule of conduct. As a result, nature is rarely allowed to enter the

-sacred portals of civilized society. And as history thus far has been

-a pastime of the few, the poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull

-life, especially when we compare it to the career of many of her less

-respectable sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing and have been

-invited to every party ever since the beginning of time. This of course

-has been a source of great annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her

-own subtle way she has managed to get her revenge.

-

-A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one and ofttimes very

-expensive in the matter of human lives and property.

-

-For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying,

-continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with

-the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once

-enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry

-begin to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers

-commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And ere all these people

-have been safely returned to their respective homes or cemeteries, whole

-countries have been laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been

-drained down to the last kopek.

-

-Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn upon the

-members of our guild that history is a science as well as an art and is

-therefore subject to certain of the immutable laws of nature which thus

-far have only been respected in chemical laboratories and astronomical

-observatories. And as a result we are now doing some very useful

-scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit to all

-coming generations.

-

-Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the head of this

-chapter, to wit: the Reformation.

-

-Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions regarding this

-great social and spiritual upheaval. It was either wholly good or wholly

-bad.

-

-According to the adherents of the former opinion it had been the result

-of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on the part of a number of noble

-theologians who, profoundly shocked by the wickedness and the venality

-of the papal super-state, had established a separate church of their own

-where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those who were

-seriously trying to be true Christians.

-

-Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.

-

-The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond the Alps, was the

-result of a damnable and most reprehensible conspiracy on the part of a

-number of despicable princes who wanted to get unmarried and who besides

-hoped to acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their

-Holy Mother the Church.

-

-As usual, both sides were right and both sides were wrong.

-

-The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with all sorts of

-motives. And it is only within very recent times that we have begun to

-realize how religious discontent played only a minor rôle in this great

-upheaval and that it was really an unavoidable social and economic

-revolution with a slightly theological background.

-

-Of course it is much easier to teach our children that good Prince

-Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took a profound personal interest

-in the reformed doctrines, than to explain to them the complicated

-machinations of an unscrupulous politician who willingly accepted the

-help of the infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In

-consequence whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years made a

-magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave who hoped to see

-the house of Hesse play the rôle thus far played by the rival house of

-Hapsburg.

-

-On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope Clement into a

-loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants of his declining strength

-trying to prevent his flocks from following false leaders, than to

-depict him as a typical prince of the house of Medici who regarded

-the Reformation as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks and used

-the power of the Church to further the interests of his own Italian

-fatherland, that we need feel no surprise if such a fabulous figure

-smiles at us from the pages of most Catholic text-books.

-

-But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe, we fortunate

-settlers in a new world are under no obligation to persist in the errors

-of our continental ancestors and are at liberty to draw a few conclusions

-of our own.

-

-Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter of Luther,

-was a man dominated by an enormous political ambition, it does not

-necessarily follow that he was insincere in his religious convictions.

-

-By no means.

-

-When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the year 1529, he knew

-as well as his fellow signers that they were about to “expose themselves

-to the violence of a terrible storm,” and might end their lives on the

-scaffold. If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he would

-never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually played.

-

-But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is exceedingly

-difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an historical character (or

-for that matter, any of our immediate neighbors) without a profound

-knowledge of all the many motives which have inspired him to do what he

-has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted to do.

-

-The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive

-everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an

-amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand

-everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who

-ages ago reserved that right to himself.

-

-Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more

-than enough for our limited human ability.

-

-And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this

-slight detour.

-

-As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation

-of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and

-political development of the last three centuries and which came to be

-known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that

-foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced

-during the course of the last five centuries.

-

-Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never

-have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and

-Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party,

-strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had

-been held for such a long time.

-

-If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements had not been

-temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their

-own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have

-succeeded.

-

-It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily

-suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic

-inquisitors.

-

-The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would

-have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had

-been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored

-another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those

-guilty of a “breach of discipline.”

-

-Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of

-all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the

-menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been

-removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number

-of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat

-all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of

-their power.

-

-A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise

-fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.

-

-To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this

-era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the

-sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the

-scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be

-realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure

-citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the

-utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more

-liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most

-severe test.

-

-For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world

-many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great

-many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of

-making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made

-it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much

-the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the

-mental habits of most people.

-

-They refuse to be hurried.

-

-They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.

-

-They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the

-bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do

-so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral

-furniture as they can possibly carry.

-

-As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new

-relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was

-to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone

-era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its

-trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and

-soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment

-which it held in such great abhorrence.

-

-For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could

-not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its

-adherents.

-

-And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not

-progress as much as might have been expected.

-

-Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the Reformation gave

-the world a book which was held to be infallible.

-

-Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and

-one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule

-supreme.

-

-Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the

-ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless

-little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense

-hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of

-establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early

-Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched

-behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter

-warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established

-doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.

-

-All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.

-

-But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development of the sixteenth

-and seventeenth centuries.

-

-To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists

-only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”

-

-A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college

-somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns

-a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a

-church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a

-fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such

-men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world

-can offer no adequate comparison.

-

-That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters, friends with a

-purpose of their own and supporters who hoped to fish successfully in

-troubled waters, all this is neither here nor there.

-

-When these men began to gamble with their lives for the sake of their

-conscience, they could not foresee that this would happen and that most

-of the nations of the north would eventually enlist under their banners.

-

-But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of their own making,

-they were obliged to go whither the current carried them.

-

-Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water took all of

-their strength. In far away Rome the Pope had at last learned that this

-contemptible disturbance was something more serious than a personal

-quarrel between a few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue

-on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great joy of his many

-creditors, he temporarily ceased building his pet cathedral and called

-together a council of war. The papal bulls and excommunications flew fast

-and furiously. Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the

-rebellion, with their backs against the wall, were forced to stand and

-fight.

-

-It was not the first time in history that great men in the midst of a

-desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion. The same Luther who at

-one time proclaims that it is “against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,”

-a few years later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of the

-wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have a leaning towards the

-ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems to have lost his reason.

-

-The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must

-not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an

-opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.

-

-The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow.

-

-And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last

-followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of

-the Middle Ages as long as they lived.

-

-Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light

-of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing

-to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use

-it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this

-trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant

-junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had

-been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected,

-until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk

-full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the

-rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from

-those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth

-century.

-

-And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of

-tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the

-gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were

-all on the side of progress.

-

-In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church

-had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had

-it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at

-last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the

-holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw

-his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake.

-

-Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and fear which we

-feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred

-years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants

-believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass

-to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the

-“inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than

-to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not

-because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant

-pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and

-the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very

-serious, not to say disastrous.

-

-Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was

-really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders

-was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had

-never foreseen.

-

-If they had, I am certain they would have shared the Church’s dislike

-of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept the scriptures carefully out of

-the hands of the uninitiated. For in the end, an increasing number of

-serious students began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly

-interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales

-of cruelty, greed and murder that it could not possibly have been

-inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of

-a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism.

-

-After that, of course, it was impossible for many people to regard the

-Bible as the only font of all true wisdom. And once this obstacle to free

-speculation had been removed, the current of scientific investigation,

-dammed up for almost a thousand years, began to flow in its natural

-channel and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman

-philosophers were picked up where they had been left off twenty centuries

-before.

-

-And in the second place, and this is even more important from the point

-of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered northern and western

-Europe from the dictatorship of a power which under the guise of a

-religious organization had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and

-highly despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.

-

-With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly agree. But

-they too have reason to be grateful to a movement which was not only

-unavoidable, but which was to render a most salutary service to their

-own faith. For, thrown upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic

-effort to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once sacred name

-a byword for rapacity and tyranny.

-

-And she succeeded most brilliantly.

-

-After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias were tolerated

-in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before continued to be Italians. A

-deflection from this rule was practically impossible, as the Roman

-proletariat would have turned the city upside down if the cardinals

-entrusted with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German or a

-Frenchman or any other foreigner.

-

-The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care and only

-candidates of the highest character could hope to be considered. And

-these new masters, faithfully aided by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries,

-began a thorough house-cleaning.

-

-The sale of indulgences came to an end.

-

-Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth to obey) the rules

-laid down by their founders.

-

-Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized cities.

-

-And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance was replaced by

-an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent in good deeds and in humble

-service towards those unfortunate people who were not strong enough to

-carry the burden of existence by themselves.

-

-Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never

-regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half

-of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.

-

-But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language

-of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more

-clearly revealed.

-

-During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and

-intellectual prison-house.

-

-The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of

-the available material it had constructed a jail of its own.

-

-After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved

-exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants.

-

-At least that had been the original plan.

-

-But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of

-training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make

-their lockup dissenter-proof.

-

-Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the

-unruly inmates escaped.

-

-Ere long the entire building was a wreck.

-

-At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and

-beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little

-fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of

-that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory the

-Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength.

-

-No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of

-rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale

-walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now

-called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline

-(excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were

-absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand

-by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their

-own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened

-to suit their temporary convictions.

-

-This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of

-spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls

-could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they

-pleased without hindrance or molestation.

-

-And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause

-of tolerance.

-

-It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIII

-

-ERASMUS

-

-

-In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes

-during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make

-itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book

-without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There

-probably is something the matter with it.

-

-The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have

-now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of

-tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all

-the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light

-of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make

-a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use

-the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.

-

-How to explain this?

-

-There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable

-feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with

-his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second

-place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest

-practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present

-volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant

-fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their

-own bad causes.

-

-But apart from these arguments (which hold good for most serious books)

-there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of

-“system.”

-

-A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This

-book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?

-

-What I mean is this.

-

-I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of

-righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.

-

-I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance

-was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.

-

-I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one

-accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”

-

-But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly

-desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake

-to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to

-ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday

-I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the

-institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small

-gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in

-forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”

-

-And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets,

-refuses to be of any use in this emergency.

-

-Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free

-trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic

-architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and

-Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of

-all other material we could at least study the lives of the men and

-women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital

-punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them.

-And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached

-their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their

-preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches

-they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which

-they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.

-

-But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those

-who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their

-tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They

-were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans.

-In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making

-steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance,

-but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers.

-They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing

-chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted

-group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and

-Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that

-common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those

-who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or

-delivering the world from sin.

-

-In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere

-in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this

-particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even

-old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from

-memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just

-enough religion to hate their neighbors but not quite enough to love

-them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present

-difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as

-any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as

-cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally

-devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all

-the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.

-

-No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation

-(but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I

-suspect to be the truth.

-

-The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had

-all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt;

-they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they

-never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute

-conviction.

-

-In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring

-for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to

-point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional

-aversion to any such ideal of standardization.

-

-Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die

-because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent

-pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called

-steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure

-gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven

-different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a

-hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!

-

-In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I

-see no reason why faith should be an exception. Unless the base of our

-“certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith

-will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a

-trombone made of brass.

-

-It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of

-tolerance apart from the rest of the world.

-

-As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish

-devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men

-could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would

-go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died

-in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar

-trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies

-of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of

-elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.

-

-But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.

-

-They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the

-problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses

-would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray

-that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a

-safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only

-right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting

-by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil

-thoroughfares leading to damnation.

-

-All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our

-catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue

-of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps

-so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning

-at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity cannot be said

-to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I

-don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might

-try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant

-guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If

-that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of

-our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a

-society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community

-less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been

-gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.

-

-And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go

-back to my history.

-

-When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the

-best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time

-before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security

-that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been

-characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely

-return to this earth.

-

-That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.

-

-The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the

-poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class

-of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow

-those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity.

-And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of

-those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of

-experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the

-old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who

-regarded their interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as

-a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.

-

-Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of

-pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book,

-few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known

-as Erasmus.

-

-For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal

-encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror

-of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly

-of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.

-

-Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were

-shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very

-dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There

-was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an

-amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them

-home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to

-get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that

-four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the

-effects of the drug.

-

-It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest

-towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the

-North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet

-attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth.

-They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere

-on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring,

-their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it

-was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal

-shores.

-

-But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant

-surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of

-activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the

-best known men of his time.

-

-From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an

-illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate

-and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal

-more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such

-things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the

-rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature

-in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making.

-The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in

-so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly

-muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and

-leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or

-scoundrels.

-

-These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two

-little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a

-home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in

-Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the

-Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which

-Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a

-very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and

-the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate

-supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of

-the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If

-that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four

-centuries later, I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make

-matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his

-money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were

-strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed

-him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was

-secure.”

-

-The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible

-experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of

-the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in

-the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics

-who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully

-half of all monasteries.

-

-Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend

-most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had

-collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those

-volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical

-learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the

-move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not

-necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten

-gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed

-to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate

-what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century.

-

-Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People

-like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own

-circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material.

-

-And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching restlessly

-after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of

-admiring friends.

-

-But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of

-his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did

-he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the

-highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and

-Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.

-

-These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat

-them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name

-of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his

-appearance.

-

-He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger

-and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried

-(quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold

-of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much

-of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the

-University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice

-and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those

-of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome

-made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe

-could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal

-pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was

-opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished

-to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with

-his occasional presence.

-

-But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to

-contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he

-wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he

-preferred amusing companions to dull ones, he knew the difference

-between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red

-ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and

-this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”

-

-The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an

-intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the

-horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant

-rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors

-see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of

-that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.

-

-That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our

-history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics

-while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the

-Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been

-most often condemned.

-

-Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it

-applies to the ancestors.

-

-“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance

-together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems

-to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent

-citizens.

-

-The answer is, “Why should he?”

-

-It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded

-himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense

-of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who

-undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought

-about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the

-old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters.

-Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of repairs. The drainage

-was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds

-and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all

-this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises

-and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond

-that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies

-sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more)

-than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where

-only one had been before.

-

-Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that

-the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over

-the individual man and you have made over the entire world!

-

-Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal

-to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.

-

-In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them

-to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and

-to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and

-self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him

-and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.

-

-In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which

-had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense.

-For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts

-to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons

-why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a

-real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the

-fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of

-trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute

-like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts

-of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with

-those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that

-they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the

-beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a

-Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority

-of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a

-book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto

-evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.

-

-Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of

-this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an

-existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to

-leave the city in which they had found an asylum.

-

-In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in

-the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and

-the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current

-events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a

-separate pamphlet.

-

-But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely

-different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his

-famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought

-together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the

-classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with

-clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were

-by no means what one had the right to expect of a man who enjoyed the

-friendship of the Pope.

-

-And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which

-are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived

-for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great

-literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done.

-It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to

-be written.

-

-It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet

-written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an

-attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name

-appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the

-world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich

-von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet

-laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the

-production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud

-of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous

-champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he

-wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.

-

-Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his

-orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters

-who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier

-for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house

-that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless

-bumpers of sour beer.

-

-But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus

-answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon

-the virtues of his London friend and depicted so charming a scene of

-domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve

-as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this

-letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts,

-had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely

-it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable

-Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and

-birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of

-amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece

-of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.

-

-In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which

-for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children.

-Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their

-dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The

-hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other

-actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account

-of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful

-audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were

-thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.

-

-In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully

-taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and

-favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole

-of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of

-course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with

-all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile

-pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never

-forgotten and never forgiven.

-

-But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to

-the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee,

-were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.

-

-The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than

-the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little

-book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel

-of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.

-

-It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the

-spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons

-in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance

-of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government

-which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against

-Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who

-“slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of

-a clever little book.

-

-This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any

-effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the

-age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word

-from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking

-at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected

-nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well

-the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was

-allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.

-

-And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that

-famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem

-the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.

-

-Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will

-and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the

-Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed

-away.

-

-But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon

-the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those

-irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of

-dykes that will actually hold.

-

-Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.

-

-His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his

-publisher.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIV

-

-RABELAIS

-

-

-Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows.

-

-The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable book intended for the

-entire family. But to mention Rabelais in public is considered little

-short of a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this fellow

-that laws have been passed in our country to keep his wicked works out of

-the hands of our innocent children and that in many states copies of his

-books can only be obtained from the more intrepid among our book-leggers.

-

-This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have been forced

-upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy.

-

-In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average citizen of the

-twentieth century are about as dull reading as “Tom Jones” or “The House

-of the Seven Gables.” Few people ever get beyond the first interminable

-chapter.

-

-And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally suggestive in

-what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary of his time. That does

-not happen to be the common vernacular of our own day. But in the era of

-the bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived close to

-the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs were not “lady-dogs.”

-

-No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished surgeon go

-much deeper than a mere disapproval of his rich but somewhat outspoken

-collection of idioms. They are caused by the horror which many excellent

-people experience when they come face to face with the point of view of a

-man who point blank refuses to be defeated by life.

-

-The human race, as far as I can make out, is divided into two sorts of

-people; those who say “yes” unto life and those who say “no.” The former

-accept it and courageously they endeavor to make the best of whatever

-bargain fate has handed out to them.

-

-The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?) but they hold

-the gift in great contempt and fret about it like children who have been

-given a new little brother when they really wanted a puppy or a railroad

-train.

-

-But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing to accept their

-morose neighbors at their own valuation and tolerate them, and do not

-hinder them when they fill the landscape with their lamentations and the

-hideous monuments to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely

-extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.

-

-Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would immediately purge this

-planet of the “yeas.”

-

-As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands of their

-jealous souls by the incessant persecution of those who claim that the

-world belongs to the living and not to the dead.

-

-Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his patients or

-his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery. This, no doubt, was very

-regrettable, but we cannot all be grave-diggers. There have to be a

-few Poloniuses and a world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a

-terrible place of abode.

-

-As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very mysterious

-about it. The few details which are omitted in the books written by his

-friends are found in the works of his enemies and as a result we can

-follow his career with a fair degree of accuracy.

-

-Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately upon

-Erasmus but he was born into a world still largely dominated by monks,

-nuns, deacons, and a thousand and one varieties of mendicant friars.

-He was born in Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer

-in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth century)

-and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send his son to a good

-school. There young François was thrown into the company of the scions

-of a famous local family called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their

-father, had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion they could

-fight well. They were men of the world in the good sense of that oft

-misunderstood expression. They were faithful servitors of their master

-the king, held endless public offices, became bishops and cardinals and

-ambassadors, translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill

-and ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services

-that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when a title condemned a

-man to a life of few pleasures and many duties and responsibilities.

-

-The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed upon Rabelais

-shows that he must have been something more than an amusing table

-companion. During the many ups and downs of his life he could always

-count upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates.

-Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors he found the door

-of their castle wide open and if perchance the soil of France became

-a little too hot for this blunt young moralist, there was always a du

-Bellay, conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in need

-of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician besides being a

-polished Latin scholar.

-

-This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed that the career

-of our learned doctor was about to come to an abrupt and painful end,

-the influence of his old friends saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne

-or from the anger of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted

-upon him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when he

-pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as mercilessly as

-he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of his erstwhile colleagues in

-Fontenay and Maillezais.

-

-Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the more dangerous.

-Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content, but outside of the narrow

-boundaries of a small Swiss canton, his lightning was as harmless as a

-fire-cracker.

-

-The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with the University of

-Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and the Old Learning, knew of no mercy

-when her authority was questioned and could always count upon the hearty

-coöperation of the king of France and his hangman.

-

-And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked man. Not

-because he liked to drink good wine and told funny stories about his

-fellow-monks. He had done much worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the

-wicked Greek tongue.

-

-When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his cloister, it

-was decided to search his cell. It was found to be full of literary

-contraband, a copy of Homer, one of the New Testament, one of Herodotus.

-

-This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great deal of

-wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends to get him out of

-this scrape.

-

-It was a curious period in the development of the Church.

-

-Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been advance posts

-of civilization and both friars and nuns had rendered inestimable service

-in promoting the interest of the Church. More than one Pope, however, had

-foreseen the danger that might come from a too powerful development of

-the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just because every

-one knew that something ought to be done about these cloisters, nothing

-was ever done.

-

-Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that the Catholic Church

-is a placid institution which is run silently and almost automatically

-by a small body of haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those

-inner upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization

-composed of ordinary mortals.

-

-Nothing is further from the truth.

-

-Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been caused by the

-misinterpretation of a single word.

-

-A world addicted to democratic ideals is easily horrified at the idea of

-an “infallible” human being.

-

-“It must be easy,” so the popular argument runs, “to administer this big

-institution when it is enough for one man to say that a thing is so to

-have all the others fall upon their knees and shout amen and obey him.”

-

-It is extremely difficult for one brought up in Protestant countries to

-get a correct and fair view of this rather intricate subject. But if I am

-not mistaken, the “infallible” utterances of the supreme pontiff are as

-rare as constitutional amendments in the United States.

-

-Furthermore, such important decisions are never reached until the subject

-has been thoroughly discussed and the debates which precede the final

-verdict often rock the very body of the Church. Such pronunciamentos

-are therefore “infallible” in the sense that our own constitutional

-amendments are infallible, because they are “final” and because all

-further argument is supposed to come to an end as soon as they have been

-definitely incorporated into the highest law of the land.

-

-If any one were to proclaim that it is an easy job to govern these United

-States because in case of an emergency all the people are found to stand

-firmly behind the Constitution, he would be just as much in error as

-if he were to state that all Catholics who in supreme matters of faith

-recognize the absolute authority of their pope are docile sheep and have

-surrendered every right to an opinion of their own.

-

-If this were true, the occupants of the Lateran and the Vatican palaces

-would have had an easy life. But even the most superficial study of

-the last fifteen hundred years will show the exact opposite. And those

-champions of the reformed faith who sometimes write as if the Roman

-authorities had been ignorant of the many evils which Luther and Calvin

-and Zwingli denounced with such great vehemence are either ignorant of

-the facts or are not quite fair in their zeal for the good cause.

-

-Such men as Adrian VI and Clement VII knew perfectly well that something

-very serious was wrong with their Church. But it is one thing to express

-the opinion that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is

-quite a different matter to correct the evil, as even poor Hamlet was to

-learn.

-

-Nor was that unfortunate prince the last victim of the pleasant delusion

-that hundreds of years of misgovernment can be undone overnight by the

-unselfish efforts of an honest man.

-

-Many intelligent Russians knew that the old official structure which

-dominated their empire was corrupt, inefficient and a menace to the

-safety of the nation.

-

-They made Herculean efforts to bring about reforms and they failed.

-

-How many of our citizens who have ever given the matter an hour’s thought

-fail to see that a democratic instead of a representative form of

-government (as intended by the founders of the Republic) must eventually

-lead to systematized anarchy?

-

-And yet, what can they do about it?

-

-Such problems, by the time they have begun to attract public attention,

-have become so hopelessly complicated that they are rarely solved except

-by a social cataclysm. And social cataclysms are terrible things from

-which most men shy away. Rather than run to such extremes, they try to

-patch up the old, decrepit machinery and meanwhile they pray that some

-miracle will occur which will make it work.

-

-An insolent religious and social dictatorship, set up and maintained by

-a number of religious orders, was one of the most flagrant evils of the

-out-going Middle Ages.

-

-For the so-many-eth time in history, the army was about to run away with

-the commander-in-chief. In plain words, the situation had grown entirely

-beyond the control of the popes. All they could do was to sit still,

-improve their own party organization, and meanwhile try to mitigate the

-fate of those who had incurred the displeasure of their common enemies,

-the friars.

-

-Erasmus was one of the many scholars who had frequently enjoyed the

-protection of the Pope. Let Louvain storm and the Dominicans rave, Rome

-would stand firm and woe unto him who disregarded her command, “Leave the

-old man alone!”

-

-And after these few introductory remarks, it will be no matter of

-surprise that Rabelais, a mutinous soul but a brilliant mind withal,

-could often count upon the support of the Holy See when the superiors

-of his own order wished to punish him and that he readily obtained

-permission to leave his cloister when constant interference with his

-studies began to make his life unbearable.

-

-And so with a sigh of relief, he shook the dust of Maillezais off his

-feet and went to Montpellier and to Lyons to follow a course in medicine.

-

-Surely here was a man of extraordinary talents! Within less than two

-years the former Benedictine monk had become chief physician of the city

-hospital of Lyons. But as soon as he had achieved these new honors, his

-restless soul began to look for pastures new. He did not give up his

-powders and pills but in addition to his anatomical studies (a novelty

-almost as dangerous as the study of Greek) he took up literature.

-

-Lyons, situated in the center of the valley of the Rhone, was an ideal

-city for a man who cared for belles lettres. Italy was nearby. A few days

-easy travel carried the traveler to the Provence and although the ancient

-paradise of the Troubadours had suffered dreadfully at the hands of the

-Inquisition, the grand old literary tradition had not yet been entirely

-lost. Furthermore, the printing-presses of Lyons were famous for the

-excellence of their product and her book stores were well stocked with

-all the latest publications.

-

-When one of the master printers, Sebastian Gryphius by name, looked for

-some one to edit his collection of medieval classics, it was natural

-that he should bethink himself of the new doctor who was also known as

-a scholar. He hired Rabelais and set him to work. In rapid succession

-almanachs and chap-books followed upon the learned treatises of Galen

-and Hippocrates. And out of these inconspicuous beginnings grew that

-strange tome which was to make its author one of the most popular writers

-of his time.

-

-The same talent for novelty which had turned Rabelais into a successful

-medical practitioner brought him his success as a novelist. He did what

-few people had dared to do before him. He began to write in the language

-of his own people. He broke with a thousand-year-old tradition which

-insisted that the books of a learned man must be in a tongue unknown

-to the vulgar multitude. He used French and, furthermore, he used the

-unadorned vernacular of the year 1532.

-

-I gladly leave it to the professors of literature to decide where and

-how and when Rabelais discovered his two pet heroes, Gargantua and

-Pantagruel. Maybe they were old heathenish Gods who, after the nature

-of their species, had managed to live through fifteen hundred years of

-Christian persecution and neglect.

-

-Then again, he may have invented them in an outburst of gigantic hilarity.

-

-However that be, Rabelais contributed enormously to the gayety of nations

-and greater praise no author can gain than that he has added something

-to the sum total of human laughter. But at the same time, his works were

-not funny books in the terrible modern sense of the word. They had their

-serious side and struck a bold blow for the cause of tolerance by their

-caricature of the people who were responsible for that clerical reign of

-terror which caused such untold misery during the first fifty years of

-the sixteenth century.

-

-Rabelais, a skillfully trained theologian, was able to avoid all such

-direct statements as might have got him into trouble, and acting upon the

-principle that one cheerful humorist out of jail is better than a dozen

-gloomy reformers behind the bars, refrained from a too brazen exposition

-of his highly unorthodox opinions.

-

-But his enemies knew perfectly well what he was trying to do. The

-Sorbonne condemned his books in unmistakable terms and the Parliament

-of Paris put him on their index and confiscated and burned all such

-copies of his works as could be found within their jurisdiction. But

-notwithstanding the activities of the hangman (who in those days was also

-the official book destroyer) the “Lives and Heroic Deeds and Sayings

-of Gargantua and his Sonne Pantagruel” remained a popular classic. For

-almost four centuries it has continued to edify those who can derive

-pleasure from a clever mixture of good-natured laughter and bantering

-wisdom and it will never cease to irritate those others who firmly

-believe that the Goddess of Truth, caught with a smile on her lips,

-cannot possibly be a good woman.

-

-As for the author himself, he was and is a “man of one book.” His

-friends, the du Bellays, remained faithful to him until the end, but most

-of his life Rabelais practiced the virtue of discretion and kept himself

-at a polite distance from the residence of that Majesty by whose supposed

-“privilege” he published his nefarious works.

-

-He ventured however upon a visit to Rome and met with no difficulties,

-but on the contrary was received with every manifestation of a cordial

-welcome. In the year 1550 he returned to France and went to live in

-Meudon. Three years later he died.

-

-It is of course quite impossible to measure the exact and positive

-influence exercised by such a man. After all, he was a human being and

-not an electric current or a barrel of gasoline.

-

-It has been said that he was merely destructive.

-

-Perhaps so.

-

-But he was destructive in an age when there was a great and crying need

-for a social wrecking crew, headed by just such people as Erasmus and

-Rabelais.

-

-That many of the new buildings were going to be just as uncomfortable and

-ugly as the old ones which they were supposed to replace was something

-which no one was able to foresee.

-

-And, anyway, that was the fault of the next generation.

-

-They are the people we ought to blame.

-

-They were given a chance such as few people ever enjoyed to make a fresh

-start.

-

-May the Lord have mercy upon their souls for the way in which they

-neglected their opportunities.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XV

-

-NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD

-

-

-The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large ocean upon which

-sailed many ships. Whenever these little vessels bumped against each

-other, they made a “wonderful music” which people call history.

-

-I would like to borrow Heine’s ocean, but for a purpose and a simile

-of my own. When we were children it was fun to drop pebbles into a

-pond. They made a nice splash and then the pretty little ripples caused

-a series of ever widening circles and that was very nice. If bricks

-were handy (which sometimes was the case) one could make an Armada of

-nutshells and matches and submit this flimsy fleet to a nice artificial

-storm, provided the heavy projectile did not create that fatal loss of

-equilibrium which sometimes overtakes small children who play too near

-the water’s edge and sends them to bed without their supper.

-

-In that special universe reserved for grown-ups, the same pastime is not

-entirely unknown, but the results are apt to be far more disastrous.

-

-Everything is placid and the sun is shining and the water-wigglers are

-skating merrily, and then suddenly a bold, bad boy comes along with a

-piece of mill-stone (Heaven only knows where he found it!) and before any

-one can stop him he has heaved it right into the middle of the old duck

-pond and then there is a great ado about who did it and how he ought to

-be spanked and some say, “Oh, let him go,” and others, out of sheer envy

-of the kid who is attracting all the attention, pick up any old thing

-that happens to lie around and they dump it into the water and everybody

-gets splashed and one thing leading to another, the usual result is a

-free-for-all fight and a few million broken heads.

-

-Alexander was such a bold, bad boy.

-

-And Helen of Troy, in her own charming way, was such a bad, bold girl,

-and history is just full of them.

-

-But by far the worst offenders are those wicked citizens who play this

-game with ideas and use the stagnant pool of man’s spiritual indifference

-as their playground. And I for one don’t wonder that they are hated by

-all right-thinking citizens and are punished with great severity if ever

-they are unfortunate enough to let themselves be caught.

-

-Think of the damage they have done these last four hundred years.

-

-There were the leaders of the rebirth of the ancient world. The stately

-moats of the Middle Ages reflected the image of a society that was

-harmonious in both color and texture. It was not perfect. But people

-liked it. They loved to see the blending of the brick-red walls of their

-little homes with the somber gray of those high cathedral towers that

-watched over their souls.

-

-Came the terrible splash of the Renaissance and overnight everything was

-changed. But it was only a beginning. For just when the poor burghers had

-almost recovered from the shock, that dreadful German monk appeared with

-a whole cartload of specially prepared bricks and dumped them right into

-the heart of the pontifical lagoon. Really, that was too much. And no

-wonder that it took the world three centuries to recover from the shock.

-

-The older historians who studied this period often fell into a slight

-error. They saw the commotion and decided that the ripples had been

-started by a common cause, which they alternately called the Renaissance

-and the Reformation.

-

-Today we know better.

-

-The Renaissance and the Reformation were movements which professed to be

-striving after a common purpose. But the means by which they hoped to

-accomplish their ultimate object were so utterly different that Humanist

-and Protestant not infrequently came to regard each other with bitter

-hostility.

-

-They both believed in the supreme rights of man. During the Middle Ages

-the individual had been completely merged in the community. He did not

-exist as John Doe, a bright citizen who came and went at will, who sold

-and bought as he liked, who went to any one of a dozen churches (or to

-none at all, as suited his tastes and his prejudices). His life from the

-time of his birth to the hour of his death was lived according to a rigid

-handbook of economic and spiritual etiquette. This taught him that his

-body was a shoddy garment, casually borrowed from Mother Nature and of no

-value except as a temporary receptacle for his immortal soul.

-

-It trained him to believe that this world was a halfway house to future

-glory and should be regarded with that profound contempt which travelers

-destined for New York bestow upon Queenstown and Halifax.

-

-And now unto the excellent John, living happily in the best of all

-possible worlds (since it was the only world he knew), came the two

-fairy god-mothers, Renaissance and Reformation, and said: “Arise, noble

-citizen, from now on thou art to be free.”

-

-But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers greatly differed.

-

-“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance replied.

-

-“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished him.

-

-“Free to search the records of the past when the world was truly the

-realm of men. Free to realize those ideals which once filled the hearts

-of poets and painters and sculptors and architects. Free to turn the

-universe into thine eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her

-secrets,” was the promise of the Renaissance.

-

-“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find salvation for thy

-soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was the warning of the Reformation.

-

-And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe in the possession

-of a new freedom which was infinitely more embarrassing than the

-thralldom of his former days.

-

-Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made her peace with

-the established order of things. The successors of Phidias and Horace

-discovered that a belief in the established Deity and outward conformity

-to the rules of the Church were two very different things and that one

-could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets with complete

-impunity if one took the precaution to call Hercules, John the Baptist,

-and Hera, the Virgin Mary.

-

-They were like tourists who go to India and who obey certain laws which

-mean nothing to them at all in order that they may gain entrance to the

-temples and travel freely without disturbing the peace of the land.

-

-But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most trifling

-of details at once assumed enormous importance. An erroneous comma

-in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As for a misplaced full stop in the

-Apocalypse, it called for instant death.

-

-To people like these who took what they considered their religious

-convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise of the

-Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.

-

-As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company, never to meet

-again.

-

-Whereupon the Reformation, alone against all the world, buckled on the

-armor of righteousness and made ready to defend her holiest possessions.

-

-In the beginning, the army of revolt was composed almost exclusively of

-Germans. They fought and suffered with extreme bravery, but that mutual

-jealousy which is the bane and the curse of all northern nations soon

-lamed their efforts and forced them to accept a truce. The strategy which

-led to the ultimate victory was provided by a very different sort of

-genius. Luther stepped aside to make room for Calvin.

-

-It was high time.

-

-In that same French college where Erasmus had spent so many of his

-unhappy Parisian days, a black-bearded young Spaniard with a limp (the

-result of a Gallic gunshot) was dreaming of the day when he should march

-at the head of a new army of the Lord to rid the world of the last of the

-heretics.

-

-It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic.

-

-And only a man of granite, like Calvin, would have been able to defeat

-the plans of Loyola.

-

-Personally, I am glad that I was not obliged to live in Geneva in the

-sixteenth century. At the same time I am profoundly grateful that the

-Geneva of the sixteenth century existed.

-

-Without it, the world of the twentieth century would have been a great

-deal more uncomfortable and I for one would probably be in jail.

-

-The hero of this glorious fight, the famous Magister Joannes Calvinus (or

-Jean Calvini or John Calvin) was a few years younger than Luther. Date

-of birth: July 10, 1509. Place of birth: the city of Noyon in northern

-France. Background: French middle class. Father: a small clerical

-official. Mother: the daughter of an inn-keeper. Family: five sons and

-two daughters. Characteristic qualities of early education: thrift,

-simplicity, and a tendency to do all things in an orderly manner, not

-stingily, but with minute and efficient care.

-

-John, the second son, was meant for the priesthood. The father had

-influential friends, and could eventually get him into a good parish.

-Before he was thirteen years old, he already held a small office in the

-cathedral of his home city. This gave him a small but steady income. It

-was used to send him to a good school in Paris. A remarkable boy. Every

-one who came in contact with him said, “Watch out for that youngster!”

-

-The French educational system of the sixteenth century was well able to

-take care of such a child and make the best of his many gifts. At the age

-of nineteen, John was allowed to preach. His future as a duly established

-deacon seemed assured.

-

-But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement in the Church

-was slow. The law offered better opportunities. Besides, it was a time

-of great religious excitement and the future was uncertain. A distant

-relative, a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible into

-French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time with his cousin. It

-would never do to have two heretics in one family. John was packed off

-to Orleans and was apprenticed to an old lawyer that he might learn the

-business of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.

-

-Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the end of the year,

-the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching his less industrious

-fellow-students in the principles of jurisprudence. And soon he knew all

-there was to know and was ready to start upon that course which, so his

-father fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those famous

-avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single opinion and who drove

-in a coach and four when they were called upon to see the king in distant

-Compiègne.

-

-But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never practiced law.

-

-Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests and his

-pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of theological works and

-started in all seriousness upon that task which was to make him one of

-the most important historical figures of the last twenty centuries.

-

-The years, however, which he had spent studying the principles of Roman

-law put their stamp upon all his further activities. It was impossible

-for him to approach a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things

-and he felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers who

-had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had been condemned to be

-roasted to death over slow burning coal fires. In their helpless agony

-they are as fine a bit of writing as anything of which we have a record.

-And they show such a delicate understanding of human psychology that

-the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of the man whose

-teaching had brought them into their predicament.

-

-No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said, a man without a

-heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.

-

-And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself and with his

-God that he must first reduce every question to certain fundamental

-principles of faith and doctrine before he dared to expose it to the

-touchstone of human sentiment.

-

-When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked, “The power of that

-heretic lay in the fact that he was indifferent to money.” If His

-Holiness meant to pay his enemy the compliment of absolute personal

-disinterestedness, he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and

-refused to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness had made it

-impossible for him to earn that money as he should have done.”

-

-But his strength lay elsewhere.

-

-He was a man of one idea, his life centered around one all-overpowering

-impulse; the desire to find the truth of God as revealed in the

-Scriptures. When he finally had reached a conclusion that seemed proof

-against every possible form of argument and objection, then at last he

-incorporated it into his own code of life. And thereafter he went his way

-with such utter disregard for the consequences of his decision that he

-became both invincible and irresistible.

-

-This quality, however, was not to make itself manifest until many years

-later. During the first decade after his conversion he was obliged to

-direct all his energies toward the very commonplace problem of keeping

-alive.

-

-A short triumph of the “new learning” in the University of Paris, an

-orgy of Greek declensions, Hebrew irregular verbs and other forbidden

-intellectual fruit had been followed by the usual reaction. When it

-appeared that even the rector of that famous seat of learning had been

-contaminated with the pernicious new German doctrines, steps were taken

-to purge the institution of all those who in terms of our modern medical

-science might be considered “idea carriers.” Calvin, who, ’twas said,

-had given the rector the material for several of his most objectionable

-speeches, was among those whose names appeared at the top of the list of

-suspects. His rooms were searched. His papers were confiscated and an

-order was issued for his arrest.

-

-He heard of it and hid himself in the house of a friend.

-

-But storms in an academic tea-pot never last very long. All the same, a

-career in the Church of Rome had become an impossibility. The moment had

-arrived for a definite choice.

-

-In the year 1534 Calvin broke away from the old faith. Almost at the same

-moment, on the hills of Montmartre, high above the French capital, Loyola

-and a handful of his fellow students were taking that solemn vow which

-shortly afterwards was to be incorporated into the constitution of the

-Society of Jesus.

-

-Thereupon they both left Paris.

-

-Ignatius set his face towards the east, but remembering the unfortunate

-outcome of his first assault upon the Holy Land, he retraced his steps,

-went to Rome and there began those activities which were to carry his

-fame (or otherwise) to every nook and corner of our planet.

-

-John was of a different caliber. His Kingdom of God was bound to neither

-time nor place and he wandered forth that he might find a quiet spot

-and devote the rest of his days to reading, to contemplation and to the

-peaceful expounding of his ideas.

-

-He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the outbreak of a war

-between Charles V and Francis I forced him to make a detour through

-western Switzerland. In Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one

-of the stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary

-from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons. Farel welcomed

-him with open arms, spoke to him of the wondrous things that might be

-accomplished in this little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin

-asked time to consider. Then he stayed.

-

-In this way did the chances of war decree that the New Zion should be

-built at the foot of the Alps.

-

-It is a strange world.

-

-Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles upon a new

-continent.

-

-Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend the rest of his

-days in study and holy meditation, wanders into a third-rate Swiss town

-and makes it the spiritual capital of those who soon afterwards turn

-the domains of their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant

-empire.

-

-Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves all purposes?

-

-I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has been preserved.

-But if it still exists, the volume will show considerable wear on that

-particular page which contains the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel.

-The French reformer was a modest man, but often he must have found

-consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of the living

-God who also had been cast into a den of lions and whose innocence had

-saved him from a gruesome and untimely death.

-

-Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city inhabited by

-respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took life seriously, but not quite

-so seriously as that new master who was now holding forth in the pulpit

-of their Saint Peter.

-

-And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the form of a Duke of

-Savoy. It was during one of their interminable quarrels with the house

-of Savoy that the descendants of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make

-common cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation.

-The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg was a marriage of

-convenience, an engagement based upon common interests rather than common

-affection.

-

-But no sooner had the news spread abroad that “Geneva had gone

-Protestant,” than all the eager apostles of half a hundred new and crazy

-creeds flocked to the shores of Lake Leman. With tremendous energy they

-began to preach some of the queerest doctrines ever conceived by mortal

-man.

-

-Calvin detested these amateur prophets with all his heart. He fully

-appreciated what a menace they would prove to the cause of which they

-were such ardent but ill-guided champions. And the first thing he did

-as soon as he had enjoyed a few months leisure was to write down as

-precisely and briefly as he could what he expected his new parishioners

-to hold true and what he expected them to hold false. And that no man

-might claim the ancient and time-worn excuse, “I did not know the law,”

-he, together with his friend Farel, personally examined all Genevans in

-batches of ten and allowed only those to the full rights of citizenship

-who swore the oath of allegiance to this strange religious constitution.

-

-Next he composed a formidable catechism for the benefit of the younger

-generation.

-

-Next he prevailed upon the Town Council to expel all those who still

-clung to their old erroneous opinions.

-

-Then, having cleared the ground for further action, he set about to found

-him a state along the lines laid down by the political economists of the

-books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. For Calvin, like so many other of the

-great reformers, was really much more of an ancient Jew than a modern

-Christian. His lips did homage to the God of Jesus, but his heart went

-out to the Jehovah of Moses.

-

-This, of course, is a phenomenon often observed during periods of great

-emotional stress. The opinions of the humble Nazarene carpenter upon the

-subject of hatred and strife are so definite and so clear cut that no

-compromise has ever been found possible between them and those violent

-methods by which nations and individuals have, during the last two

-thousand years, tried to accomplish their ends.

-

-Hence, as soon as a war breaks out, by silent consent of all concerned,

-we temporarily close the pages of the Gospels and cheerfully wallow

-in the blood and thunder and the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the Old

-Testament.

-

-And as the Reformation was really a war and a very atrocious one, in

-which no quarter was asked and very little quarter was given, it need

-not surprise us that the state of Calvin was in reality an armed camp in

-which all semblance of personal liberty was gradually suppressed.

-

-Of course, all this was not accomplished without tremendous opposition,

-and in the year 1538 the attitude of the more liberal elements in the

-community became so threatening that Calvin was forced to leave the city.

-But in 1541 his adherents returned to power. Amidst the ringing of many

-bells and the loud hosannas of the deacons, Magister Joannes returned to

-his citadel on the river Rhone. Thereafter he was the uncrowned King of

-Geneva and the next twenty-three years he devoted to the establishment

-and the perfection of a theocratic form of government, the like of which

-the world had not seen since the days of Ezekiel and Ezra.

-

-The word “discipline” according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, means

-“to bring under control, to train to obedience and order, to drill.” It

-expresses best the spirit which permeated the entire political-clerical

-structure of Calvin’s dreams.

-

-Luther, after the nature of most Germans, had been a good deal of a

-sentimentalist. The Word of God alone, so it seemed to him, would show a

-man the way to the life everlasting.

-

-This was much too indefinite to suit the taste of the great French

-reformer. The Word of God might be a beacon light of hope, but the road

-was long and dark and many were the temptations that made people forget

-their true destination.

-

-The minister, however, could not go astray. He was a man set apart.

-He knew all pitfalls. He was incorruptible. And if perchance he felt

-inclined to wander from the straight path, the weekly meetings of the

-clergy, at which these worthy gentlemen were invited to criticize each

-other freely, would speedily bring him back to a realization of his

-duties. Hence he was the ideal held before all those who truly aspired

-after salvation.

-

-Those of us who have ever climbed mountains know that professional guides

-can upon occasion be veritable tyrants. They know the perils of a pile

-of rocks, the hidden dangers of an innocent-looking snowfield. Wherefore

-they assume complete command of the party that has entrusted itself to

-their care and profanity raineth richly upon the head of the foolish

-tourist who dares to disobey their orders.

-

-The ministers of Calvin’s ideal state had a similar conception of their

-duties. They were ever delighted to extend a helping hand to those

-who stumbled and asked that they be supported. But when willful people

-purposely left the beaten track and wandered away from the flock, then

-that hand was withdrawn and became a fist which meted out punishment that

-was both quick and terrible.

-

-In many other communities the dominies would have been delighted to

-exercise a similar power. But the civil authorities, jealous of their

-own prerogatives, rarely allowed the clergy to compete with the courts

-and the executioners. Calvin knew this and within his own bailiwick he

-established a form of church discipline which practically superseded the

-laws of the land.

-

-Among the curious historical misconceptions which have gained such

-popularity since the days of the great war, none is more surprising than

-the belief that the French people (in contrast to their Teuton neighbors)

-are a liberty-loving race and detest all regimentation. The French have

-for centuries submitted to the rule of a bureaucracy quite as complicated

-and infinitely less efficient than the one which existed in Prussia in

-the pre-war days. The officials are a little less punctual about their

-office hours and the spotlessness of their collars and they are given to

-sucking a particularly vile sort of cigarette. Otherwise they are quite

-as meddlesome and as obnoxious as those in the eastern republic, and the

-public accepts their rudeness with a meekness that is astonishing in a

-race so addicted to rebellion.

-

-Calvin was the ideal Frenchman in his love for centralization. In some

-details he almost approached the perfection for detail which was the

-secret of Napoleon’s success. But unlike the great emperor, he was

-utterly devoid of all personal ambition. He was just a dreadfully serious

-man with a weak stomach and no sense of humor.

-

-He ransacked the Old Testament to discover what would be agreeable

-to his particular Jehovah. And then the people of Geneva were asked

-to accept this interpretation of the Jewish chronicles as a direct

-revelation of the divine will.

-

-Almost over night the merry city on the Rhone became a community of

-rueful sinners. A civic inquisition composed of six ministers and twelve

-elders watched night and day over the private opinions of all citizens.

-Whosoever was suspected of an inclination towards “forbidden heresies”

-was cited to appear before an ecclesiastic tribunal that he might be

-examined upon all points of doctrine and explain where, how and in what

-way he had obtained the books which had given him the pernicious ideas

-which had led him astray. If the culprit showed a repentant spirit, he

-might escape with a sentence of enforced attendance at Sunday School.

-But in case he showed himself obstinate, he must leave the city within

-twenty-four hours and never again show himself within the jurisdiction of

-the Genevan commonwealth.

-

-But a proper lack of orthodox sentiment was not the only thing that could

-get a man into trouble with the so-called Consistorium. An afternoon

-spent at a bowling-alley in a nearby village, if properly reported

-(as such things invariably are), could be reason enough for a severe

-admonition. Jokes, both practical and otherwise, were considered the

-height of bad form. An attempt at wit during a wedding ceremony was

-sufficient cause for a jail sentence.

-

-Gradually the New Zion was so encumbered with laws, edicts, regulations,

-rescripts and decrees that life became a highly complicated affair and

-lost a great deal of its old flavor.

-

-Dancing was not allowed. Singing was not allowed. Card playing was not

-allowed. Gambling, of course, was not allowed. Birthday parties were

-not allowed. County fairs were not allowed. Silks and satins and all

-manifestations of external splendor were not allowed. What was allowed

-was going to church and going to school. For Calvin was a man of positive

-ideas.

-

-The verboten sign could keep out sin, but it could not force a man to

-love virtue. That had to come through an inner persuasion. Hence the

-establishment of excellent schools and a first-rate university and

-the encouragement of all learning. And the establishment of a rather

-interesting form of communal life which absorbed a good deal of the

-surplus energy of the community and which made the average man forget the

-many hardships and restrictions to which he was submitted. If it had been

-entirely lacking in human qualities, the system of Calvin could never

-have survived and it certainly would not have played such a very decisive

-rôle in the history of the last three hundred years. All of which however

-belongs in a book devoted to the development of political ideas. This

-time we are interested in the question of what Geneva did for tolerance

-and we come to the conclusion that the Protestant Rome was not a whit

-better than its Catholic namesake.

-

-The extenuating circumstances I have enumerated a few pages back. In a

-world which was forced to stand by and witness such bestial occurrences

-as the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the wholesale extermination of

-scores of Dutch cities, it was unreasonable to expect that one side (the

-weaker one at that) should practice a virtue which was equivalent to a

-self-imposed sentence of death.

-

-This, however, does not absolve Calvin from the crime of having aided and

-abetted in the legal murder of Gruet and Servetus.

-

-In the case of the former, Calvin might have put up the excuse that

-Jacques Gruet was seriously suspected of having incited his fellow

-citizens to riot and that he belonged to a political party which was

-trying to bring about the downfall of the Calvinists. But Servetus could

-hardly be called a menace to the safety of the community, as far as

-Geneva was concerned.

-

-He was what the modern passport regulations call a “transient.” Another

-twenty-four hours and he would have been gone. But he missed his boat.

-And so he came to lose his life, and it is a pretty terrible story.

-

-Miguel Serveto, better known as Michael Servetus, was a Spaniard. His

-father was a respectable notary-public (a semi-legal position in Europe

-and not just a young man with a stamping machine who charges you a

-quarter for witnessing your signature) and Miguel was also destined for

-the law. He was sent to the University of Toulouse, for in those happy

-days when all lecturing was done in Latin learning was international and

-the wisdom of the entire world was open to those who had mastered five

-declensions and a few dozen irregular verbs.

-

-At the French university Servetus made the acquaintance of one Juan de

-Quintana who shortly afterwards became the confessor of the Emperor

-Charles V.

-

-During the Middle Ages, an imperial coronation was a good deal like a

-modern international exhibition. When Charles was crowned in Bologna in

-the year 1530, Quintana took his friend Michael with him as his secretary

-and the bright young Spaniard saw all there was to be seen. Like so many

-men of his time, he was of an insatiable curiosity and he spent the

-next ten years dabbling in an infinite variety of subjects, medicine,

-astronomy, astrology, Hebrew, Greek, and, most fatal of all, theology.

-He was a very competent doctor and in the pursuit of his theological

-studies he hit upon the idea of the circulation of the blood. It is to be

-found in the fifteenth chapter of the first one of his books against the

-doctrine of the Trinity. It shows the one-sidedness of the theological

-mind of the sixteenth century that none of those who examined the works

-of Servetus ever discovered that this man had made one of the greatest

-discoveries of all ages.

-

-If only Servetus had stuck to his medical practice! He might have died

-peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age.

-

-But he simply could not keep away from the burning questions of his day,

-and having access to the printing shops of Lyons, he began to give vent

-to his opinions upon sundry subjects.

-

-Nowadays a generous millionaire can persuade a college to change its name

-from Trinity College to that of a popular brand of tobacco and nothing

-happens. The press says, “Isn’t it good of Mr. Dingus to be so generous

-with his money!” and the public at large shouts “Amen!”

-

-In a world which seems to have lost all capacity for being shocked by

-such a thing as blasphemy, it is not easy to write of a time when the

-mere suspicion that one of its fellow citizens had spoken disrespectfully

-of the Trinity would throw an entire community into a state of panic.

-But unless we fully appreciate this fact, we shall never be able to

-understand the horror in which Servetus was held by all good Christians

-of the first half of the sixteenth century.

-

-And yet he was by no means a radical.

-

-He was what today we would call a liberal.

-

-He rejected the old belief in the Trinity as held both by the Protestants

-and the Catholics, but he believed so sincerely (one feels inclined

-to say, so naïvely) in the correctness of his own views, that he

-committed the grave error of writing letters to Calvin suggesting that

-he be allowed to visit Geneva for a personal interview and a thorough

-discussion of the entire problem.

-

-He was not invited.

-

-And, anyway, it would have been impossible for him to accept. The

-Inquisitor General of Lyons had already taken a hand in the affair and

-Servetus was in jail. This inquisitor (curious readers will find a

-description of him in the works of Rabelais who refers to him as Doribus,

-a pun upon his name, which was Ory) had got wind of the Spaniard’s

-blasphemies through a letter which a private citizen of Geneva, with the

-connivance of Calvin, had sent to his cousin in Lyons.

-

-Soon the case against him was further strengthened by several samples of

-Servetus’ handwriting, also surreptitiously supplied by Calvin. It really

-looked as if Calvin did not care who hanged the poor fellow as long as he

-got hung, but the inquisitors were negligent in their sacred duties and

-Servetus was able to escape.

-

-First he seems to have tried to reach the Spanish frontier. But the long

-journey through southern France would have been very dangerous to a man

-who was so well known and so he decided to follow the rather round-about

-route via Geneva, Milan, Naples and the Mediterranean Sea.

-

-Late one Saturday afternoon in August of the year 1553 he reached Geneva.

-He tried to find a boat to cross to the other side of the lake, but boats

-were not supposed to sail so shortly before the Sabbath day and he was

-told to wait until Monday.

-

-The next day was Sunday. As it was a misdemeanor for both natives and

-strangers to stay away from divine service, Servetus went to church. He

-was recognized and arrested. By what right he was put into jail was never

-explained. Servetus was a Spanish subject and was not accused of any

-crime against the laws of Geneva. But he was a liberal in the matter of

-doctrine, a blasphemous and profane person who dared to have opinions of

-his own upon the subject of the Trinity. It was absurd that such a person

-should invoke the protection of the law. A common criminal might do so. A

-heretic, never! And without further ado he was locked up in a filthy and

-damp hole, his money and his personal belongings were confiscated and two

-days later he was taken to court and was asked to answer a questionnaire

-containing thirty-eight different points.

-

-The trial lasted two months and twelve days.

-

-In the end he was found guilty of “heresies against the foundations

-of the Christian religion.” The answers which he had given during the

-discussions of his opinions had exasperated his judges. The usual

-punishment for cases of his sort, especially if the accused were a

-foreigner, was perpetual banishment from the territory of the city of

-Geneva. In the case of Servetus an exception was made. He was condemned

-to be burned alive.

-

-In the meantime the French tribunal had re-opened the case of the

-fugitive and the officials of the Inquisition had come to the same

-conclusion as their Protestant colleagues. They too had condemned

-Servetus to death and had dispatched their sheriff to Geneva with the

-request that the culprit be surrendered to him and be brought back to

-France.

-

-This request was refused.

-

-Calvin was able to do his own burning.

-

-As for that terrible walk to the place of execution, with a delegation

-of arguing ministers surrounding the heretic upon his last journey, the

-agony which lasted for more than half an hour and did not really come to

-an end until the crowd, in their pity for the poor martyr, had thrown

-a fresh supply of fagots upon the flames, all this makes interesting

-reading for those who care for that sort of thing, but it had better be

-omitted. One execution more or less, what difference did it make during a

-period of unbridled religious fanaticism?

-

-But the case of Servetus really stands by itself. Its consequences were

-terrible. For now it was shown, and shown with brutal clearness, that

-those Protestants who had clamored so loudly and persistently for “the

-right to their own opinions” were merely Catholics in disguise, that

-they were just as narrow-minded and cruel to those who did not share

-their own views as their enemies and that they were only waiting for the

-opportunity to establish a reign of terror of their own.

-

-This accusation is a very serious one. It cannot be dismissed by a mere

-shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, what would you expect?”

-

-We possess a great deal of information upon the trial and know in detail

-what the rest of the world thought of this execution. It makes ghastly

-reading. It is true that Calvin, in an outburst of generosity, suggested

-that Servetus be decapitated instead of burned. Servetus thanked him for

-his kindness, but offered still another solution. He wanted to be set

-free. Yea, he insisted (and the logic was all on his side) that the court

-had no jurisdiction over him, that he was merely an honest man in search

-for the truth and that therefore he had the right to be heard in open

-debate with his opponent, Dr. Calvin.

-

-But of this Calvin would not hear.

-

-He had sworn that this heretic, once he fell into his hands, should never

-be allowed to escape with his life, and he was going to be as good as

-his word. That he could not get a conviction without the coöperation

-of his arch-enemy, the Inquisition, made no difference to him. He

-would have made common cause with the pope if His Holiness had been

-in the possession of some documents that would further incriminate the

-unfortunate Spaniard.

-

-But worse was to follow.

-

-On the morning of his death, Servetus asked to see Calvin and the latter

-came to the dark and filthy dungeon that had served his enemy as a prison.

-

-Upon this occasion at least he might have been generous; more, he might

-have been human.

-

-He was neither.

-

-He stood in the presence of a man who within another hour would be able

-to plead his case before the throne of God and he argued. He debated

-and sputtered, grew green and lost his temper. But not a word of pity,

-of charity, or kindliness. Not a word. Only bitterness and hatred, the

-feeling of “Serve you right, you obstinate scoundrel. Burn and be damned!”

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-All this happened many, many years ago.

-

-Servetus is dead.

-

-All our statues and memorial tablets will not bring him back to life

-again.

-

-Calvin is dead.

-

-A thousand volumes of abuse will not disturb the ashes of his unknown

-grave.

-

-They are all of them dead, those ardent reformers who during the trial

-had shuddered with fear lest the blasphemous scoundrel be allowed to

-escape, those staunch pillars of the Church who after the execution broke

-forth into paeans of praise and wrote each other, “All hail to Geneva!

-The deed is done.”

-

-They are all of them dead, and perhaps it were best they were forgotten

-too.

-

-Only let us have a care.

-

-Tolerance is like liberty.

-

-No one ever gets it merely by asking for it. No one keeps it except by

-the exercise of eternal care and vigilance.

-

-For the sake of some future Servetus among our own children, we shall do

-well to remember this.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVI

-

-THE ANABAPTISTS

-

-

-Every generation has a bogey-man all its own.

-

-We have our “Reds.”

-

-Our fathers had their Socialists.

-

-Our grandfathers had their Molly Maguires.

-

-Our great-great-grandfathers had their Jacobins.

-

-And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not a bit better off.

-

-They had their Anabaptists.

-

-The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth century was a

-certain “World Book” or chronicle, which Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler,

-prohibitionist and author, living in the good city of Ulm, published in

-the year 1534.

-

-Sebastian knew the Anabaptists. He had married into an Anabaptist family.

-He did not share their views, for he was a confirmed free-thinker. But

-this is what he wrote about them: “that they taught nothing but love and

-faith and the crucifixion of the flesh, that they manifested patience and

-humility under all suffering, assisted one another with true helpfulness,

-called each other brother and believed in having all things in common.”

-

-It is surely a curious thing that people of whom all those nice things

-could be truthfully said should for almost a hundred years have been

-hunted down like wild animals, and should have been exposed to all the

-most cruel punishments of the most bloodthirsty of centuries.

-

-But there was a reason and in order to appreciate it you must remember

-certain facts about the Reformation.

-

-The Reformation really settled nothing.

-

-It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book infallible in

-the place of a man and established (or rather, tried to establish) a rule

-by black garbed ministers instead of white garbed priests.

-

-Such meager results after half a century of struggle and sacrifice had

-filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate disappointment.

-They had expected a millennium of social and religious righteousness

-and they were not at all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and

-economic slavery.

-

-They had been ready for a great adventure. Then something had happened.

-They had slipped between the wall and the ship. And they had been obliged

-to strike out for themselves and keep above water as best they could.

-

-They were in a terrible position. They had left the old church. Their

-conscience did not allow them to join the new faith. Officially they had,

-therefore, ceased to exist. And yet they lived. They breathed. They were

-sure that they were God’s beloved children. As such it was their duty to

-keep on living and breathing, that they might save a wicked world from

-its own folly.

-

-Eventually they survived, but do not ask how!

-

-Deprived of their old associations, they were forced to form groups of

-their own, to look for a new leadership.

-

-But what man in his senses would take up with these poor fanatics?

-

-As a result, shoemakers with second sight and hysterical midwives with

-visions and hallucinations assumed the rôle of prophets and prophetesses

-and they prayed and preached and raved until the rafters of their

-dingy meeting places shook with the hosannas of the faithful and the

-tip-staffs of the village were forced to take notice of the unseemly

-disturbance.

-

-Then half a dozen men and women were sent to jail and their High and

-Mightinesses, the town councilors, began what was good-naturedly called

-“an investigation.”

-

-These people did not go to the Catholic Church. They did not worship in

-the Protestant kirk. Then would they please explain who they were and

-what they believed?

-

-To give the poor councilors their due, they were in a difficult

-predicament. For their prisoners were the most uncomfortable of all

-heretics, people who took their religious convictions absolutely

-seriously. Many of the most respectable reformers were of this earth

-earthy and willingly made such small compromises as were absolutely

-necessary, if one hoped to lead an agreeable and respectable existence.

-

-Your true Anabaptist was of a different caliber. He frowned upon all

-half-way measures. Jesus had told his followers to turn the other cheek

-when smitten by an enemy, and had taught that all those who take the

-sword shall perish by the sword. To the Anabaptists this meant a positive

-ordinance to use no violence. They did not care to dilly-dally with

-words and murmur that circumstances alter cases, that, of course, they

-were against war, but that this was a different kind of a war and that

-therefore they felt that for this once God would not mind if they threw a

-few bombs or fired an occasional torpedo.

-

-A divine ordinance was a divine ordinance, and that was all there was to

-it.

-

-And so they refused to enlist and refused to carry arms and in case they

-were arrested for their pacifism (for that is what their enemies called

-this sort of applied Christianity) they went willingly forth to meet

-their fate and recited Matthew xxvi: 52 until death made an end to their

-suffering.

-

-But anti-militarism was only a small detail in their program of

-queerness. Jesus had preached that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom

-of Caesar were two entirely different entities and could not and should

-not be reconciled. Very well. These words were clear. Henceforth all

-good Anabaptists carefully abstained from taking part in their country’s

-government, refused to hold public office and spent the time which other

-people wasted upon politics, reading and studying the holy scriptures.

-

-Jesus had cautioned his disciples against unseemly quarrels and the

-Anabaptists would rather lose their rightful possessions than submit a

-difference of opinion to a law court.

-

-There were several other points which set these peculiar people apart

-from the rest of the world, but these few examples of their odd behavior

-will explain the suspicion and detestation in which they were held by

-their fat and happy neighbors who invariably mixed their piety with a

-dose of that comfortable doctrine which bids us live and let live.

-

-Even so, the Anabaptists, like the Baptists and many other dissenters,

-might in the end have discovered a way to placate the authorities, if

-only they had been able to protect themselves from their own friends.

-

-Undoubtedly there are many honest Bolshevists who dearly love their

-fellow proletarians and who spend their waking hours trying to make this

-world a better and happier place. But when the average person hears

-the word “Bolshevik,” he thinks of Moscow and of a reign of terror

-established by a handful of scholarly cut-throats, of jails full of

-innocent people and firing squads jeering at the victims they are about

-to shoot. This picture may be slightly unfair, but it is no more than

-natural that it should be part of the popular myth after the unspeakable

-things which have happened in Russia during the last seven years.

-

-The really good and peaceful Anabaptists of the sixteenth century

-suffered from a similar disadvantage. As a sect they were suspected of

-many strange crimes, and with good reason. In the first place, they were

-inveterate Bible readers. This, of course, is not a crime at all, but let

-me finish my sentence. The Anabaptists studied the scriptures without any

-discrimination and that is a very dangerous thing when one has a strong

-predilection for the Book of Revelation.

-

-This strange work which even as late as the fifth century was rejected

-as a bit of “spurious writing” was just the sort of thing to appeal to

-people who lived during a period of intense emotional passions. The exile

-of Patmos spoke a language which these poor, hunted creatures understood.

-When his impotent rage drove him into hysterical prophecies anent the

-modern Babylon, all the Anabaptists shouted amen and prayed for the

-speedy coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth.

-

-It was not the first time that weak minds gave way under the stress of

-a great excitement. And almost every persecution of the Anabaptists was

-followed by violent outbursts of religious insanity. Men and women would

-rush naked through the streets, announcing the end of the world, trying

-to indulge in weird sacrifices that the fury of God might be appeased.

-Old hags would enter the divine services of some other sect and break up

-the meeting, stridently shrieking nonsense about the coming of the Dragon.

-

-Of course, this sort of affliction (in a mild degree) is always with us.

-Read the daily papers and you will see how in some remote hamlet of Ohio

-or Iowa or Florida a woman has butchered her husband with a meat cleaver

-because “she was told to do so” by the voice of an angel; or how an

-otherwise reasonable father has just killed his wife and eight children

-in anticipation of the sounding of the Seven Trumpets. Such cases,

-however, are rare exceptions. They can be easily handled by the local

-police and they really do not have great influence upon the life or the

-safety of the Republic.

-

-But what had happened in the year 1534 in the good town of Münster was

-something very different. There the New Zion, upon strictly Anabaptist

-principles, had actually been proclaimed.

-

-And people all over northern Europe shuddered when they thought of that

-terrible winter and spring.

-

-The villain in the case was a good-looking young tailor by the name of

-Jan Beukelszoon. History knows him as John of Leiden, for Jan was a

-native of that industrious little city and had spent his childhood along

-the banks of the sluggish old Rhine. Like all other apprentices of that

-day, he had traveled extensively and had wandered far and wide to learn

-the secrets of his trade.

-

-He could read and write just enough to produce an occasional play, but

-he had no real education. Neither was he possessed of that humility of

-spirit which we so often find in people who are conscious of their social

-disadvantages and their lack of knowledge. But he was a very good-looking

-young man, endowed with unlimited cheek and as vain as a peacock.

-

-After a long absence in England and Germany, he went back to his native

-land and set up in the cloak and suit business. At the same time he went

-in for religion and that was the beginning of his extraordinary career.

-For he became a disciple of Thomas Münzer.

-

-This man Münzer, a baker by profession, was a famous character. He was

-one of the three Anabaptist prophets who, in the year 1521, had suddenly

-made their appearance in Wittenberg that they might show Luther how to

-find the true road to salvation. Although they had acted with the best

-of intentions, their efforts had not been appreciated and they had been

-chased out of the Protestant stronghold with the request that never again

-they show their unwelcome selves within the jurisdiction of the Dukes of

-Saxony.

-

-Came the year 1534 and the Anabaptists had suffered so many defeats that

-they decided to risk everything on one big, bold stroke.

-

-That they selected the town of Münster in Westphalia as the spot

-for their final experiment surprised no one. Franz von Waldeck, the

-prince-bishop of that city, was a drunken bounder who for years had lived

-openly with a score of women and who ever since his sixteenth year had

-offended all decent people by the outrageous bad taste of his private

-conduct. When the town went Protestant, he compromised. But being known

-far and wide for a liar and a cheat, his treaty of peace did not give

-his Protestant subjects that feeling of personal security without which

-life is indeed a very uncomfortable experience. In consequence whereof

-the inhabitants of Münster remained in a state of high agitation until

-the next elections. These brought a surprise. The city government fell

-into the hands of the Anabaptists. The chairman became one Bernard

-Knipperdollinck, a cloth merchant by day and a prophet after dark.

-

-The bishop took one look at his new councilors and fled.

-

-It was then that John of Leiden appeared upon the scene. He had come to

-Münster as the apostle of a certain Jan Matthysz, a Haarlem baker who had

-started a new sect of his own and was regarded as a very holy man. And

-when he heard of the great blow that had been struck for the good cause,

-he remained to help celebrate the victory and purge the bishopric of all

-popish contamination. The Anabaptists were nothing if not thorough. They

-turned the churches into stone quarries. They confiscated the convents

-for the benefit of the homeless. All books except the Bible were publicly

-burned. And as a fitting climax, those who refused to be re-baptized

-after the Anabaptist fashion were driven into the camp of the Bishop, who

-decapitated them or drowned them on the general principle that they were

-heretics and small loss to the community.

-

-That was the prologue.

-

-The play itself was no less terrible.

-

-From far and wide the high priests of half a hundred new creeds hastened

-to the New Jerusalem. There they were joined by all those who believed

-themselves possessed of a call for the great uplift, honest and sincere

-citizens, but as innocent as babes when it came to politics or statecraft.

-

-The siege of Münster lasted five months and during that time, every

-scheme, system and program of social and spiritual regeneration was tried

-out; every new-fangled prophet had his day in court.

-

-But, of course, a little town chuck full of fugitives, pestilence and

-hunger, was not a fit place for a sociological laboratory and the

-dissensions and quarrels between the different factions lamed all the

-efforts of the military leaders. During that crisis John the tailor

-stepped forward.

-

-The short hour of his glory had come.

-

-In that community of starving men and suffering children, all things

-were possible. John began his régime by introducing an exact replica of

-that old theocratic form of government of which he had read in his Old

-Testament. The burghers of Münster were divided into the twelve tribes

-of Israel and John himself was chosen to be their king. He had already

-married the daughter of one prophet, Knipperdollinck. Now he married the

-widow of another, the wife of his former master, John Matthysz. Next he

-remembered Solomon and added a couple of concubines. And then the ghastly

-farce began.

-

-All day long John sat on the throne of David in the market place and all

-day long the people stood by while the royal court chaplain read the

-latest batch of ordinances. These came fast and furiously, for the fate

-of the city was daily growing more desperate and the people were in dire

-need.

-

-John, however, was an optimist and thoroughly believed in the omnipotence

-of paper decrees.

-

-The people complained that they were hungry. John promised that he would

-tend to it. And forthwith a royal ukase, duly signed by His Majesty,

-ordained that all wealth in the city be divided equally among the rich

-and the poor, that the streets be broken up and used as vegetable

-gardens, that all meals be eaten in common.

-

-So far so good. But there were those who said that some of the rich

-people had hidden part of their treasures. John bade his subjects not to

-worry. A second decree proclaimed that all those who broke a single law

-of the community would be immediately decapitated. And, mind you, such

-a warning was no idle threat. For this royal tailor was as handy with

-his sword as with his scissors and frequently undertook to be his own

-executioner.

-

-Then came the period of hallucinations when the populace suffered from a

-diversity of religious manias; when the market place was crowded day and

-night with thousands of men and women, awaiting the trumpet blasts of

-the angel Gabriel.

-

-Then came the period of terror, when the prophet kept up the courage of

-his flock by a constant orgy of blood and cut the throat of one of his

-own queens.

-

-And then came the terrible day of retribution when two citizens in their

-despair opened the gates to the soldiers of the bishop and when the

-prophet, locked in an iron cage, was shown at all the Westphalian country

-fairs and was finally tortured to death.

-

-A weird episode, but of terrible consequence to many a God-fearing and

-simple soul.

-

-From that moment on, all Anabaptists were outlawed. Such leaders as

-had escaped the carnage of Münster were hunted down like rabbits and

-were killed wherever found. From every pulpit, ministers and priests

-fulminated against the Anabaptists and with many curses and anathemas

-they denounced them as communists and traitors and rebels, who wanted to

-upset the existing order of things and deserved less mercy than wolves or

-mad dogs.

-

-Rarely has a heresy hunt been so successful. As a sect, the Anabaptists

-ceased to exist. But a strange thing happened. Many of their ideas

-continued to live, were picked up by other denominations, were

-incorporated into all sorts of religious and philosophic systems, became

-respectable, and are today part and parcel of everybody’s spiritual and

-intellectual inheritance.

-

-It is a simple thing to state such a fact. To explain how it actually

-came about, that is quite a different story.

-

-Almost without exception the Anabaptists belonged to that class of

-society which regards an inkstand as an unnecessary luxury.

-

-Anabaptist history, therefore, was writ by those who regarded the sect

-as a particularly venomous land of denominational radicalism. Only now,

-after a century of study, are we beginning to understand the great

-rôle the ideas of these humble peasants and artisans have played in

-the further development of a more rational and more tolerant form of

-Christianity.

-

-But ideas are like lightning. One never knows where they will strike

-next. And what is the use of lightning rods in Münster, when the storm

-breaks loose over Sienna?

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVII

-

-THE SOZZINI FAMILY

-

-

-In Italy the Reformation had never been successful. It could not be. In

-the first place, the people of the south did not take their religion

-seriously enough to fight about it and in the second place, the close

-proximity of Rome, the center of a particularly well equipped office of

-the Inquisition, made indulgence in private opinions a dangerous and

-costly pastime.

-

-But, of course, among all the thousands of humanists who populated the

-peninsula, there were bound to be a few black sheep who cared a great

-deal more for the good opinion of Aristotle than for that of Saint

-Chrysostom. Those good people, however, were given many opportunities

-to get rid of their surplus spiritual energy. There were clubs and

-coffee-houses and discreet salons where men and women could give vent to

-their intellectual enthusiasm without upsetting empires. All of which was

-very pleasant and restful. And besides, wasn’t all life a compromise?

-Hadn’t it always been a compromise? Would it not in all likelihood be a

-compromise until the end of time?

-

-Why get excited about such a small detail as one’s faith?

-

-After these few introductory remarks, the reader will surely not expect

-to hear a loud fanfaronade or the firing of guns when our next two heroes

-make their appearance. For they are soft-spoken gentlemen, and go about

-their business in a dignified and pleasant way.

-

-In the end, they are to do more to upset the dogmatic tyranny under

-which the world had suffered for such a long time than a whole army of

-noisy reformers. But that is one of those curious things which no one

-can foresee. They happen. We are grateful. But how it comes about, that,

-alas, is something which we do not fully understand.

-

-The name of these two quiet workmen in the vineyard of reason was Sozzini.

-

-They were uncle and nephew.

-

-For some unknown reason, the older man, Lelio Francesco, spelled his name

-with one “z” and the younger, Fausto Paolo, spelled his with two “zs.”

-But as they are both of them much better known by the Latinized form of

-their name, Socinius, than by the Italian Sozzini, we can leave that

-detail to the grammarians and etymologists.

-

-As far as their influence was concerned, the uncle was much less

-important than the nephew. We shall, therefore, deal with him first and

-speak of the nephew afterwards.

-

-Lelio Sozini was a Siennese, the descendant of a race of bankers and

-judges and himself destined for a career at the bar, via the University

-of Bologna. But like so many of his contemporaries, he allowed himself

-to slip into theology, stopped reading law, played with Greek and Hebrew

-and Arabic and ended (as so often happens with people of his type) as a

-rationalistic mystic—a man who was at once very much of this world and

-yet never quite of it. This sounds complicated. But those who understand

-what I mean will understand without any further explanation, and the

-others would not understand, no matter what I said.

-

-His father, however, seems to have had a suspicion that the son might

-amount to something in the world of letters. He gave his boy a check and

-bade him go forth and see whatever there was to be seen. And so Lelio

-left Sienna and during the next ten years, he traveled from Venice to

-Geneva and from Geneva to Zürich and from Zürich to Wittenberg and then

-to London and then to Prague and then to Vienna and then to Cracow,

-spending a few months or years in every town and hamlet where he hoped

-to find interesting company and might be able to learn something new

-and interesting. It was an age when people talked religion just as

-incessantly as today they talk business. Lelio must have collected a

-strange assortment of ideas and by keeping his ears open he was soon

-familiar with every heresy between the Mediterranean and the Baltic.

-

-When, however, he carried himself and his intellectual luggage to

-Geneva, he was received politely but none too cordially. The pale eyes

-of Calvin looked upon this Italian visitor with grave suspicion. He was

-a distinguished young man of excellent family and not a poor, friendless

-wanderer like Servetus. It was said, however, that he had Servetian

-inclinations. And that was most disturbing. The case for or against the

-Trinity, so Calvin thought, had been definitely settled when the Spanish

-heretic was burned. On the contrary! The fate of Servetus had become a

-subject of conversation from Madrid to Stockholm, and serious-minded

-people all over the world were beginning to take the side of the

-anti-trinitarian. But that was not all. They were using Gutenberg’s

-devilish invention to spread their views broadcast and being at a safe

-distance from Geneva they were often far from complimentary in their

-remarks.

-

-Only a short while before a very learned tract had appeared which

-contained everything the fathers of the Church had ever said or written

-upon the subject of persecuting and punishing heretics. It had an

-instantaneous and enormous sale among those who “hated God,” as Calvin

-said, or who “hated Calvin,” as they themselves protested. Calvin had

-let it be known that he would like to have a personal interview with the

-author of this precious booklet. But the author, anticipating such a

-request, had wisely omitted his name from the title-page.

-

-It was said that he was called Sebastian Castellio, that he had been a

-teacher in one of the Geneva high schools and that his moderate views

-upon diverse theological enormities had gained him the hatred of Calvin

-and the approbation of Montaigne. No one, however, could prove this. It

-was mere hearsay. But where one had gone before, others might follow.

-

-Calvin, therefore, was distantly polite to Sozzini, but suggested that

-the mild air of Basel would suit his Siennese friend much better than the

-damp climate of Savoy and heartily bade him Godspeed when he started on

-his way to the famous old Erasmian stronghold.

-

-Fortunately for Calvin, the Sozzini family soon afterwards fell under the

-suspicion of the Inquisition, Lelio was deprived of his funds and falling

-ill of a fever, he died in Zürich at the age of only thirty-seven.

-

-Whatever joy his untimely demise may have caused in Geneva, it was

-short-lived.

-

-For Lelio, besides a widow and several trunks of notes, left a nephew,

-who not only fell heir to his uncle’s unpublished manuscripts but soon

-gained for himself the reputation of being even more of a Servetus

-enthusiast than his uncle had been.

-

-During his younger years, Faustus Socinius had traveled almost as

-extensively as the older Lelio. His grandfather had left him a small

-estate and as he did not marry until he was nearly fifty, he was able to

-devote all his time to his favorite subject, theology.

-

-For a short while he seems to have been in business in Lyons.

-

-What sort of a salesman he made, I do not know, but his experience in

-buying and selling and dealing in concrete commodities rather than

-spiritual values seems to have strengthened him in his conviction that

-very little is ever gained by killing a competitor or losing one’s temper

-if the other man has the better of a deal. And as long as he lived,

-he showed himself possessed of that sober common sense which is often

-found in a counting-house but is very rarely part of the curriculum of a

-religious seminary.

-

-In the year 1563 Faustus returned to Italy. On his way home he visited

-Geneva. It does not appear that he ever paid his respects to the local

-patriarch. Besides, Calvin was a very sick man at that time. The visit

-from a member of the Sozzini family would only have disturbed him.

-

-The next dozen years, young Socinius spent in the service of Isabella de’

-Medici. But in the year 1576 this lady, after a few days of matrimonial

-bliss, was murdered by her husband, Paolo Orsini. Thereupon Socinius

-resigned, left Italy for good and went to Basel to translate the Psalms

-into colloquial Italian and write a book on Jesus.

-

-Faustus, so it appeared from his writings, was a careful man. In the

-first place, he was very deaf and such people are by nature cautious.

-

-In the second place, he derived his income from certain estates situated

-on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan authorities had given him

-a hint that it might be just as well for one suspected of “Lutheran

-leanings” not to be too bold while dealing with subjects which were held

-in disfavor by the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms

-and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by a number of

-friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.

-

-Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the Index. It also

-happened that a copy of his life of Jesus was carried all the way to

-Transylvania and there fell into the hands of another liberal-minded

-Italian, the private physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine

-ladies who had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.

-

-Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe. A wilderness

-until the early part of the twelfth century, it had been used as a

-convenient home for the surplus population of Germany. The hard working

-Saxon peasants had turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well

-regulated little country with cities and schools and an occasional

-university. But it remained a country far removed from the main roads of

-travel and trade. Hence it had always been a favorite place of residence

-for those who for one reason or another preferred to keep a few miles of

-marsh and mountain between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.

-

-As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many centuries been

-associated with the general idea of reaction and jingoism that it will

-come as an agreeable surprise to many of my readers when I tell them that

-during the first half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum

-for all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account of their

-religious convictions.

-

-This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about in a typically

-Polish fashion.

-

-That the Republic for quite a long time had been the most scandalously

-mismanaged country of the entire continent was even then a generally

-known fact. The extent, however, to which the higher clergy had neglected

-their duties was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when

-dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common affliction

-of all western nations.

-

-But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was noticed that

-the number of Polish students in the different German universities was

-beginning to increase at a rate of speed which caused great concern

-among the authorities of Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask

-questions. And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of

-Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed to fall into

-such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders were forced to go

-abroad for their education or do without. A little later, when the Teuton

-universities fell under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young

-men from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally followed suit.

-

-And when they returned to their home towns, they did so as full-fledged

-Lutherans.

-

-At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been quite easy for

-the king and the nobility and the clergy to stamp out this epidemic of

-erroneous opinions. But such a step would have obliged the rulers of the

-republic to unite upon a definite and common policy and that of course

-was directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of this

-strange country where a single dissenting vote could upset a law which

-had the support of all the other members of the diet.

-

-And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared that the religion

-of the famous Wittenberg professor carried with it a by-product of an

-economic nature, consisting of the confiscation of all Church property,

-the Boleslauses and the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts,

-barons, princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between the

-Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning towards a faith

-which meant money in their pockets.

-

-The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed upon the

-discovery caused one of those famous “interims” with which the Poles,

-since time immemorial, have tried to stave off the day of reckoning.

-During such periods all authority came to a standstill and the

-Protestants made such a good use of their opportunity that in less than

-a year they had established churches of their own in every part of the

-kingdom.

-

-Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling of the new

-ministers drove the peasants back into the arms of the Church and Poland

-once more became one of the strongholds of a most uncompromising form

-of Catholicism. But during the latter half of the sixteenth century,

-the country enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics and

-Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination upon the

-Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion that the survivors should flee

-eastward and should eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula

-and it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’ book on Jesus

-and expressed a wish to make the author’s acquaintance.

-

-Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man of parts. He

-had graduated at the University of Montpellier and had been remarkably

-successful as a woman’s specialist. First and last he was a good deal of

-a scoundrel, but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think of

-Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as a neurologist

-and frequently played one rôle out against the other. For example, he

-cured the Queen Dowager of Poland, Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund),

-so successfully of the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were

-wrong, that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed those

-who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.

-

-The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her lovers) but two

-of her daughters had married local noblemen and as their medical adviser,

-Blandrata exercised a great deal of influence upon the politics of his

-adopted land. He knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that

-it would happen very soon unless something be done to make an end to the

-everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to work to bring about

-a truce between the different opposing sects. But for this purpose he

-needed some one more skilled in the intricacies of a religious debate

-than he was himself. Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life

-of Jesus was his man.

-

-He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.

-

-Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the private life of

-Blandrata had just led to so grave a public scandal that the Italian had

-been forced to resign and leave for parts unknown. Socinius, however,

-remained in this far away land, married a Polish girl and died in his

-adopted country in the year 1604.

-

-These last two decades of his life proved to be the most interesting

-period of his career. For it was then that he gave a concrete expression

-to his ideas upon the subject of tolerance.

-

-They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of Rakow,” a document

-which Socinius composed as a sort of common constitution for all those

-who meant well by this world and wished to make an end to future

-sectarian strife.

-

-The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of catechism,

-confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People were writing them

-in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and in Holland and in

-Denmark. But everywhere these carelessly printed little booklets gave

-expression to the ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained

-the real Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty of

-all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to uphold this one

-particular form of Truth with a great big capital T to punish with the

-sword and the gallows and the stake those who willfully remained faithful

-to a different sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and

-therefore was of an inferior quality).

-

-The Socinian confession of faith breathed an entirely different spirit.

-It began by the flat statement that it was not the intention of those who

-had signed this document to quarrel with anybody else.

-

-“With good reason,” it continued, “many pious people complain that the

-various confessions and catechisms which have hitherto been published and

-which the different churches are now publishing are apples of discord

-among the Christians because they all try to impose certain principles

-upon people’s conscience and to consider those who disagree with them as

-heretics.”

-

-Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was the intention of

-the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any one else on account of his

-religious convictions and turning to humanity in general, it made the

-following appeal:

-

-“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for this is the rule

-set forth by the New Testament and by the example of the earliest church.

-Who are we, miserable people, that we would smother and extinguish in

-others the fire of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have

-any of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures? Why do

-we not remember that our only master is Jesus Christ and that we are

-all brothers and that to no one has been given power over the souls of

-others? It may be that one of our brothers is more learned than the

-others, yet in regard to liberty and the relationship with Christ we are

-all equal.”

-

-All this was very fine and very wonderful, but it was said three hundred

-years ahead of the times. Neither the Socinians nor any of the other

-Protestant sects could in the long run hope to hold their own in this

-turbulent part of the world. The counter-reformation had begun in all

-seriousness. Veritable hordes of Jesuit fathers were beginning to be

-turned loose upon the lost provinces. While they worked, the Protestants

-quarreled. Soon the people of the eastern frontier were back within

-the fold of Rome. Today the traveler who visits these distant parts of

-civilized Europe would hardly guess that, once upon a time, they were

-a stronghold of the most advanced and liberal thought of the age. Nor

-would he suspect that somewhere among those dreary Lithuanian hills there

-lies a village where the world was for the first time presented with a

-definite program for a practical system of tolerance.

-

-Driven by idle curiosity, I took a morning off recently and went to the

-library and read through the index of all our most popular text-books

-out of which the youth of our country learns the story of the past. Not

-a single one mentioned Socinianism or the Sozzinis. They all jumped from

-Social Democrats to Sophia of Hanover and from Sobieski to Saracens. The

-usual leaders of the great religious revolution were there, including

-Oecolampadius and the lesser lights.

-

-One volume only contained a reference to the two great Siennese humanists

-but they appeared as a vague appendix to something Luther or Calvin had

-said or done.

-

-It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion that in the

-popular histories of three hundred years hence, all this will have been

-changed and that the Sozzinis shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter

-of their own and that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be

-relegated to the bottom of the page.

-

-They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing in footnotes.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XVIII

-

-MONTAIGNE

-

-

-In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made for freedom.

-

-That was true.

-

-A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely at baron and

-priest.

-

-A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved

-so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility,

-another historical phenomenon began to make itself manifest.

-

-Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes for

-tolerance.”

-

-You can verify this statement any day of the week and most of all on

-Sunday in any part of our country.

-

-Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux Klan, but New York

-cannot. If the people of New York should ever start a movement for the

-exclusion of all Jews and all Catholics and all foreigners in general,

-there would be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the

-labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the hope of repair.

-

-The same held true during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Moscow, the

-seat of a small grand ducal count, might rage against the pagans, but

-Novgorod, the international trading post, must be careful lest she offend

-the Swedes and Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants who

-visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.

-

-A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with

-a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese

-or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within

-their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who

-represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of

-capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.

-

-A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from

-experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions

-of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called

-“loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of

-the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or

-dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.

-

-Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men

-who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which

-side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of

-spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and

-Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to

-their own particular religion.

-

-For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass a law against

-the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was careful to explain to their

-gendarmes that this decree must not be taken too seriously and that

-unless the heretics actually tried to get hold of San Marco and convert

-it into a meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must be

-allowed to worship as they saw fit.

-

-Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every Sunday their

-ministers fulminated against the sins of the “Scarlet Woman.” But in

-the next block the terrible Papists were quietly saying mass in some

-inconspicuous looking house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police

-stood watch lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to

-break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable French and

-Italian visitors away.

-

-This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people in Venice or

-Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their respective churches. They

-were as good Catholics or Protestants as they had ever been. But they

-remembered that the good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg

-or Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of a dozen shabby

-clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted accordingly.

-

-It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened and liberal

-opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne with the fact that

-his father and grandfather had been in the herring business and that

-his mother was of Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these

-commercial antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s general

-point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism and bigotry

-which characterized his entire career as a soldier and statesman had

-originated in a little fish-shop somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.

-

-Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had been able to make

-this statement to his face. For when he was born, all vestiges of mere

-“trade” had been carefully wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.

-

-His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne and had spent

-money lavishly that his son might be brought up as a gentleman. Before

-he was fairly able to walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little

-head full of Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to

-high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And before he was

-twenty he was a full-fledged member of the Bordeaux town council.

-

-Then followed a career in the army and a period at court, until at the

-age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father, he retired from all

-active business and spent the last twenty-one years of his life, (with

-the exception of a few unwilling excursions into politics), among his

-horses and his dogs and his books and learned as much from the one as he

-did from the other.

-

-Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered from several

-weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain affections and

-mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s grandson, believed to be a part of

-true gentility. Until the end of his days he protested that he was not

-really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled

-away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon

-subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If

-ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and

-everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the

-immortal d’Artagnan.

-

-And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these vices were

-the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices of an essentially

-generous, well-bred and agreeable person, the sum total of Montaigne’s

-works has become something more than literature. It has developed into

-a definite philosophy of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary

-practical variety of decency.

-

-Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic, and in his younger

-years he was an active member of that League of Catholic Noblemen which

-was formed among the French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.

-

-But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572 when news reached

-him of the joy with which Pope Gregory XIII had celebrated the murder of

-thirty thousand French Protestants, he turned away from the Church for

-good. He never went so far as to join the other side. He continued to go

-through certain formalities that he might keep his neighbors’ tongues

-from wagging, but those of his chapters written after the night of Saint

-Bartholomew might just as well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or

-Epictetus or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And in

-one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,” he spoke

-as if he had been a contemporary of Pericles rather than a servant of

-Her Majesty Catherine de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the

-Apostate as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might hope to

-accomplish.

-

-It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and you will find

-it in part nineteen of the second book.

-

-Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy of both

-Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of absolute freedom, which

-(under the existing circumstances) could only provoke a new outbreak

-of civil war. But when circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and

-Catholics no longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath

-their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep away as much

-as possible from interfering with other people’s consciences and should

-permit all of its subjects to love God as best suited the happiness of

-their own particular souls.

-

-Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon

-this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year

-1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici

-and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally

-suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that

-heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He had based his

-somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it

-was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he

-had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration

-which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own,

-to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to

-behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely

-a tolerated little sect.

-

-Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who

-had defended the rights of private property against the communistic

-tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar

-vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving

-their subjects to this or that church.

-

-But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political

-philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read

-and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in

-the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be

-read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years.

-

-His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun

-of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of

-people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book

-that was officially classified under “philosophy.”

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XIX

-

-ARMINIUS

-

-

-The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between

-“organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group”

-ahead of all other considerations and those private citizens of unusual

-intelligence or energy who hold that such improvement as the world has

-thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts of the individual

-and not due to the efforts of the mass (which by its very nature is

-distrustful of all innovations) and that therefore the rights of the

-individual are far more important than those of the mass.

-

-If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows that the amount

-of tolerance in any given country must be in direct proportion to the

-degree of individual liberty enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants.

-

-Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally

-enlightened ruler spake unto his children and said, “I firmly believe in

-the principle of live and let live. I expect all my beloved subjects to

-practice tolerance towards their neighbors or bear the consequences.”

-

-In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in a supply of

-the official buttons bearing the proud inscription, “Tolerance first.”

-

-But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His Majesty’s hangman,

-were rarely of a lasting nature and only bore fruit if the sovereign

-accompanied his threat by an intelligent system of gradual education

-along the lines of practical every day politics.

-

-Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred in the Dutch

-Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth century.

-

-In the first place the country consisted of several thousand

-semi-independent towns and villages and these for the greater part were

-inhabited by fishermen, sailors and traders, three classes of people who

-are accustomed to a certain amount of independence of action and who are

-forced by the nature of their trade to make quick decisions and to judge

-the casual occurrences of the day’s work upon their own merits.

-

-I would not for a moment claim that, man for man, they were a whit more

-intelligent or broadminded than their neighbors in other parts of the

-world. But hard work and tenacity of purpose had made them the grain

-and fish carriers of all northern and western Europe. They knew that

-the money of a Catholic was just as good as that of a Protestant and

-they preferred a Turk who paid cash to a Presbyterian who asked for six

-months’ credit. An ideal country therefore to start a little experiment

-in tolerance and furthermore the right man was in the right place and

-what is infinitely more important the right man was in the right place at

-the right moment.

-

-William the Silent was a shining example of the old maxim that “those

-who wish to rule the world must know the world.” He began life as a very

-fashionable and rich young man, enjoying a most enviable social position

-as the confidential secretary of the greatest monarch of his time. He

-wasted scandalous sums of money upon dinners and dances, married several

-of the better known heiresses of his day and lived gayly without a care

-for the day of tomorrow. He was not a particularly studious person and

-racing charts interested him infinitely more than religious tracts.

-

-The social unrest which followed in the wake of the Reformation did not

-at first impress him as anything more serious than still another quarrel

-between capital and labor, the sort of thing that could be settled by the

-use of a little tact and the display of a few brawny police constables.

-

-But once he had grasped the true nature of the issue that had arisen

-between the sovereign and his subjects, this amiable grand seigneur was

-suddenly transformed into the exceedingly able leader of what, to all

-intents and purposes, was the prime lost cause of the age. The palaces

-and horses, the gold plate and the country estates were sold at short

-notice (or confiscated at no notice at all) and the sporting young man

-from Brussels became the most tenacious and successful enemy of the house

-of Habsburg.

-

-This change of fortune, however, did not affect his private character.

-William had been a philosopher in the days of plenty. He remained a

-philosopher when he lived in a couple of furnished rooms and did not know

-how to pay for Saturday’s clean wash. And just as in the olden days he

-had worked hard to frustrate the plans of a cardinal who had expressed

-the intention of building a sufficient number of gallows to accommodate

-all Protestants, he now made it a point to bridle the energy of those

-ardent Calvinists who wished to hang all Catholics.

-

-His task was wellnigh hopeless.

-

-Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already been killed, the

-prisons of the Inquisition were full of new candidates for martyrdom and

-in far off Spain new armies were being recruited to smash the rebellion

-before it should spread to other parts of the Empire.

-

-To tell people who were fighting for their lives that they must love

-those who had just hanged their sons and brothers and uncles and

-grandfathers was out of the question. But by his personal example, by his

-conciliatory attitude towards those who opposed him, William was able to

-show his followers how a man of character can invariably rise superior to

-the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

-

-In this campaign for public decency he enjoyed the support of a very

-remarkable man. In the church of Gouda you may this very day read a

-curious monosyllabic epitaph which enumerates the virtues of one Dirck

-Coornhert, who lies buried there. This Coornhert was an interesting

-fellow. He was the son of well-to-do people and had spent many years

-of his youth traveling in foreign lands and getting some first hand

-information about Germany, Spain and France. As soon as he had returned

-home from this trip he fell in love with a girl who did not have a

-cent. His careful Dutch father had forbidden the marriage. When his son

-married the girl just the same, he did what those ancestral patriarchs

-were supposed to do under the circumstances; he talked about filial

-ingratitude and disinherited the boy.

-

-This was inconvenient, in so far as young Coornhert was now obliged to go

-to work for a living. But he was a young man of parts, learned a trade

-and set up as a copper-engraver.

-

-Alas! once a Dutchman, always a dominie. When evening came, he hastily

-dropped the burin, picked up the goose-quill and wrote articles upon the

-events of the day. His style was not exactly what one would nowadays

-call “amusing.” But his books contained a great deal of that amiable

-common sense which had distinguished the work of Erasmus and they made

-him many friends and brought him into contact with William the Silent

-who thought so highly of his abilities that he employed him as one of his

-confidential advisers.

-

-Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate. King Philip, aided

-and abetted by the Pope, was trying to rid the world of the enemy of

-the human race (to wit, his own enemy, William) by a standing offer

-of twenty-five thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and

-forgiveness of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder the

-arch-heretic. William, who had already lived through five attempts upon

-his life, felt it his duty to refute the arguments of good King Philip in

-a series of pamphlets and Coornhert assisted him.

-

-That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments were intended,

-should thereby be converted to tolerance was of course an idle hope. But

-as all the world was watching the duel between William and Philip, those

-little pamphlets were translated and read everywhere and they caused a

-healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never before dared to

-mention above a whisper.

-

-Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the ninth of July of

-the year 1584 a young French Catholic gained that reward of twenty-five

-thousand ducats and six years later Coornhert died before he had been

-able to finish the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch

-vernacular.

-

-As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the noise of battle

-that even the fulminations of the different theologians went unheard.

-And when finally the enemy had been driven from the territory of the

-new republic, there was no William to take hold of internal affairs and

-three score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary

-but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large number of Spanish

-mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats.

-

-Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel but who ever

-heard of a theologian without a grievance?

-

-In the University of Leiden there were two professors who disagreed. That

-was nothing either new or unusual. But these two professors disagreed

-upon the question of the freedom of the will and that was a very serious

-matter. At once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion and

-within less than a month the entire country was divided into two hostile

-camps.

-

-On the one side, the friends of Arminius.

-

-On the other, the followers of Gomarus.

-

-The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all his life in

-Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton system of pedagogy.

-He possessed immense learning combined with a total absence of ordinary

-horse-sense. His mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but

-his heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.

-

-His opponent, Arminius, was a very different sort of man. He was born

-in Oudewater, a little city not far away from that cloister Steyn where

-Erasmus had spent the unhappy years of his early manhood. As a child

-he had won the friendship of a neighbor, a famous mathematician and

-professor of astronomy in the University of Marburg. This man, Rudolf

-Snellius, had taken Arminius back with him to Germany that he might be

-properly educated. But when the boy went home for his first vacation he

-found that his native town had been sacked by the Spaniards and that all

-his relatives had been murdered.

-

-That seemed to end his career but fortunately some rich people with kind

-hearts heard of the sad plight of the young orphan and they put up a

-purse and sent him to Leiden to study theology. He worked hard and after

-half a dozen years he had learned all there was to be learned and looked

-for fresh intellectual grazing grounds.

-

-In those days, brilliant students could always find a patron willing

-to invest a few dollars in their future. Soon Arminius, provided with

-a letter of credit issued by certain guilds of Amsterdam, was merrily

-trotting southward in search of future educational opportunities.

-

-As behooved a respectable candidate of theology, he went first of all to

-Geneva. Calvin was dead, but his man Friday, the learned Theodore Beza,

-had succeeded him as shepherd of the seraphic flock. The fine nose of

-this old heresy hunter at once detected a slight odor of Ramism in the

-doctrines of the young Dutchman and the visit of Arminius was cut short.

-

-The word Ramism means nothing to modern readers. But three hundred years

-ago it was considered a most dangerous religious novelty, as those who

-are familiar with the assembled works of Milton will know. It had been

-invented or originated (or what you please) by a Frenchman, a certain

-Pierre de la Ramée. As a student, de la Ramée had been so utterly

-exasperated by the antiquated methods of his professors that he had

-chosen as subject for his doctor’s dissertation the somewhat startling

-text, “Everything ever taught by Aristotle is absolutely wrong.”

-

-Needless to say this subject did not gain him the good will of his

-teachers. When a few years afterwards he elaborated his idea in a number

-of learned volumes, his death was a foregone conclusion. He fell as one

-of the first victims of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

-

-But his books, those pesky books which refuse to be assassinated together

-with their authors, had survived and Ramée’s curious system of logic had

-gained great popularity throughout northern and western Europe. Truly

-pious people however believed that Ramism was the password to Hades

-and Arminius was advised to go to Basel where “libertines” (a sixteenth

-century colloquialism meaning “liberals”) had been considered good form

-ever since that unfortunate city had fallen under the spell of the

-quizzical Erasmus.

-

-Arminius, thus forewarned, traveled northward and then decided upon

-something quite unusual. He boldly invaded the enemy’s territory, studied

-for a few semesters in the University of Padua and paid a visit to Rome.

-This made him a dangerous person in the eyes of his fellow countrymen

-when he returned to his native country in the year 1587. But as he

-seemed to develop neither horns nor a tail, he was gradually taken back

-into their good favor and was allowed to accept a call as minister to

-Amsterdam.

-

-There he made himself not only useful but he gained quite a reputation

-as a hero during one of the many outbreaks of the plague. Soon he was

-held in such genuine esteem that he was entrusted with the task of

-reorganizing the public school system of that big city and when in

-the year 1603 he was called to Leiden as a full-fledged professor of

-theology, he left the capital amidst the sincere regrets of the entire

-population.

-

-If he had known beforehand what was awaiting him in Leiden, I am sure

-he would never have gone. He arrived just when the battle between the

-Infralapsarians and the Supralapsarians was at its height.

-

-Arminius was both by nature and education an Infralapsarian. He tried

-to be fair to his colleague, the Supralapsarian Gomarus. But alas, the

-differences between the Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians were such

-as allowed of no compromise. And Arminius was forced to declare himself

-an out and out Infralapsarian.

-

-Of course, you will ask me what Supra- and Infralapsarians were. I

-don’t know, and I seem unable to learn such things. But as far as I can

-make out, it was the age-old quarrel between those who believed (as did

-Arminius) that man is to a certain extent possessed of a free will and

-able to shape his own destinies and those who like Sophocles and Calvin

-and Gomarus taught that everything in our lives has been pre-ordained

-ages before we were born and that our fate therefore depends upon a throw

-of the divine dice at the hour of creation.

-

-In the year 1600 by far the greater number of the people of northern

-Europe were Supralapsarians. They loved to listen to sermons which

-doomed the majority of their neighbors to eternal perdition and those

-few ministers who dared to preach a gospel of good will and charity

-were at once suspected of criminal weakness, fit rivals of those tender

-hearted doctors who fail to prescribe malodorous medicines and kill their

-patients by their kindness.

-

-As soon as the gossiping old women of Leiden had discovered that Arminius

-was an Infralapsarian, his usefulness had come to an end. The poor man

-died under the torrent of abuse that was let loose upon him by his former

-friends and supporters. And then, as seemed unavoidable during the

-seventeenth century, Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism made their

-entrance into the field of politics and the Supralapsarians won at the

-polls and the Infralapsarians were declared enemies of the public order

-and traitors to their country.

-

-Before this absurd quarrel had come to an end, Oldenbarnevelt, the man

-who next to William the Silent had been responsible for the foundation

-of the Republic, lay dead with his head between his feet; Grotius, whose

-moderation had made him the first great advocate of an equitable system

-of international law, was eating the bread of charity at the court of

-the Queen of Sweden; and the work of William the Silent seemed entirely

-undone.

-

-But Calvinism did not gain the triumph it had hoped.

-

-The Dutch Republic was a republic only in name. It was really a sort

-of merchants’ and bankers’ club, ruled by a few hundred influential

-families. These gentlemen were not at all interested in equality and

-fraternity, but they did believe in law and order. They recognized and

-supported the established church. On Sundays with a great display of

-unction they proceeded to the large white-washed sepulchers which in

-former days had been Catholic Cathedrals and which now were Protestant

-lecture halls. But on Monday, when the clergy paid its respects to the

-Honorable Burgomaster and Town Councilor, with a long list of grievances

-against this and that and the other person, their lordships were “in

-conference” and unable to receive the reverend gentlemen. If the reverend

-gentlemen insisted, and induced (as frequently happened) a few thousand

-of their loyal parishioners to “demonstrate” in front of the town hall,

-then their lordships would graciously deign to accept a neatly written

-copy of the reverend gentlemen’s complaints and suggestions. But as

-soon as the door had been closed upon the last of the darkly garbed

-petitioners, their lordships would use the document to light their pipes.

-

-For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of “once is enough

-and too many” and they were so horrified by what had happened during

-the terrible years of the great Supralapsarian civil war that they

-uncompromisingly suppressed all further forms of religious frenzy.

-

-Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of the ledger.

-Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their private property and did

-not always differentiate with sufficient nicety between the interests

-of their fatherland and those of their own firm. They lacked that

-broad vision which goes with empire and almost invariably they were

-penny-wise and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves our

-hearty commendation. They turned their country into an international

-clearing-house where all sorts of people with all sorts of ideas were

-given the widest degree of liberty to say, think, write and print

-whatever pleased them.

-

-I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there, under a threat

-of ministerial disapprobation, the Town Councilors were sometimes obliged

-to suppress a secret society of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets

-printed by a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as long

-as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the market place

-to denounce the doctrine of predestination or carry a big rosary into

-a public dining-hall or deny the existence of God in the South Side

-Methodist Church of Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity

-which for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable haven

-of rest for all those who in other parts of the world were persecuted for

-the sake of their opinions.

-

-Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad. And during the

-next two hundred years, the print shops and the coffee-houses of Holland

-were filled with a motley crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a

-strange new army of spiritual liberation.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XX

-

-BRUNO

-

-

-It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that the Great War was

-a war of non-commissioned officers.

-

-While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in

-solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated

-miles of maps until they could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to

-give them half a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand

-men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals, aided and

-abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did the so-called “dirty

-work” and eventually brought about the collapse of the German line of

-defense.

-

-The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought along similar

-lines.

-

-There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half a million

-soldiers.

-

-There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s gunners with an

-easy and agreeable target.

-

-I might go even further and say that the vast majority of the people

-never knew that there was any fighting at all. Now and then, curiosity

-may have compelled them to ask who was being burned that morning or who

-was going to be hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered

-that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain

-principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants disapproved

-most heartily. But I doubt whether such information affected them beyond

-the point of mild regret and the comment that it must be very sad for

-their poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible end.

-

-It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually accomplish for

-the cause for which they give their lives cannot possibly be reduced to

-mathematical formulae or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.

-

-Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may read carefully through

-the assembled works of Giordano Bruno and by the patient collection of

-all sentences containing such sentiments as “the state has no right to

-tell people what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword

-those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he may be able to

-write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano Bruno (1549-1600) and the

-principles of religious freedom.”

-

-But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters must approach

-the subject from a different angle.

-

-There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number of devout men who

-were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism of their day, by the yoke

-under which the people of all countries were forced to exist, that they

-rose in revolt. They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the

-cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a place to

-sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up and down the land they

-traveled, talking and writing, drawing the learned professors of learned

-academies into learned disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country

-folk in humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good will,

-of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and down the land they

-traveled in their shabby clothes with their little bundles of books and

-pamphlets until they died of pneumonia in some miserable village in the

-hinterland of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a Scotch

-hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial borough of France.

-

-And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not mean to imply that

-he was the only one of his kind. But his life, his ideas, his restless

-zeal for what he held to be true and desirable, were so typical of that

-entire group of pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.

-

-The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an average Italian

-boy of no particular promise, followed the usual course and went into a

-monastery. Later he became a Dominican monk. He had no business in that

-order for the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms of

-persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their contemporaries

-called them. And they were clever. It was not necessary for a heretic

-to have his ideas put into print to be nosed out by one of those eager

-detectives. A single glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the

-shoulders were often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into

-contact with the Inquisition.

-

-How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning obedience,

-turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures for the works of Zeno and

-Anaxagoras, I do not know. But before this strange novice had finished

-his course of prescribed studies, he was expelled from the Dominican

-order and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.

-

-He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before him had braved the

-dangers of those ancient mountain passes that they might find freedom in

-the mighty fortress which the new faith had erected at the junction of

-the Rhone and the Arve!

-

-And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted when they discovered

-that here as there it was the inner spirit which guided the hearts of

-men and that a change of creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart

-and mind.

-

-Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months. The town was

-full of Italian refugees. These brought their fellow-countryman a new

-suit of clothes and found him a job as proof-reader. In the evenings he

-read and wrote. He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at

-last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed too that the

-world could not progress until the tyranny of the medieval text-books

-was broken. Bruno did not go as far as his famous French teacher and did

-not believe that everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But

-why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by words and

-sentences that were written in the fourth century before the birth of

-Christ? Why indeed?

-

-“Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of the orthodox

-faith answered him.

-

-“What have we to do with our grandfathers and what have they to do with

-us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the young iconoclast answered.

-

-And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and suggested that

-he had better pack his satchels and try his luck elsewhere.

-

-Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in search of

-a place where he might live and work in some degree of liberty and

-security. He never found it. From Geneva he went to Lyons and then to

-Toulouse. By that time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had

-become an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a dangerous step

-in an age when all the contemporary Bryans brayed, “The world turning

-around the sun! The world a commonplace little planet turning around the

-sun! Ho-ho and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?”

-

-Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France, walking to Paris. And

-next to England as private secretary to a French ambassador. But there

-another disappointment awaited him. The English theologians were no

-better than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps. In

-Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when he committed an

-error against the teachings of Aristotle. They fined him ten shillings.

-

-Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly dangerous bits of

-prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political nature in which the

-entire existing order of things was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a

-minute but none too flattering examination.

-

-And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject, astronomy.

-

-But college authorities rarely smile upon professors who please the

-hearts of their students. Bruno once more found himself invited to

-leave. And so back again to France and then to Marburg, where not so

-long before Luther and Zwingli had debated upon the true nature of the

-transubstantiation in the castle of pious Elisabeth of Hungary.

-

-Alas! his reputation as a “Libertine” had preceded him. He was not

-even allowed to lecture. Wittenberg proved more hospitable. That old

-stronghold of the Lutheran faith, however, was beginning to be overrun by

-the disciples of Dr. Calvin. After that there was no further room for a

-man of Bruno’s liberal tendencies.

-

-Southward he wended his way to try his luck in the land of John Huss.

-Further disappointment awaited him. Prague had become a Habsburg capital

-and where the Habsburg entered, freedom went out by the city gates. Back

-to the road and a long, long walk to Zürich.

-

-There he received a letter from an Italian youth, Giovanni Mocenigo,

-who asked him to come to Venice. What made Bruno accept, I do not know.

-Perhaps the Italian peasant in him was impressed by the luster of an old

-patrician name and felt flattered by the invitation.

-

-Giovanni Mocenigo, however, was not made of the stuff which had enabled

-his ancestors to defy both Sultan and Pope. He was a weakling and a

-coward and did not move a finger when officers of the Inquisition

-appeared at his house and took his guest to Rome.

-

-As a rule, the government of Venice was terribly jealous of its rights.

-If Bruno had been a German merchant or a Dutch skipper, they would have

-protested violently and they might even have gone to war when a foreign

-power dared to arrest some one within their own jurisdiction. But why

-incur the hostility of the pope on account of a vagabond who had brought

-nothing to their city but his ideas?

-

-It was true he called himself a scholar. The Republic was highly

-flattered, but she had scholars enough of her own.

-

-And so farewell to Bruno and may San Marco have mercy upon his soul.

-

-Seven long years Bruno was kept in the prison of the Inquisition.

-

-On the seventeenth of February of the year 1600 he was burned at the

-stake and his ashes were blown to the winds.

-

-He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who know Italian may

-therein find inspiration for a pretty little allegory.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXI

-

-SPINOZA

-

-

-There are certain things in history which I have never been able to

-understand and one of these is the amount of work done by some of the

-artists and literary men of bygone ages.

-

-The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters and dictaphones

-and secretaries and fountain pens, can turn out between three and four

-thousand words a day. How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs

-to distract his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill,

-manage to write thirty-seven plays?

-

-Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible Armada and a busy man

-all his life, find the necessary ink and paper for eighteen hundred

-comedies and five hundred essays?

-

-What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister, Johann Sebastian

-Bach, who in a little house filled with the noise of twenty children

-found time to compose five oratorios, one hundred and ninety church

-cantatas, three wedding cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses,

-three fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would

-have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano and orchestra,

-three concertos for two pianos, two concertos for three pianos, thirty

-orchestral scores and enough pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the

-organ, the bull-fiddle and the French horn to keep the average student of

-music busy for the rest of his days.

-

-Or again, by what process of industry and application could painters

-like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture or an etching at the rate

-of almost four a month during more than thirty years? How could an

-humble citizen like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty

-fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?

-

-I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising all these plots,

-hearing all these melodies, seeing all those diversified combinations

-of color and line, choosing all this wood. I am just wondering at the

-physical part of it. How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed?

-Didn’t they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards? Were

-they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?

-

-Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of that sort of

-people. They defied all the laws of hygiene, ate and drank everything

-that was bad for them, were totally unconscious of their high destinies

-as members of the glorious human race, but they had an awfully good time

-and their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific.

-

-And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally true of such

-finicky subjects as theology.

-

-Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred years and you

-will find their cellars and attics filled with tracts and homilies and

-discussions and refutations and digests and commentaries in duodecimo

-and octodecimo and octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in

-paper, all of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception

-containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.

-

-The subjects of which they treated and many of the words they used have

-lost all meaning to our modern ears. But somehow or other these moldy

-compilations served a very useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing

-else, they at least cleared the air. For they either settled the

-questions they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned,

-or they convinced their readers that those particular problems could

-not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic and argument and might

-therefore just as well be dropped right then and there.

-

-This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I hope that critics of

-the thirtieth century shall be just as charitable when they wade through

-the remains of our own literary and scientific achievements.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow the fashion

-of his time in the matter of quantity. His assembled works consist of

-three or four small volumes and a few bundles of letters.

-

-But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical solution

-of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy would have staggered

-any normally healthy man. It killed the poor consumptive who had

-undertaken to reach God by way of the table of multiplication.

-

-Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered the

-indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had settled down in the

-Spanish peninsula when that part of the world was a Moorish province.

-After the reconquest and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for

-the Spaniard” which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy, the

-Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They had sailed for

-the Netherlands, had bought a small house in Amsterdam, had worked hard,

-had saved their money and soon were known as one of the most respectable

-families of the “Portuguese colony.”

-

-If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewish origin,

-this was due more to the training he received in his Talmud school than

-to the gibes of his little neighbors. For the Dutch Republic was so

-chock full of class prejudice that there was little room left for mere

-race prejudice and therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all

-the alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the North

-and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic bits of

-Dutch life which contemporary travelers never failed to omit from their

-“Souvenirs de Voyage” and with good reason.

-

-In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the relation

-between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from satisfactory. What made the

-quarrel between the two races so hopeless was the fact that both sides

-were equally right and equally wrong and that both sides could justly

-claim to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice.

-In the light of the theory put forward in this book that intolerance

-is merely a form of self-protection of the mob, it becomes clear that

-as long as they were faithful to their own respective religions, the

-Christian and the Jew must have conceded each other as enemies. In the

-first place, they both of them maintained that their God was the only

-true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations were false.

-In the second place, they were each other’s most dangerous commercial

-rival. The Jews had come to western Europe as they had originally come

-to Palestine, as immigrants in search of a new home. The labor unions

-of that day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take up a

-trade. They had therefore been obliged to content themselves with such

-economic makeshifts as pawnbroking and banking. In the Middle Ages these

-two professions, which closely resembled each other, were not thought

-fit occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until the days

-of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards money (except

-in the form of taxes) and should have regarded the taking of interest

-as a crime, is hard to understand. Usury, of course, was something

-no government could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty

-centuries before, had passed drastic laws against the money changers who

-tried to make a profit out of other people’s money. In several chapters

-of the Old Testament, written two thousand years later, we read how Moses

-too had expressly forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant

-rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later, the great

-Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, had given expression

-to their great disapproval of money that was born of other money. The

-Church fathers had been even more explicit upon this subject. All during

-the Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt. Dante

-even provided a special little alcove in his Hell for the exclusive

-benefit of his banker friends.

-

-Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker and his

-colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were undesirable citizens and

-that the world would be better off without them. At the same time,

-as soon as the world had ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was

-found to be quite impossible to transact even the simplest business

-operations without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had

-become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the views of the

-Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation any way, was urged to occupy

-himself with a trade which was necessary but which no respectable man

-would touch.

-

-In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into certain unpleasant

-trades which made them the natural enemy of both the rich and the poor,

-and then, as soon as they had established themselves, these same enemies

-turned against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest

-part of the city and in moments of great emotional stress, hanged them as

-wicked unbelievers or burned them as renegade Christians.

-

-It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid. These endless

-annoyances and persecutions did not make the Jews any fonder of their

-Christian neighbors. And as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate

-intelligence was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright

-young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce and science

-and the arts, wasted their brains and energy upon the useless study of

-certain old books filled with abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting

-syllogisms and millions of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead

-stunted lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to their

-elders who told them that they were God’s chosen people who would surely

-inherit the earth and all the wealth thereof, and on the other hand being

-frightened to death by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to

-inform them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or the wheel.

-

-To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under such adverse

-circumstances shall retain a normal outlook upon life is to demand the

-impossible.

-

-Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate act by their

-Christian compatriots and then, when white with rage, they turned upon

-their oppressors, they were called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains”

-and were subjected to further humiliations and restrictions. But these

-restrictions had only one result. They increased the number of Jews who

-had a grievance, turned the others into nervous wrecks and generally made

-the Ghetto a ghastly abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.

-

-Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the misery which was

-the birthright of most of his relatives. He went first of all to the

-school maintained by his synagogue (appropriately called “the Tree of

-Life”) and as soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to the

-learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who was to drill him in

-Latin and in the sciences.

-

-Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic origin. Rumor had

-it that he was a graduate of the University of Louvain and if one were to

-believe the best informed deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in

-disguise and a very dangerous person. This however was nonsense. Van den

-Ende in his youth had actually spent a few years at a Catholic seminary.

-But his heart was not in his work and he had left his native city of

-Antwerp, had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private school of

-his own.

-

-He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods that would make

-his pupils like their classical lessons, that heedless of the man’s

-popish past, the Calvinistic burghers of Amsterdam willingly entrusted

-their children to his care and were very proud of the fact that the

-pupils of his school invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the

-little boys of all other local academies.

-

-Van den Ende taught little Baruch his Latin, but being an enthusiastic

-follower of all the latest discoveries in the field of science and a

-great admirer of Giordano Bruno, he undoubtedly taught the boy several

-things which as a rule were not mentioned in an orthodox Jewish household.

-

-For young Spinoza, contrary to the customs of the times, did not board

-with the other boys, but lived at home. And he so impressed his family by

-his profound learning that all the relations proudly pointed to him as

-the little professor and liberally supplied him with pocket money. He

-did not waste it upon tobacco. He used it to buy books on philosophy.

-

-One author especially fascinated him.

-

-That was Descartes.

-

-René Descartes was a French nobleman born in that region between Tours

-and Poitiers where a thousand years before the grandfather of Charlemagne

-had stopped the Mohammedan conquest of Europe. Before he was ten years

-old he had been sent to the Jesuits to be educated and he spent the next

-decade making a nuisance of himself. For this boy had a mind of his own

-and accepted nothing without “being shown.” The Jesuits are probably the

-only people in the world who know how to handle such difficult children

-and who can train them successfully without breaking their spirit.

-The proof of the educational pudding is in the eating. If our modern

-pedagogues would study the methods of Brother Loyola, we might have a few

-Descartes of our own.

-

-When he was twenty years old, René entered military service and went to

-the Netherlands where Maurice of Nassau had so thoroughly perfected his

-military system that his armies were the post-graduate school for all

-ambitious young men who hoped to become generals. Descartes’ visit to

-the headquarters of the Nassau prince was perhaps a little irregular.

-A faithful Catholic taking service with a Protestant chieftain! It

-sounds like high treason. But Descartes was interested in problems of

-mathematics and artillery but not of religion or politics. Therefore

-as soon as Holland had concluded a truce with Spain, he resigned his

-commission, went to Munich and fought for a while under the banner of the

-Catholic Duke of Bavaria.

-

-But that campaign did not last very long. The only fighting of any

-consequence then still going on was near La Rochelle, the city which the

-Huguenots were defending against Richelieu. And so Descartes went back to

-France that he might learn the noble art of siege-craft. But camp life

-was beginning to pall upon him. He decided to give up a military career

-and devote himself to philosophy and science.

-

-He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to marry. His wishes

-were few. He anticipated a quiet and happy life and he had it.

-

-Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not know. But it was

-a country full of printers and publishers and bookshops and as long as

-one did not openly attack the established form of government or religion,

-the existing law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore, as

-he never learned a single word of the language of his adopted country (a

-trick not difficult to a true Frenchman), Descartes was able to avoid

-undesirable company and futile conversations and could give all of his

-time (some twenty hours per day) to his own work.

-

-This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been a soldier. But

-Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems that he was perfectly

-contented with his self-inflicted exile. He had during the course of

-years become convinced that the world was still plunged in a profound

-gloom of abysmal ignorance; that what was then being called science

-had not even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no

-general progress would be possible until the whole ancient fabric of

-error and falsehood had first of all been razed to the ground. No small

-order, this. Descartes however was possessed of endless patience and at

-the age of thirty he set to work to give us an entirely new system of

-philosophy. Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomy and

-physics to his original program and he performed his task with such noble

-impartiality of mind that the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and

-the Calvinists cursed him for an atheist.

-

-This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him in the least.

-He quietly continued his researches and died peacefully in the city of

-Stockholm, whither he had gone to talk philosophy with the Queen of

-Sweden.

-

-Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism (the name under

-which his philosophies became known) made quite as much of a stir as

-Darwinism was to make among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be

-a Cartesian in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something almost

-indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the established order of society,

-a Socinian, a low fellow who by his own confession had set himself apart

-from the companionship of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent

-the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting Cartesianism as

-readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers accepted Darwinism. But among

-the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam, such subjects were never even mentioned.

-Cartesianism was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah. Hence it did

-not exist. And when it became apparent that it existed just the same in

-the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza, it was a foregone conclusion that said

-Baruch de Spinoza would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities

-of the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and take official

-action.

-

-The Amsterdam synagogue had at that moment passed through a severe

-crisis. When little Baruch was fifteen years old, another Portuguese

-exile by the name of Uriel Acosta had arrived in Amsterdam, had forsworn

-Catholicism, which he had accepted under a threat of death, and had

-returned to the faith of his fathers. But this fellow Acosta had not been

-an ordinary Jew. He was a gentleman accustomed to carry a feather in his

-hat and a sword at his side. To him the arrogance of the Dutch rabbis,

-trained in the German and Polish schools of learning, had come as a most

-unpleasant surprise, and he had been too proud and too indifferent to

-hide his opinions.

-

-In a small community like that, such open defiance could not possibly be

-tolerated. A bitter struggle had followed. On the one side a solitary

-dreamer, half prophet, half hidalgo. On the other side the merciless

-guardians of the law.

-

-It had ended in tragedy.

-

-First of all Acosta had been denounced to the local police as the author

-of certain blasphemous pamphlets which denied the immortality of the

-soul. This had got him into trouble with the Calvinist ministers. But

-the matter had been straightened out and the charge had been dropped.

-Thereupon the synagogue had excommunicated the stiff-necked rebel and had

-deprived him of his livelihood.

-

-For months thereafter the poor man had wandered through the streets

-of Amsterdam until destitution and loneliness had driven him back to

-his own flock. But he was not re-admitted until he had first of all

-publicly apologized for his evil conduct and had then suffered himself

-to be whipped and kicked by all the members of the congregation. These

-indignities had unbalanced his mind. He had bought a pistol and had blown

-his brains out.

-

-This suicide had caused a tremendous lot of talk among the principal

-citizens of Amsterdam. The Jewish community felt that it could not risk

-the chance of another public scandal. When it became evident that the

-most promising pupil of the “Tree of Life” had been contaminated by the

-new heresies of Descartes, a direct attempt was made to hush things up.

-Baruch was approached and was offered a fixed annual sum if he would give

-his word that he would be good, would continue to show himself in the

-synagogue and would not publish or say anything against the law.

-

-Now Spinoza was the last man to consider such a compromise. He curtly

-refused to do anything of the sort. In consequence whereof he was duly

-read out of his own church according to that famous ancient Formula of

-Damnation which leaves very little to the imagination and goes back all

-the way to the days of Jericho to find the appropriate number of curses

-and execrations.

-

-As for the victim of these manifold maledictions, he remained quietly in

-his room and read about the occurrence in next day’s paper. Even when an

-attempt was made upon his life by an over zealous follower of the law, he

-refused to leave town.

-

-This came as a great blow to the prestige of the Rabbis who apparently

-had invoked the names of Joshua and Elisha in vain and who saw themselves

-publicly defied for the second time in less than half a dozen years. In

-their anxiety they went so far as to make an appeal to the town hall.

-They asked for an interview with the Burgomasters and explained that this

-Baruch de Spinoza whom they had just expelled from their own church was

-really a most dangerous person, an agnostic who refused to believe in God

-and who therefore ought not to be tolerated in a respectable Christian

-community like the city of Amsterdam.

-

-Their lordships, after their pleasant habit, washed their hands of the

-whole affair and referred the matter to a sub-committee of clergymen. The

-sub-committee studied the question, discovered that Baruch de Spinoza had

-done nothing that could be construed as an offense against the ordinances

-of the town, and so reported to their lordships. At the same time

-they considered it to be good policy for members of the cloth to stand

-together and therefore they suggested that the Burgomasters ask this

-young man, who seemed to be so very independent, to leave Amsterdam for a

-couple of months and not to return until the thing had blown over.

-

-From that moment on the life of Spinoza was as quiet and uneventful as

-the landscape upon which he looked from his bedroom windows. He left

-Amsterdam and hired a small house in the village of Rijnsberg near

-Leiden. He spent his days polishing lenses for optical instruments and

-at night he smoked his pipe and read or wrote as the spirit moved him.

-He never married. There was rumor of a love affair between him and a

-daughter of his former Latin teacher, van den Ende. But as the child was

-ten years old when Spinoza left Amsterdam, this does not seem very likely.

-

-He had several very loyal friends and at least twice a year they offered

-to give him a pension that he might devote all his time to his studies.

-He answered that he appreciated their good intentions but that he

-preferred to remain independent and with the exception of an allowance

-of eighty dollars a year from a rich young Cartesian, he never touched

-a penny and spent his days in the respectable poverty of the true

-philosopher.

-

-He had a chance to become a professor in Germany, but he declined.

-He received word that the illustrious King of Prussia would be happy

-to become his patron and protector, but he answered nay and remained

-faithful to the quiet routine of his pleasant exile.

-

-After a number of years in Rijnsberg he moved to the Hague. He had never

-been very strong and the particles of glass from his half-finished lenses

-had affected his lungs.

-

-He died quite suddenly and alone in the year 1677.

-

-To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than six private

-carriages belonging to prominent members of the court followed the

-“atheist” to his grave. And when two hundred years later a statue was

-unveiled to his memory, the police reserves had to be called out to

-protect the participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of a

-rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists.

-

-So much for the man. What about his influence? Was he merely another

-of those industrious philosophers who fill endless books with endless

-theories and speak a language which drove even Omar Khayyam to an

-expression of exasperated annoyance?

-

-No, he was not.

-

-Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of his wit or the

-plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was great mainly by force of his

-courage. He belonged to a race that knew only one law, a set of hard and

-fast rules laid down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten

-past, a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a class of

-professional priests who had taken it upon themselves to interpret this

-sacred code.

-

-He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom was almost

-synonymous with political anarchy.

-

-He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews and Gentiles.

-

-But he never wavered.

-

-He approached all problems as universal problems. He regarded them

-without exception as the manifestation of an omnipresent will and

-believed them to be the expression of an ultimate reality which would

-hold good on Doomsday as it had held good at the hour of creation.

-

-And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of human tolerance.

-

-Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow boundaries laid

-down by the older forms of religion and boldly built himself a new system

-of thought based upon the rocks of a million stars.

-

-By so doing he made man what man had not been since the days of the

-ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen of the universe.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXII

-

-THE NEW ZION

-

-

-There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be

-popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few

-people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given

-chapter.

-

-It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of

-the people.

-

-In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had

-come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute

-monarchy.

-

-In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of

-the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two

-hundred years.

-

-During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was

-the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress

-along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the

-prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element

-of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal

-freedom.

-

-First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these

-unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the

-deep sea of Puritanism.

-

-Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful

-Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome) were forever clamoring

-for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of

-the pope.

-

-Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon

-the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at

-all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away

-in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.

-

-But that was not all.

-

-The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland and their Scottish

-subjects, when it came to religion, knew exactly what they wanted. And so

-thoroughly were they convinced that they themselves were right that they

-were firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They thought

-it wicked that other denominations should be suffered to exist and to

-worship freely within the confines of their own Protestant land. And they

-insisted not only that all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the

-British Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians, in

-short all those who did not share their own views upon the existence of a

-living God, be hanged.

-

-This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected result. It

-forced the men who were obliged to keep peace between those mutually

-hostile parties to be much more tolerant than they would have been

-otherwise.

-

-If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of their careers

-insisted upon equal rights for all denominations, and history tells

-us they did, they were most certainly not animated by a love for

-Presbyterians or High Churchmen, or vice versa. They were merely making

-the best of a very difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened

-in the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect finally

-became all powerful, show us what would have been the fate of England if

-any one of the many contending factions had been able to establish an

-absolute dictatorship over the entire country.

-

-Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able to do as he liked.

-But the Lord Protector was a very wise man. He knew that he ruled by the

-grace of his iron brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct

-or of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make common

-cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning tolerance did not go.

-

-As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned Socinians and

-Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles of the divine right of the

-individual human being, their lives were just as difficult as before.

-

-Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous advantage. They

-lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six hours of sickness separated them

-from the safe asylum of the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these

-cities were turning out most of the contraband literature of southern

-and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really meant a voyage to

-one’s publisher and gave the enterprising traveler a chance to gather in

-his royalties and see what were the latest additions to the literature of

-intellectual protest.

-

-Among those who at one time or another availed themselves of this

-convenient opportunity for quiet study and peaceful reflection, no one

-has gained a more deserving fame than John Locke.

-

-He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like Spinoza (indeed like

-most independent thinkers) he was the product of an essentially pious

-household. The parents of Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John

-were orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well by their

-children when they trained them in the strict doctrines of their own

-respective creeds. But such an education either breaks a boy’s spirit or

-it turns him into a rebel. Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever

-surrenders, gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.

-

-At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there for the first time

-heard of Descartes. But among the dusty book-stalls of St. Catherine

-Street he found certain other volumes that were much to his taste. For

-example, there were the works of Thomas Hobbes.

-

-An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a

-restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo,

-who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had

-spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the

-fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book

-which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which

-bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a

-Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.”

-

-This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore

-year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights

-and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going

-Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans

-felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged

-royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed

-not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom

-it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a

-Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics

-of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the

-Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree of

-“latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as

-non-essential.

-

-Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too remained within the

-Church until the end of his life but he was heartily in favor of a most

-generous interpretation both of life and of faith. What was the use,

-Locke and his friends argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who

-wore a golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power by

-another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why renounce allegiance

-to one set of priests and then the next day accept the rule of another

-set of priests who were fully as overbearing and arrogant as their

-predecessors? Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of

-view could not possibly be popular among those who would have lost their

-livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful and had changed a

-rigid social system into an ethical debating society?

-

-And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of great personal charm,

-had influential friends who could protect him against the curiosity of

-the sheriffs, the day was soon to come when he would no longer be able to

-escape the suspicion of being an atheist.

-

-That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke thereupon went

-to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for half a dozen years, but the

-intellectual atmosphere of the Dutch capital continued to be decidedly

-liberal and Locke was given a chance to study and write without the

-slightest interference on the part of the authorities. He was an

-industrious fellow and during the four years of his exile he composed

-that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes him one of the heroes of

-our little history. In this letter (which under the criticism of his

-opponents grew into three letters) he flatly denied that the state had

-the right to interfere with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and

-in this he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name of

-Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time composing his

-incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia), the state was merely a sort

-of protective organization which a certain number of people had created

-and continued to maintain for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such

-an organization should presume to dictate what the individual citizens

-should believe and what not—that was something which Locke and his

-disciples failed to understand. The state did not undertake to tell them

-what to eat or drink. Why should it force them to visit one church and

-keep away from another?

-

-The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted victory of

-Protestantism, was an era of strange religious compromises.

-

-The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make an end to all

-religious warfare had laid down the principle that “all subjects

-shall follow the religion of their ruler.” Hence in one six-by-nine

-principality all citizens were Lutherans (because the local grand duke

-was a Lutheran) and in the next they were all Catholics (because the

-local baron happened to be a Catholic).

-

-“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the

-people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the

-people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot

-possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it

-follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound

-for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell

-and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future

-salvation.”

-

-That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of tolerance is

-regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the

-seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction

-but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety

-of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of

-gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly

-nation.

-

-Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was

-willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they

-continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the

-ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they

-professed a different faith.

-

-One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then

-a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an

-affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite

-capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had

-been injured.

-

-The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes

-of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the

-fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense.

-

-When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke

-followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England.

-Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at

-the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and

-no longer feared as a heretic.

-

-Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears

-the atmosphere.

-

-The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely

-consumed the superfluous energy of the English nation and while the

-citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake

-of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great

-Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the

-established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact

-with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because

-he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the

-Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of

-irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have

-escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of

-the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with

-Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense

-of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship

-of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison.

-

-Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels

-beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been

-driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain

-of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so

-much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently

-discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely

-greater economic advantages than the old one.

-

-In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered

-standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon

-have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the

-ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country

-of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent inhabited by a

-mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary.

-

-And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of

-Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous

-orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days

-when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High

-Executioner in western Switzerland.

-

-The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions

-of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are

-referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of

-the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious

-devotion.” The passengers of the _Mayflower_ were not pilgrims in

-that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and

-cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country

-to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to

-the worship in most of the churches around them.

-

-First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland

-where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our

-school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to

-their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and

-otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It

-seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such

-shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course

-of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to

-live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living

-in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better

-revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in

-Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed, but having been thrown by adverse

-currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they

-decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another

-voyage in their leaky tub.

-

-But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and

-seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them

-came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude

-for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by

-the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and

-their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And,

-finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured

-people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country,

-were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who

-without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety

-of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for

-several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.

-

-Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on

-the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an

-excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old

-Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to

-develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they

-had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became

-veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had

-nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except

-the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true

-faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people

-must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share

-their own views, who suggested by implication that the Puritan way of

-doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from

-their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully

-flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their

-ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in

-one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the

-Dutch.

-

-No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony

-achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion

-which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence

-of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a

-more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny,

-there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all

-forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of

-the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the

-ancestral admixture of religion and politics.

-

-By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the

-crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of

-hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result,

-the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either

-freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who

-incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which

-have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of

-our republic.

-

-But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected

-development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place

-in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free

-state of Maryland.

-

-The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting experiment, were

-of Flemish origin, but the father had moved to England and had rendered

-very distinguished services to the house of Stuart. Originally they had

-been Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and general

-utility man to King James I, had become so utterly disgusted with the

-futile theological haggling of his contemporaries that he returned to the

-old faith. Good, bad or indifferent, it called black, black and white,

-white and did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine

-to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.

-

-This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts. His back-sliding (a

-very serious offense in those days!) did not lose him the favor of his

-royal master. On the contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore

-and was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to establish a

-little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted Catholics. First,

-he tried his luck in Newfoundland. But his settlers were frozen out of

-house and home and his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square

-miles in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian, would

-have naught of such dangerous neighbors and Baltimore then asked for a

-slice of that wilderness which lay between Virginia and the Dutch and

-Swedish possessions of the north. Ere he received his charter he died.

-His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the winter of

-1633-1634 two little ships, the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, under command of

-Leonard Calvert, brother to George, crossed the ocean, and in March of

-1634 they safely landed their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake

-Bay. The new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor of Mary,

-daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose plans for a European League

-of Nations had been cut short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife

-to that English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head at the

-hands of his Puritan subjects.

-

-This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its Indian neighbors

-and offered equal opportunities to both Catholics and Protestants

-passed through many difficult years. First of all it was overrun by

-Episcopalians who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans

-in Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried to escape the

-fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia. And the two groups

-of fugitives, with the usual arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard

-to introduce their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth

-that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which might give rise

-to religious passions” were expressly forbidden on Maryland territory,

-the older colonists were entirely within their right when they bade both

-Episcopalians and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards war

-broke out in the home country between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads

-and the Marylanders feared that, no matter who should win, they would

-lose their old freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly

-after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them, and at the

-direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed their famous Act of

-Tolerance which, among other things, contained this excellent passage:

-

-“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of religion has

-often produced very harmful results in those communities in which it

-was exercised, for the more tranquil and pacific government in this

-province and for the better preservation of mutual love and unity among

-its inhabitants, it is hereby decided that nobody in this province

-who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested or

-persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his religion or the free

-exercise thereof.”

-

-That such an act could be passed in a country in which the Jesuits

-occupied a favorite position shows that the Baltimore family was

-possessed of remarkable political ability and of more than ordinary

-courage. How profoundly this generous spirit was appreciated by some of

-their guests was shown in the same year when a number of Puritan exiles

-overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished the Act of Tolerance and

-replaced it by an “Act Concerning Religion” of their own which granted

-full religious liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians

-“with the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”

-

-This period of reaction fortunately did not last long. In the year 1660

-the Stuarts returned to power and once more the Baltimores reigned in

-Maryland.

-

-The next attack upon their policy came from the other side. The

-Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the mother country and they

-insisted that henceforth their church should be the official church of

-all the colonies. The Calverts continued to fight but they found it

-impossible to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which

-lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.

-

-Protestantism triumphed.

-

-So did intolerance.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXIII

-

-THE SUN KING

-

-

-The eighteenth century is usually referred to as an era of despotism. And

-in an age which believes in the dogma of democracy, despotism, however

-enlightened, is not apt to be regarded as a desirable form of government.

-

-Historians who mean well by the human race are very apt to point the

-finger of scorn at that great monarch Louis XIV and ask us to draw our

-own conclusions. When this brilliant sovereign came to the throne, he

-inherited a country in which the forces of Catholicism and Protestantism

-were so evenly balanced that the two parties, after a century of mutual

-assassination (with the odds heavily in favor of the Catholics), had at

-last concluded a definite peace and had promised to accept each other as

-unwelcome but unavoidable neighbors and fellow citizens. The “perpetual

-and irrevocable” Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 which contained the

-terms of agreement, stated that the Catholic religion was the official

-religion of the state but that the Protestants should enjoy complete

-liberty of conscience and should not suffer any persecution on account

-of their belief. They were furthermore allowed to build churches of

-their own and to hold public office. And as a token of good faith,

-the Protestants were allowed to hold two hundred fortified cities and

-villages within the realm of France.

-

-This, of course, was an impossible arrangement. The Huguenots were no

-angels. To leave two hundred of the most prosperous cities and villages

-of France in the hands of a political party which was the sworn enemy of

-the government was quite as absurd as if we should surrender Chicago and

-San Francisco and Philadelphia to the Democrats to make them accept a

-Republican administration, or vice versa.

-

-Richelieu, as intelligent a man as ever ruled a country, recognized this.

-After a long struggle he deprived the Protestants of their political

-power, but although a cardinal by profession, he scrupulously refrained

-from any interference with their religious freedom. The Huguenots could

-no longer conduct independent diplomatic negotiations with the enemies

-of their own country, but otherwise they enjoyed the same privileges as

-before and could sing psalms and listen to sermons or not as pleased them.

-

-Mazarin, the next man to rule France in the real sense of the word, had

-followed a similar policy. But he died in the year 1661. Then young Louis

-XIV personally undertook to rule his domains, and there was an end to the

-era of good will.

-

-It seems most unfortunate that when this brilliant if disreputable

-Majesty was forced for once in his life into the companionship of decent

-people he should have fallen into the clutches of a good woman who was

-also a religious fanatic. Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow of a literary

-hack by the name of Scarron, had begun her career at the French court

-as governess to the seven illegitimate children of Louis XIV and the

-Marquise de Montespan. When that lady’s love philtres ceased to have the

-desired effect and the King began to show occasional signs of boredom,

-it was the governess who stepped into her shoes. Only she was different

-from all her predecessors. Before she agreed to move into His Majesty’s

-apartments, the Archbishop of Paris had duly solemnized her marriage to

-the descendant of Saint Louis.

-

-During the next twenty years the power behind the throne was therefore

-in the hands of a woman who was completely dominated by her confessor.

-The clergy of France had never forgiven either Richelieu or Mazarin for

-their conciliatory attitude towards the Protestants. Now at last they had

-a chance to undo the work of these shrewd statesmen and they went to it

-with a will. For not only were they the official advisers of the Queen,

-but they also became the bankers of the King.

-

-That again is a curious story.

-

-During the last eight centuries the monasteries had accumulated the

-greater part of the wealth of France and as they paid no taxes in a

-country which suffered perpetually from a depleted treasury, their

-surplus wealth was of great importance. And His Majesty, whose glory

-was greater than his credit, made a grateful use of this opportunity to

-replenish his own coffers and in exchange for certain favors extended

-to his clerical supporters he was allowed to borrow as much money as he

-wanted.

-

-In this way the different stipulations of the “irrevocable” Edict of

-Nantes were one by one revoked. At first the Protestant religion was

-not actually forbidden, but life for those who remained faithful to the

-Huguenot cause was made exasperatingly uncomfortable. Whole regiments of

-dragoons were turned loose upon those provinces where the false doctrines

-were supposed to be most strongly entrenched. The soldiers were billeted

-among the inhabitants with instructions to make themselves thoroughly

-detestable. They ate the food and drank the wine and stole the forks and

-spoons and broke the furniture and insulted the wives and daughters of

-perfectly harmless citizens and generally behaved as if they were in a

-conquered territory. When their poor hosts, in their despair, rushed to

-the courts for some form of redress and protection, they were laughed at

-for their trouble and were told that they had brought their misfortunes

-upon their own heads and knew perfectly well how they could get rid of

-their unwelcome guests and at the same time regain the good will of the

-government.

-

-A few, a very few, followed this suggestion and allowed themselves to be

-baptized by the nearest village priest. But the vast majority of these

-simple people remained faithful to the ideals of their childhood. At

-last, however, when one after another their churches were closed and

-their clergy were sent to the galleys, they began to understand that they

-were doomed. Rather than surrender, they decided to go into exile. But

-when they reached the frontier, they were told that no one was allowed

-to leave the country, that those who were caught in the act were to be

-hanged, and that those who aided and abetted such fugitives were liable

-to be sent to the galleys for life.

-

-There are apparently certain things which this world will never learn.

-

-From the days of the Pharaohs to those of Lenin, all governments at one

-time or another have tried the policy of “closing the frontier” and none

-of them has ever been able to score a success.

-

-People who want to get out so badly that they are willing to take all

-sorts of risks can invariably find a way. Hundreds of thousands of French

-Protestants took to the “underground route” and soon afterwards appeared

-in London or Amsterdam or Berlin or Basel. Of course, such fugitives were

-not able to carry much ready cash. But they were known everywhere as

-honest and hard working merchants and artisans. Their credit was good

-and their energy undiminished. After a few years they usually regained

-that prosperity which had been their share in the old country and the

-home government was deprived of a living economic asset of incalculable

-value.

-

-Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the revocation of the Edict of

-Nantes was the prelude to the French Revolution.

-

-France had been and still was a very rich country. But commerce and

-clericalism have never been able to coöperate.

-

-From the moment that the French government surrendered to petticoats and

-cassocks, her fate was sealed. The same pen that decreed the expulsion of

-the Huguenots signed the death-warrant of Louis XVI.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXIV

-

-FREDERICK THE GREAT

-

-

-The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous for its love of

-popular forms of government. But ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian

-Wittelsbachs had tainted this sober-minded family of bookkeepers and

-overseers, they rendered some very useful service to the cause of

-tolerance.

-

-In part this was the result of a practical necessity. The Hohenzollerns

-had fallen heir to the poorest part of Europe, a half-populated

-wilderness of sand and forests. The Thirty Years War had left them

-bankrupt. They needed both men and money to start in business once more

-and they set out to get them, regardless of race, creed or previous

-condition of servitude.

-

-The father of Frederick the Great, a vulgarian with the manners of a

-coal-heaver and the personal tastes of a bartender, could grow quite

-tender when he was called upon to meet a delegation of foreign fugitives.

-“The more the merrier,” was his motto in all matters pertaining to the

-vital statistics of his kingdom and he collected the disinherited of all

-nations as carefully as he collected the six-foot-three grenadiers of his

-lifeguard.

-

-His son was of a very different caliber, a highly civilized human being

-who, having been forbidden by his father to study Latin and French, had

-made a speciality of both languages and greatly preferred the prose of

-Montaigne to the poetry of Luther and the wisdom of Epictetus of that

-of the Minor Prophets. The Old Testament severity of his father (who

-ordered the boy’s best friend to be decapitated in front of his window

-so as to teach him a lesson in obedience) had not inclined his heart

-toward those Judaean ideals of rectitude of which the Lutheran and

-Calvinist ministers of his day were apt to speak with such great praise.

-He came to regard all religion as a survival of prehistoric fear and

-ignorance, a mood of subservience carefully encouraged by a small class

-of clever and unscrupulous fellows who knew how to make good use of

-their own pre-eminent position by living pleasantly at the expense of

-their neighbors. He was interested in Christianity and even more so in

-the person of Christ himself, but he approached the subject by way of

-Locke and Socinius and as a result he was, in religious matters at least,

-a very broad minded person, and could truly boast that in his country

-“every one could find salvation after his own fashion.”

-

-This clever saying he made the basis for all his further experiments

-along the line of Tolerance. For example, he decreed that all religions

-were good as long as those who professed them were upright people who led

-decent, law-abiding lives; that therefore all creeds must enjoy equal

-rights and the state must never interfere in religious questions, but

-must content herself with playing policeman and keeping the peace between

-the different denominations. And because he truly believed this, he asked

-nothing of his subjects except that they be obedient and faithful and

-leave the final judgment of their thoughts and deeds “to Him alone who

-knew the conscience of men” and of whom he (the King) did not venture to

-form so small an opinion as to believe him to be in need of that human

-assistance which imagines that it can further the divine purpose by the

-exercise of violence and cruelty.

-

-In all these ideas, Frederick was a couple of centuries ahead of his day.

-His contemporaries shook their heads when the king gave his Catholic

-subjects a piece of land that they might build themselves a church right

-in the heart of his capital. They began to murmur ominous words of

-warning when he made himself the protector of the Jesuit order, which

-had just been driven out of most Catholic countries, and they definitely

-ceased to regard him as a Christian when he claimed that ethics and

-religion had nothing to do with each other and that each man could

-believe whatever he pleased as long as he paid his taxes and served his

-time in the army.

-

-Because at that time they happened to live within the boundaries of

-Prussia, these critics held their peace, for His Majesty was a master

-of epigram and a witty remark on the margin of a royal rescript could

-do strange things to the career of those who in some way or another had

-failed to please him.

-

-The fact however remains that it was the head of an unlimited monarchy,

-an autocrat of thirty years’ standing, who gave Europe a first taste of

-almost complete religious liberty.

-

-In this distant corner of Europe, Protestant and Catholic and Jew and

-Turk and Agnostic enjoyed for the first time in their lives equal rights

-and equal prerogatives. Those who preferred to wear red coats could not

-lord it over their neighbors who preferred to wear green coats, and vice

-versa. And the people who went back for their spiritual consolation to

-Nicaea were forced to live in peace and amity with others who would as

-soon have supped with the Devil as with the Bishop of Rome.

-

-That Frederick was entirely pleased with the outcome of his labors, that

-I rather doubt. When he felt his last hour approaching, he sent for his

-faithful dogs. They seemed better company in this supreme hour than the

-members of “the so-called human race.” (His Majesty was a columnist of no

-mean ability.)

-

-And so he died, another Marcus Aurelius who had strayed into the wrong

-century and who, like his great predecessor, left a heritage which was

-entirely too good for his successors.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXV

-

-VOLTAIRE

-

-

-In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about the nefarious

-labors of the press agent and many good people denounce “publicity”

-as an invention of the modern devil of success, a new-fangled and

-disreputable method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause.

-But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the past, when

-examined without prejudice, completely contradict the popular notion that

-publicity is something of recent origin.

-

-The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and minor, were

-past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd. Greek history and Roman

-history are one long succession of what we people of the journalistic

-profession call “publicity stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified.

-A great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that today even

-Broadway would refuse to fall for it.

-

-Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the tremendous value of

-carefully pre-arranged publicity. And we cannot blame them. They were not

-the sort of men who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the road

-like the blushing daisies. They were very much in earnest. They wanted

-their ideas to live. How could they hope to succeed without attracting a

-crowd of followers?

-

-A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence by spending eighty

-years in a quiet corner of a monastery, for such long voluntary exile,

-if duly advertised (as it was), becomes an excellent selling point and

-makes people curious to see the little book which was born of a lifetime

-of prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola, who hope

-to see some tangible results of their work while they are still on this

-planet, must willy-nilly resort to methods now usually associated with a

-circus or a new movie star.

-

-Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises those who are

-humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols these virtues was delivered

-under circumstances which have made it a subject of conversation to this

-very day.

-

-No wonder that those men and women who were denounced as the arch enemies

-of the Church took a leaf out of the Holy Book and resorted to certain

-rather obvious methods of publicity when they began their great fight

-upon the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in bondage.

-

-I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest of all

-virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has very often been blamed

-for the way in which he sometimes played upon the tom-tom of public

-consciousness. Perhaps he did not always show the best of good taste. But

-those whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.

-

-And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating,

-the success or failure of a man like Voltaire should be measured by

-the services he actually rendered to his fellow-men and not by his

-predilection for certain sorts of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.

-

-In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature once said,

-“What of it if I have no scepter? I have got a pen.” And right he was.

-He had a pen. Any number of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose

-and used more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged to

-that class of literary giants who all alone and under the most adverse

-circumstances can turn out as much copy as an entire syndicate of modern

-sport writers. He scribbled on the tables of dirty country inns. He

-composed endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country

-houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses in

-Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets of the royal Prussian

-residence and used reams of the private stationery which bore the

-monogram of the governor of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play

-with a hoop and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a

-considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some books,” and

-eighty years later, in the self-same town of Paris, we hear him ask for

-a pad of foolscap and unlimited coffee that he may finish yet one more

-volume before the inevitable hour of darkness and rest.

-

-His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and his treatises

-upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle him to an entire chapter of

-this book. He wrote no better verses than half a hundred other sonneteers

-of that era. As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his

-ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort of stuff we

-find in the Sunday papers.

-

-But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was stupid and narrow

-and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence which has endured until

-the beginning of the Great Civil War of the year 1914.

-

-The age in which he lived was a period of extremes. On the one hand, the

-utter selfishness and corruption of a religious, social and economic

-system which had long since outlived its usefulness. On the other side,

-a large number of eager but overzealous young men and young women ready

-to bring about a millennium which was based upon nothing more substantial

-than their good intentions. A humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly

-son of an inconspicuous notary public into this maelstrom of sharks and

-pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred to swim and struck

-out for shore. The methods he employed during his long struggle with

-adverse circumstances were often of a questionable nature. He begged and

-flattered and played the clown. But this was in the days before royalties

-and literary agents. And let the author who never wrote a potboiler throw

-the first stone!

-

-Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a few additional

-bricks. During a long and busy life devoted to warfare upon stupidity,

-he had experienced too many defeats to worry about such trifles as a

-public beating or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a man

-of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend his leisure hours in

-His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may find himself honored with a high

-titulary position at the same court from which he has just been banished.

-And if all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests

-denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion, isn’t there

-somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love letters that beautiful medal

-presented to him by the Pope to prove that he can gain the approbation of

-Holy Church as well as her disapproval?

-

-It was all in the day’s work.

-

-Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and crowd his days

-and weeks and months and years with a strange and colorful assortment of

-the most variegated experiences.

-

-By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class. His father was

-what for the lack of a better term we might call a sort of private trust

-company. He was the confidential handy-man of a number of rich nobles

-and looked after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet (for

-that was the family name) was therefore accustomed to a society a little

-better than that of his own people, something which later in life gave

-him a great advantage over most of his literary rivals. His mother was

-a certain Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who did not

-bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was possessed of that small

-“d’” which all Frenchmen of the middle classes (and all Europeans in

-general and a few Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and

-her husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize. As for the

-son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his ennobled grandparents

-and as soon as he began to write, he exchanged the plebeian François

-Marie Arouet for the more aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but

-how and where he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery.

-He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care of him after

-his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely. The brother, on the other

-hand, a faithful priest of the Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and

-rectitude, bored him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he

-spent as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.

-

-Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his little “Zozo”

-promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent him to the Jesuits that he

-might become versed in Latin hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good

-fathers did their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil a

-sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and living tongues. But

-they found it impossible to eradicate a certain bump of “queerness”

-which from the very beginning had set this child apart from the other

-scholars.

-

-At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and to please his

-father, young François then took up the study of the law. Unfortunately

-one could not read all day long. There were the long hours of the

-lazy evenings. These hours François whiled away either writing funny

-little pieces for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary

-compositions to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two centuries

-ago such a life was generally believed to lead straight to perdition.

-Father Arouet fully appreciated the danger his son was running. He went

-to one of his many influential friends and obtained for M. François a

-position as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The Dutch

-capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out of sheer boredom

-Voltaire began a love affair with the not particularly attractive

-daughter of a terrible old woman who was a society reporter. The lady,

-who hoped to marry her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the

-French minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous Romeo

-before the whole city knew about the scandal. His Excellency had troubles

-enough of his own and was not eager for more. He bundled his secretary

-into the next stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once

-more found himself at the mercy of his father.

-

-In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of an expedient which

-was often used by such Frenchmen as had a friend at court. He asked and

-obtained a “lettre de cachet” and placed his son before the choice of

-enforced leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school.

-The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised that he would

-be a model of industry and application. He was as good as his word and

-applied himself to the happy life of a free lance pamphleteer with such

-industry that the whole town talked about it. This was not according to

-the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely within his rights

-when he decided to send his son away from the flesh-pots of the Seine and

-packed him off to a friend in the country, where the young man was to

-remain for a whole year.

-

-There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the week (Sundays

-included) Voltaire began the study of letters in all seriousness and

-composed the first of his plays. After twelve months of fresh air and a

-very healthy monotony, he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere

-of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series of lampoons

-upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved all that was said about him

-but did not like this publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second

-period of exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at last

-a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days, that is to say,

-prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s social prominence, was not a bad

-place. One was not allowed to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty

-much as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A lonely cell

-in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do some serious work. When

-he was released, he had finished several plays and these were performed

-with such tremendous success that one of them broke all records of the

-eighteenth century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.

-

-This brought him some money (which he needed badly) but it also

-established his reputation as a wit, a most unfortunate thing for a

-young man who still has to make his career. For hereafter he was held

-responsible for every joke that enjoyed a few hours’ popularity on

-the boulevards and in the coffee-houses. And incidentally it was the

-reason why he went to England and took a post-graduate course in liberal

-statesmanship.

-

-It happened in the year 1725. Voltaire had (or had not) been funny about

-the old but otherwise useless family of de Rohan. The Chevalier de Rohan

-felt that his honor had been assailed and that something must be done

-about it. Of course, it was impossible for a descendant of the ancient

-rulers of Brittany to fight a duel with the son of a notary public and

-the Chevalier delegated the work of revenge to his flunkeys.

-

-One night Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully, one of his father’s

-customers, when he was told that some one wished to speak to him outside.

-He went to the door, was fallen upon by the lackeys of my Lord de Rohan

-and was given a sound beating. The next day the story was all over the

-town. Voltaire, even on his best days, looked like the caricature of

-a very ugly little monkey. What with his eyes blackened and his head

-bandaged, he was a fit subject for half a dozen popular reviews. Only

-something very drastic could save his reputation from an untimely death

-at the hands of the comic papers. And as soon as raw beefsteak had done

-its work, M. de Voltaire sent his witnesses to M. le Chevalier de Rohan

-and began his preparation for mortal combat by an intensive course in

-fencing.

-

-Alas! when the morning came for the great fight, Voltaire once more found

-himself behind the bars. De Rohan, a cad unto the last, had given the

-duel away to the police, and the battling scribe remained in custody

-until, provided with a ticket for England, he was sent traveling in

-a northwestern direction and was told not to return to France until

-requested to do so by His Majesty’s gendarmes.

-

-Four whole years Voltaire spent in and near London. The British kingdom

-was not exactly a Paradise, but compared to France, it was a little bit

-of Heaven.

-

-A royal scaffold threw its shadow over the land. The thirtieth of January

-of the year 1649 was a date remembered by all those in high places. What

-had happened to sainted King Charles might (under slightly modified

-circumstances) happen to any one else who dared to set himself above

-the law. And as for the religion of the country, of course the official

-church of the state was supposed to enjoy certain lucrative and agreeable

-advantages, but those who preferred to worship elsewhere were left in

-peace and the direct influence of the clerical officials upon the affairs

-of state was, compared to France, almost negligible. Confessed Atheists

-and certain bothersome non-conformists might occasionally succeed in

-getting themselves into jail, but to a subject of King Louis XV the

-general condition of life in England must have seemed wellnigh perfect.

-

-In 1729, Voltaire returned to France, but although he was permitted to

-live in Paris, he rarely availed himself of that privilege. He was like

-a scared animal, willing to accept bits of sugar from the hands of his

-friends, but forever on the alert and ready to escape at the slightest

-sign of danger. He worked very hard. He wrote prodigiously and with a

-sublime disregard for dates and facts, and choosing for himself subjects

-which ran all the way from Lima, Peru, to Moscow, Russia, he composed a

-series of such learned and popular histories, tragedies and comedies that

-at the age of forty he was by far the most successful man of letters of

-his time.

-

-Followed another episode which was to bring him into contact with a

-different kind of civilization.

-

-In distant Prussia, good King Frederick, yawning audibly among the yokels

-of his rustic court, sadly pined for the companionship of a few amusing

-people. He felt a tremendous admiration for Voltaire and for years he had

-tried to induce him to come to Berlin. But to a Frenchman of the year

-1750 such a migration seemed like moving into the wilds of Virginia and

-it was not until Frederick had repeatedly raised the ante that Voltaire

-at last condescended to accept.

-

-He traveled to Berlin and the fight was on. Two such hopeless egotists

-as the Prussian king and the French playwright could not possibly hope

-to live under one and the same roof without coming to hate each other.

-After two years of sublime disagreement, a violent quarrel about nothing

-in particular drove Voltaire back to what he felt inclined to call

-“civilization.”

-

-But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he was right, and the

-French poetry of the Prussian king was atrocious. But His Majesty’s

-attitude upon the subject of religious liberty left nothing to be desired

-and that was more than could be said of any other European monarch.

-

-And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned to his native

-land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal sentences by which the

-French courts tried to maintain order without some very scathing words of

-protest. All his life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness

-to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on the sixth

-day of creation had bestowed upon the most sublime product of His

-handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated and loathed stupidity in every shape, form

-and manner. The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of his

-anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening to demolish, this

-“infamous enemy” was nothing more or less than the lazy stupidity of the

-mass of the people who refused to think for themselves as long as they

-had enough to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.

-

-From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself pursued by a

-gigantic machine which seemed to move through sheer force of lethargy and

-combined the cruelty of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency

-of Juggernaut. To destroy or at least upset this contraption become the

-obsession of his old years, and the French government, to give this

-particular devil his due, ably assisted him in his efforts by providing

-the world with a choice collection of legal scandals.

-

-The first one occurred in the year 1761.

-

-In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France there lived a

-certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant. Toulouse had always

-been a pious city. No Protestant was there allowed to hold office or

-to be a doctor or a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was

-permitted to keep a Protestant servant. And on August 23rd and 24th

-of each year the entire community celebrated the glorious anniversary

-of the massacre of St. Bartholomew with a solemn feast of praise and

-thanksgiving.

-

-Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had lived all his life in

-complete harmony with his neighbors. One of his sons had turned Catholic,

-but the father had continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and

-had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children were

-entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them best.

-

-But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was Marc Antony, the

-oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but

-that career was closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and

-refused to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused an attack

-of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey upon the young man’s

-mind. He began to entertain his father and mother with long recitations

-of Hamlet’s well known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his

-friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.

-

-This went on for some time and then one night, while the family was

-entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped into his father’s storeroom,

-took a piece of packing rope and hanged himself from the doorpost.

-

-There his father found him a few hours later, his coat and vest neatly

-folded upon the counter.

-

-The family was in despair. In those days the body of a person who had

-committed suicide was dragged nude and face downward through the streets

-of the town and was hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by

-the birds.

-

-The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of such a disgrace.

-They stood around and talked of what they ought to do and what they were

-going to do until one of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent

-for the police, and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was

-immediately filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for the

-death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to prevent him from

-becoming a Catholic.”

-

-In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial nest of

-eighteenth century France, with boredom like a black funeral pall hanging

-heavily upon the entire community, the most idiotic and fantastic yarns

-were given credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.

-

-The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under such suspicious

-circumstances, at once arrested the entire family, their guests and

-their servants and every one who had recently been seen in or near the

-Calas home. They dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in

-irons and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most desperate

-criminals. The next day they were examined. All of them told the same

-story. How Marc Antony had come into the house in his usual spirits, how

-he had left the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his

-solitary walks, etc., etc.

-

-By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse had taken

-a hand in the matter and with their help the dreadful news of this

-bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed one of his own children because he

-was about to return to the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout

-the land of Languedoc.

-

-Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime might think that

-the authorities would have spent that day inspecting the scene of the

-murder. Marc Antony enjoyed quite a reputation as an athlete. He was

-twenty-eight and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father

-having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a struggle were

-small indeed. But none of the town councilors bothered about such little

-details. They were too busy with the body of the victim. For Marc Antony,

-the suicide, had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three

-weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon it was most

-solemnly buried by the White Penitents who for some mysterious reason had

-made the defunct Calvinist an ex-officio member of their own order and

-who conducted his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance

-and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop or an exceedingly rich

-patron of the local Basilica.

-

-During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town, the good people of

-Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever testimony they could against

-the person of Jean Calas and his family and finally, after the case had

-been thoroughly thrashed out in the public press, and five months after

-the suicide, the trial began.

-

-One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested that the shop

-of the old man be visited to see whether such a suicide as he described

-would have been possible, but he was overridden and with twelve votes

-against one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken on the

-wheel.

-

-He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his wrists until his

-feet were a meter from the ground. Then his body was stretched until the

-limbs were “drawn from their sockets.” (I am copying from the official

-report.) As he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed,

-he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast quantities of

-water that his body had soon “swollen to twice its natural size.” As he

-persisted in his diabolical refusal to confess his guilt, he was placed

-on a tumbril and was dragged to the place of execution where his arms

-and legs were broken in two places by the executioner. During the next

-two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates and priests

-continued to bother him with their questions. With incredible courage the

-old man continued to proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice,

-exasperated by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and

-ordered him to be strangled to death.

-

-The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself and none of the

-other members of the family were killed. The widow, deprived of all her

-goods, was allowed to go into retirement and starve as best she could in

-the company of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent to

-different convents with the exception of the youngest who had been away

-at school at Nîmes at the time of his brother’s suicide and who had

-wisely fled to the territory of the sovereign city of Geneva.

-

-The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire in his castle

-of Ferney (conveniently built near the frontier of Switzerland so that a

-few minutes’ walk could carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at

-first refused to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with the

-Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private little theater

-which stood within sight of their own city as a direct provocation and

-the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire, in one of his supercilious moods,

-wrote that he could not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called

-Protestant martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those

-terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides, it

-seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other people) that twelve

-supposedly respectable judges would have condemned an innocent man to

-such a terrible death without very good reason.

-

-But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open house to all

-comers and no questions asked, had a visit from an honest merchant from

-Marseilles who had happened to be in Toulouse at the time of the trial

-and who was able to give him some first-hand information. Then at last he

-began to understand the horror of the crime that had been committed and

-from that moment on he could think of nothing else.

-

-There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of merit is reserved

-for those rare souls who, practically alone, dare to face the entire

-established order of society and who loudly cry for justice when the high

-courts of the land have pronounced sentence and when the community at

-large has accepted their verdict as equitable and just.

-

-Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should dare to

-accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder, and he prepared

-his case as carefully as if he had been a professional attorney. He

-interviewed the Calas boy who had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every

-one who could possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired

-counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions, lest

-his anger and his indignation carry him away. And when he felt sure of

-his ground, he opened his campaign.

-

-First of all he induced every man of some influence whom he knew within

-the realm of France (and he knew most of them) to write to the Chancellor

-of the Kingdom and ask for a revision of the Calas case. Then he set

-about to find the widow and as soon as she had been located, he ordered

-her to be brought to Paris at his own expense and engaged one of the

-best known lawyers to look after her. The spirit of the woman had been

-completely broken. She vaguely prayed that she might get her daughters

-out of the convent before she died. Beyond that, her hopes did not extend.

-

-Then he got into communication with the other son who was a Catholic,

-made it possible for him to escape from his school and to join him in

-Geneva. And finally he published all the facts in a short pamphlet

-entitled “Original Documents Concerning the Calas Family,” which

-consisted of letters written by the survivors of the tragedy and

-contained no reference whatsoever to Voltaire himself.

-

-Afterwards, too, during the revision of the case, he remained carefully

-behind the scenes, but so well did he handle his publicity campaign that

-soon the cause of the Calas family was the cause of all families in all

-countries of Europe and that thousands of people everywhere (including

-the King of England and the Empress of Russia) contributed to the funds

-that were being raised to help the defense.

-

-Eventually Voltaire gained his victory, but not until he had fought one

-of the most desperate battle of his entire career.

-

-The throne of France just then was occupied by Louis XV of unsavory

-memory. Fortunately his mistress hated the Jesuits and all their works

-(including the Church) with a most cordial hatred and was therefore

-on the side of Voltaire. But the King loved his ease above all other

-things and was greatly annoyed at all the fuss made about an obscure and

-dead Protestant. And of course as long as His Majesty refused to sign a

-warrant for a new trial, the Chancellor would not take action, and as

-long as the Chancellor would not take action, the tribunal of Toulouse

-was perfectly safe and so strong did they feel themselves that they

-defied public opinion in a most high-handed fashion and refused to let

-Voltaire or his lawyers have access to the original documents upon which

-they had based their conviction.

-

-During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation until finally

-in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse

-to surrender all the records in the Calas case and moved that there be

-a new trial. The widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at

-last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles when this

-decision was made public. A year later the special court which had been

-ordered to investigate the appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done

-to death for a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts the

-King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon the widow and her

-children. Furthermore the magistrates who had handled the Calas case were

-deprived of their office and it was politely suggested to the people of

-Toulouse that such a thing must not happen again.

-

-But although the French government might take a lukewarm view of the

-incident, the people of France had been stirred to the very depths of

-their outraged souls. And suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was

-not the only miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many

-others who had suffered as innocently as Calas.

-

-In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the neighborhood of

-Toulouse had offered the hospitality of his house to a visiting Calvinist

-minister. For this hideous crime he had been deprived of his estate and

-had been sent to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly

-strong man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire was

-told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate man away from

-the galleys, brought him to Switzerland where his wife and children were

-being supported by public charity and looked after the family until the

-crown was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property and the

-family were given permission to return to their deserted homestead.

-

-Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had been caught at

-an open-air meeting of Protestants and who for that crime had been

-dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate period, but who now, at

-the intercession of Voltaire, was set free.

-

-These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome hors d’œuvre to what

-was to follow.

-

-Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long suffering part of

-France which after the extermination of the Albigensian and Waldensian

-heretics had been left a wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.

-

-In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant by the name of

-Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made a living as an expert in

-medieval law, a lucrative position at a time when the feudal judicial

-system had grown so complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an

-income tax blank.

-

-Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless idiot, much given

-to brooding. In March of the year 1764 she left her home. The parents

-searched far and wide but found no trace of the child until a few days

-later when the bishop of the district informed the father that the girl

-had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a nun and was now in a

-convent.

-

-Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the spirit of the

-Protestants in that part of France. Sirven humbly answered that

-everything undoubtedly would be for the best in this worst of all

-possible worlds and meekly accepted the inevitable. But in the

-unaccustomed atmosphere of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the

-last vestiges of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself,

-she was returned to her own people. She was then in a state of terrible

-mental depression and in such continual horror of voices and spooks that

-her parents feared for her life. A short time afterwards she once more

-disappeared. Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.

-

-At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people were in a mood

-to believe anything that was said against a Protestant. The Sirvens,

-remembering what had just happened to innocent Jean Calas, decided not

-to court a similar fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through

-the Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to death, they

-at last reached Switzerland. They had not left a moment too soon. A few

-months later, both the father and the mother were found guilty (in their

-absence) of the crime of having murdered their child and were ordered

-to be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the execution of

-their parents and thereafter to be banished for life.

-

-A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of Voltaire and as

-soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he turned his attention to the

-Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had died. Remained the duty of vindicating

-the husband. It took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the

-tribunal of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender

-any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom of publicity

-and beg money from Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia and

-Poniatowski of Poland before he could force the crown to take an

-interest. But finally, in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in

-the eighth year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated

-and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.

-

-So ended the second case.

-

-The third one followed immediately.

-

-In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of Abbeville, not far

-from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by the side of the road were found

-broken to pieces by an unknown hand. Three young boys were suspected

-of this sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of them

-escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught. Of these, the older

-one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre, was suspected of being an atheist.

-A copy of the Philosophical Dictionary, that famous work to which all the

-great leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among his

-books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided to look into

-the young man’s past. It was true they could not connect him with the

-Abbeville case but had he not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel

-down and uncover while a religious procession went by?

-

-De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch a stage-coach

-and had meant no offense.

-

-Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing the pain less

-easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that he had mutilated one

-of the two crucifixes and was condemned to death for “impiously and

-deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering,

-singing blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane

-books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which were supposed to have

-indicated a lack of respect for the Church.

-

-The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be torn out with hot

-irons, his right hand was to be cut off, and he was to be slowly burned

-to death, and all that only a century and a half ago!) that the public

-was stirred into several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were

-guilty of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one could

-not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions were sent to the King,

-ministers were besieged with requests for a respite. But the country was

-full of unrest and there must be an example, and de la Barre, having

-undergone the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was

-decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and his corpse,

-together with his Philosophical Dictionary and some volumes by our old

-friend Bayle, were publicly burned by the hangman.

-

-It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing

-influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and the Descartes. It showed

-what invariably happened to those ill-guided young men who left the

-narrow path between the right and the wrong and followed the leadership

-of a group of radical philosophers.

-

-Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was fast approaching

-his eightieth birthday, but he plunged into the case with all his old

-zeal and with a brain that burned with a clear white flame of outraged

-decency.

-

-De la Barre had been executed for “blasphemy.” First of all, Voltaire

-tried to discover whether there existed a law by which people guilty

-of that supposed crime could be condemned to death. He could not find

-one. Then he asked his lawyer friends. They could not find one. And it

-gradually dawned upon the community that the judges in their unholy

-eagerness had “invented” this bit of legal fiction to get rid of their

-prisoner.

-

-There had been ugly rumors at the time of de la Barre’s execution. The

-storm that now arose forced the judges to be very circumspect and the

-trial of the third of the youthful prisoners was never finished. As for

-de la Barre, he was never vindicated. The review of the case dragged on

-for years and when Voltaire died, no decision had as yet been reached.

-But the blows which he had struck, if not for tolerance at least against

-intolerance, were beginning to tell.

-

-The official acts of terror instigated by gossiping old women and senile

-courts came to an end.

-

-Tribunals that have religious axes to grind are only successful when they

-can do their work in the dark and are able to surround themselves with

-secrecy. The method of attack followed by Voltaire was one against which

-such courts had no means of defense.

-

-Voltaire turned on all the lights, hired a voluminous orchestra, invited

-the public to attend, and then bade his enemies do their worst.

-

-As a result, they did nothing at all.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXVI

-

-THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

-

-

-There are three different schools of statesmanship. The first one teaches

-a doctrine which reads somewhat as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by

-poor benighted creatures who are unable to think for themselves, who

-suffer mental agonies whenever they are obliged to make an independent

-decision and who therefore can be led astray by the first ward-heeler

-that comes along. Not only is it better for the world at large that these

-‘herd people’ be ruled by some one who knows his own mind, but they

-themselves, too, are infinitely happier when they do not have to bother

-about parliaments and ballot-boxes and can devote all their time to their

-work-shops, their children, their flivvers and their vegetable gardens.”

-

-The disciples of this school become emperors, sultans, sachems, sheiks

-and archbishops and they rarely regard labor unions as an essential part

-of civilization. They work hard and build roads, barracks, cathedrals and

-jails.

-

-The adherents of the second school of political thought argue as follows:

-“The average man is God’s noblest invention. He is a sovereign in his own

-right, unsurpassed in wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives.

-He is perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but those

-committees through which he tries to rule the universe are proverbially

-slow when it comes to handling delicate affairs of state. Therefore, the

-masses ought to leave all executive business to a few trusted friends

-who are not hampered by the immediate necessity of making a living and

-who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”

-

-Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the logical

-candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first consul and Lord

-protector.

-

-They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the cathedrals they turn

-into jails.

-

-But there is a third group of people. They contemplate man with the

-sober eye of science and accept him as he is. They appreciate his good

-qualities, they understand his limitations. They are convinced from a

-long observation of past events that the average citizen, when not under

-the influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard to do

-what is right. But they make themselves no false illusions. They know

-that the natural process of growth is exceedingly slow, that it would be

-as futile to try and hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of

-human intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government of

-a state, but whenever they have a chance to put their ideas into action,

-they build roads, improve the jails and spend the rest of the available

-funds upon schools and universities. For they are such incorrigible

-optimists that they believe that education of the right sort will

-gradually rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore a

-thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.

-

-And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal, they usually

-write an encyclopedia.

-

-Like so many other things that give evidence of great wisdom and profound

-patience, the encyclopedia-habit took its origin in China. The Chinese

-Emperor K’ang-hi tried to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in

-five thousand and twenty volumes.

-

-Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was contented with

-thirty-seven books.

-

-The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced nothing of

-the slightest value along this line of enlightenment. A fellow-countryman

-of Saint Augustine, the African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years

-of his life composing something which he held to be a veritable treasure

-house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that people might the more

-easily retain the many interesting facts which he presented to them, he

-used poetry. This terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by

-heart by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and was

-held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature, music and

-science.

-

-Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name of Isidore wrote

-an entirely new encyclopedia and after that, the output increased at the

-regular rate of two for every hundred years. What has become of them

-all, I do not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals) has

-possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these volumes had been allowed to

-survive, there would not be room for anything else on this earth.

-

-When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe

-experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual curiosity, the

-purveyors of encyclopedias entered into a veritable Paradise. Such books,

-then as now, were usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live

-on eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted for less

-than the money spent upon paper and ink. England especially was a great

-country for this sort of literature and so it was quite natural that John

-Mills, a Britisher who lived in Paris, should think of translating the

-successful “Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the French

-language that he might peddle his product among the subjects of good

-King Louis and grow rich. For this purpose he associated himself with a

-German professor and then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do

-the actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton, who saw a

-chance to make a small fortune, deliberately swindled his partner and as

-soon as he had frozen Mills and the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise,

-continued to publish the pirated edition on his own account. He called

-the forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel des Arts

-et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful prospectuses with such

-a tremendous selling appeal that the list of subscribers was soon filled.

-

-Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the Collège de France

-to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot of paper and awaited results.

-

-Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did not prove as

-simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor produced notes but no

-articles, the subscribers loudly clamored for Volume I and everything was

-in great disorder.

-

-In this emergency Lebreton remembered that a “Universal Dictionary of

-Medicine” which had appeared only a few months before had been very

-favorably received. He sent for the editor of this medical handbook and

-hired him on the spot. And so it happened that a mere encyclopedia became

-the “Encyclopédie.” For the new editor was no one less than Denis Diderot

-and the work which was to have been a hack job became one of the most

-important contributions of the eighteenth century towards the sum total

-of human enlightenment.

-

-Diderot at that time was thirty-seven years old and his life had been

-neither easy nor happy. He had refused to do what all respectable young

-Frenchmen were supposed to do and go to a university. Instead, as soon

-as he could get away from his Jesuit teachers, he had proceeded to Paris

-to become a man of letters. After a short period of starvation (acting

-upon the principle that two can go hungry just as cheaply as one) he

-had married a lady who proved to be a terribly pious woman and an

-uncompromising shrew, a combination which is by no means as rare as some

-people seem to believe. But as he was obliged to support her, he had been

-forced to take all sorts of odd jobs and to compile all sorts of books

-from “Inquiries concerning Virtue and Merit” to a rather disreputable

-rehash of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” In his heart, however, this pupil of

-Bayle remained faithful to his liberal ideals. Soon the government (after

-the fashion of governments during times of stress) discovered that this

-inoffensive looking young author maintained grave doubts about the story

-of creation as rendered in the first chapter of Genesis and otherwise was

-considerable of a heretic. In consequence whereof Diderot was conducted

-to the prison of Vincennes and there held under lock and key for almost

-three months.

-

-It was after his release from jail that he entered the service of

-Lebreton. Diderot was one of the most eloquent men of his time. He saw

-the chance of a lifetime in the enterprise of which he was to be the

-head. A mere rehash of Chambers’ old material seemed entirely beneath his

-dignity. It was an era of tremendous mental activity. Very well! Let the

-Encyclopedia of Lebreton contain the latest word upon every conceivable

-subject and let the articles be written by the foremost authorities in

-every line of human endeavor.

-

-Diderot was so full of enthusiasm that he actually persuaded Lebreton to

-give him full command and unlimited time. Then he made up a tentative

-list of his coöperators, took a large sheet of foolscap and began, “A:

-the first letter of the alphabet, etc., etc.”

-

-Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was done. Rarely,

-however, has a man worked under such tremendous disadvantages. Lebreton

-had increased his original capital when he hired Diderot, but he never

-paid his editor more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the

-other people who were supposed to lend their assistance, well, we all

-know how those things are. They were either busy just then, or they

-would do it next month, or they had to go to the country to see their

-grandmother. With the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the

-work himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped upon him by

-the officials of both the Church and the State.

-

-Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not because so many

-people want them but because so many people are glad to get rid of

-them. The book which a century and a half ago was howled down as a

-manifestation of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and

-harmless tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative

-element among the clergy of the eighteenth century, it sounded like a

-clarion call of destruction, anarchy, atheism and chaos.

-

-Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the editor-in-chief

-as an enemy of society and religion, a loose reprobate who believed

-neither in God, home or the sanctity of the family ties. But the Paris

-of the year 1770 was still an overgrown village where every one knew

-every one else. And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of

-life was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually lived up

-to this motto, who kept open house for all those who were hungry, who

-labored twenty hours a day for the sake of humanity and asked nothing in

-return but a bed, a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded,

-hard-working fellow was so shining an example of those virtues in which

-the prelates and the monarchs of that day were so conspicuously lacking,

-that it was not easy to attack him from that particular angle. And

-so the authorities contented themselves with making his life just as

-unpleasant as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage,

-by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding Diderot’s home,

-by confiscating his notes and occasionally by suppressing the work

-altogether.

-

-These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen his enthusiasm. At

-last the work was finished and the “Encyclopédie” actually accomplished

-what Diderot had expected of it—it became the rallying point for all

-those who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age and who

-knew that the world was desperately in need of a general overhauling.

-

-It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor slightly out of

-the true perspective.

-

-Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby coat, counted

-himself happy when his rich and brilliant friend, the Baron D’Holbach,

-invited him to a square meal once a week, and who was more than satisfied

-when four thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived at the

-same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot and Helvétius and Volney

-and Condorcet and a score of others, all of whom gained a much greater

-personal renown than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good

-people would never have been able to exercise the influence they did.

-It was more than a book, it was a social and economic program. It told

-what the leading minds of the day were actually thinking. It contained a

-concrete statement of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire

-world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the human race.

-

-France had reached a point where those who had eyes to see and ears to

-hear knew that something drastic must be done to avoid an immediate

-catastrophe, while those who had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused

-to use them, maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that

-peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement of a

-set of antiquated laws that belonged to the era of the Merovingians. For

-the moment, those two parties were so evenly balanced that everything

-remained as it had always been and this led to strange complications.

-The same France which on one side of the ocean played such a conspicuous

-rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom and addressed the most

-affectionate letters to Monsieur Georges Washington (who was a Free

-Mason) and arranged delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre,

-Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used to call a “sceptic”

-and what we call a plain atheist, this country on the other side of

-the broad Atlantic stood revealed as the most vindictive enemy of all

-forms of spiritual progress and only showed her sense of democracy in

-the complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher and

-peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.

-

-Eventually all this was changed.

-

-But it was changed in a way which no one had been able to foresee. For

-the struggle that was to remove the spiritual and social handicaps of all

-those who were born outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves

-themselves. It was the work of a small group of disinterested citizens

-whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated quite as bitterly

-as their Catholic oppressors and who could count upon no other reward

-than that which is said to await all honest men in Heaven.

-

-The men who during the eighteenth century defended the cause of tolerance

-rarely belonged to any particular denomination. For the sake of personal

-convenience they sometimes went through certain outward motions of

-religious conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their writing

-desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned, they might just as

-well have lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C. or in China in the

-days of Confucius.

-

-They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain reverence for

-various things which most of their contemporaries held in great respect

-and which they themselves regarded as harmless but childish survivals of

-a bygone day.

-

-They took little stock in that ancient national history which the

-western world, for some curious reason, had picked out from among all

-Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and

-had accepted as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true disciples

-of their great master, Socrates, they listened only to the inner voice

-of their own conscience and regardless of consequences, they lived

-fearlessly in a world that had long since been surrendered to the timid.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXVII

-

-THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION

-

-

-The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial misery known as the

-Kingdom of France came crashing down on a memorable evening in the month

-of August of the year of grace 1789.

-

-On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing emotional fury,

-the National Assembly worked itself into a veritable orgy of brotherly

-love. Until in a moment of intense excitement the privileged classes

-surrendered all those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken

-them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared themselves

-in favor of those theoretical rights of man which henceforth would be the

-foundation-stone for all further attempts at popular self-government.

-

-As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of the feudal system.

-An aristocracy which is actually composed of the “aristoi,” of the best

-of the most enterprising elements of society, which boldly assumes

-leadership and shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance

-to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active service and

-contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs in diverse departments of

-government is only fit to drink tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on

-Second.

-

-The old France therefore was dead.

-

-Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.

-

-But it was dead and with it there passed away that most outrageous form

-of an invisible government which the Church, ever since the days of

-Richelieu, had been able to impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint

-Louis.

-

-Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.

-

-Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts and souls of all

-honest men and women, it is needless to speak.

-

-The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.

-

-And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in an autocratic form

-of government was for good and all to be eradicated from this fair earth.

-

-Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are gone!

-

-And more words to that effect.

-

-Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its many iniquities,

-the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal and when it was all over,

-behold our old friend Intolerance, wearing a pair of proletarian

-pantaloons and his hair brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side

-with the public prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.

-

-Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for claiming that

-authority maintaining itself solely by the grace of Heaven might

-sometimes be in error.

-

-Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the will of the

-people need not always and invariably be the will of God.

-

-A ghastly joke!

-

-But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular fancies) with the

-blood of a million innocent bystanders.

-

-What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original. One can find

-the same idea couched in different if more elegant words in the works of

-many of the ancients.

-

-In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, and apparently

-there always have been, and most likely there always will be two entirely

-different varieties of human beings.

-

-A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the serious

-searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive at certain

-temperate philosophical conclusions which will place them above and

-beyond the common worries of mankind.

-

-But the vast majority of the people are not contented with a mild diet of

-spiritual “light wines.” They want something with a kick to it, something

-that burns on the tongue, that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit

-up and take notice. What that “something” is does not matter very much,

-provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications and is served

-in a direct and simple fashion and in unlimited quantities.

-

-This fact seems to have been little understood by historians and

-this has led to many and serious disappointments. No sooner has an

-outraged populace torn down the stronghold of the past (a fact duly and

-enthusiastically reported by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it

-turns mason, carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the

-city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit as vile and

-tyrannical as the old one and used for the same purpose of repression and

-terror.

-

-The very moment a number of proud nations have at last succeeded in

-throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an “infallible man” they

-accept the dictates of an “infallible book.”

-

-Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a flunkey, is madly

-galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters the deserted palace, puts

-on the discarded royal raiment and forthwith commits herself to those

-selfsame blunders and cruelties which have just driven her predecessor

-into exile.

-

-It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our story and

-must be told.

-

-No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible for the

-great French upheaval were of the best. The Declaration of the Rights of

-Man had laid down the principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed

-in the peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not even

-his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not disturb the

-public order as laid down by the various decrees and laws.

-

-This however did not mean equal rights for all religious denominations.

-The Protestant faith henceforth was to be tolerated, Protestants were not

-to be annoyed because they worshiped in a different church from their

-Catholic neighbors, but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant”

-Church of the state.

-

-Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of political

-life, knew that this far famed concession was only a half-way measure.

-But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn a great social cataclysm into a

-one-man revolution, died under the effort and many noblemen and bishops,

-repenting of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of August,

-were already beginning that policy of obstructionism which was to be of

-such fatal consequence to their master the king. And it was not until

-two years later in the year 1791 (and exactly two years too late for any

-practical purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants and

-the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality and were declared

-to enjoy the same liberty before the law.

-

-From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed. The constitution

-which the representatives of the French people finally bestowed upon

-an expectant country insisted that all priests of whatsoever faith

-should swear an oath of allegiance to the new form of government and

-should regard themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the

-school-teachers and postal employees and light-house keepers and customs

-officials who were their fellow-citizens.

-

-Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the new constitution

-were in direct violation of every solemn agreement that had been

-concluded between France and the Holy See since the year 1516. But the

-Assembly was in no mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents

-and treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this decree

-or resign their positions and starve to death. A few bishops and a few

-priests accepted what seemed inevitable. They crossed their fingers and

-went through the formality of an oath. But by far the greater number,

-being honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf out

-of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted during so many

-years, they began to say mass in deserted stables and to give communion

-in pigsties, to preach their sermons behind country hedges and to pay

-clandestine visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the

-middle of the night.

-

-Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants

-had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly

-disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the

-enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk

-of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that

-they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly

-called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be

-accorded those privileges which during the previous three centuries

-they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the

-Calvinist faith.

-

-The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance

-of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite

-decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under

-the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court,

-combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a

-panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the

-shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of

-wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of

-September of the year 1792.

-

-From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign

-of terror.

-

-The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught

-when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were

-engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The

-explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct

-of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the

-hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every

-honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the

-principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a

-hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no

-one had been able to foresee.

-

-When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it

-was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of

-warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have

-testified.

-

-Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of

-politics and economics and social organization. But not until the

-historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn

-historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark

-forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and

-travail.

-

-There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light.

-There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one

-thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a

-choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all

-experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a

-noisy apotheosis of violence.

-

-Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world by way of reason

-were either dead or were put to death by the very people whom they had

-helped to glory. And with the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots

-and the Condorcets out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New

-Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s fate. What

-a ghastly mess they made of their high mission!

-

-During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out

-enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the

-very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had

-suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere

-sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of

-incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. Together with a few

-others who believed that they could disprove the existence of a personal

-God with the help of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy

-the Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful task

-but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary psychology that the

-normal becomes abnormal and the impossible is turned into an every day

-occurrence. Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old

-Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing Christmas and

-Easter; abolishing weeks and months and re-dividing the year into periods

-of ten days each with a new pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another

-paper pronunciamento which abolished the worship of God and left the

-universe without a master.

-

-But not for long.

-

-However eloquently explained and defended within the bare rooms of the

-Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and empty void was too repellent to

-most citizens to be tolerated for more than a couple of weeks. The old

-Deity no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example of Moses

-and Mahomet and invent a new one that should suit the demands of the

-times?

-

-As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!

-

-Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime a comely

-actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek draperies, would fill the bill

-perfectly. The lady was found among the dancers of his late Majesty’s

-corps de ballet and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to the

-high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the loyal followers of

-an older faith.

-

-As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries, had stood a

-tender watch over all those who had bared the wounds of their soul before

-the patient eyes of perfect understanding, she too was gone, hastily

-hidden by loving hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned

-into mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty, the proud

-product of an amateur sculptor and done rather carelessly in white

-plaster. But that was not all. Notre Dame had seen other innovations. In

-the middle of the choir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple

-of Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a throne for

-the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl was not holding court and

-receiving the worship of her trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy

-harbored a “Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry

-high the burning flame of world enlightenment.

-

-The “end of time” came before another six months.

-

-On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794 the French people

-were officially informed that God had been reëstablished and that the

-immortality of the soul was once more a recognized article of faith. On

-the eighth of June, the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the

-second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques Rousseau) was

-officially presented to his eager disciples.

-

-Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address of welcome. He

-had reached the highest point of his career. The obscure law clerk from

-a third rate country town had become the high priest of the Revolution.

-More than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine Théot,

-revered by thousands as the true mother of God, had just proclaimed the

-forthcoming return of the Messiah and she had even revealed his name.

-It was Maximilian Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic

-uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing reams of oratory in

-which he assured God that from now on all would be well with His little

-world.

-

-And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law by which those

-suspected of treason and heresy (for once more they were held to be the

-same, as in the good old days of the Inquisition) were deprived of all

-means of defense, a measure so ably conceived that during the next six

-weeks more than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath the

-slanting knife of the guillotine.

-

-The rest of his story is only too well known.

-

-As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself held to be

-Good (with a capital G) he could, in his quality of a logical fanatic,

-not possibly recognize the right of other men, less perfect, to exist on

-the same planet with himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a

-capital E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the brink

-of depopulation.

-

-Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the enemies of

-Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate struggle destroyed this

-Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.

-

-Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent itself. The

-constitution which the French people then adopted recognized the

-existence of different denominations and gave them the same rights

-and privileges. Officially at least the Republic washed her hands of

-all religion. Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an

-association, were free to do so but they were obliged to support their

-own ministers and priests and recognize the superior rights of the state

-and the complete freedom of choice of the individual.

-

-Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have lived peacefully

-side by side.

-

-It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat, continues to deny

-the principle of a division of state and church (see the decree of Pope

-Pius IX of December 8th, 1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back

-to power by supporting those political parties who hope to upset the

-republican form of government and bring back the monarchy or the empire.

-But these battles are usually fought in the private parlors of some

-minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodge of a retired general

-with an ambitious mother-in-law.

-

-They have thus far provided the funny papers with some excellent material

-but they are proving themselves increasingly futile.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXVIII

-

-LESSING

-

-

-On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a battle was fought

-between the armies of the French Revolution and the armies of the

-allied monarchs who had set forth to annihilate the terrible monster of

-insurrection.

-

-It was a glorious victory, but not for the allies. Their infantry could

-not be employed on the slippery hillsides of the village of Valmy. The

-battle therefore consisted of a series of solemn broadsides. The rebels

-fired harder and faster than the royalists. Hence the latter were the

-first to leave the field. In the evening the allied troops retreated

-northward. Among those present at the engagement was a certain Johann

-Wolfgang von Goethe, aide to the hereditary Prince of Weimar.

-

-Several years afterwards this young man published his memoirs of that

-day. While standing ankle-deep in the sticky mud of Lorraine, he had

-turned prophet. And he had predicted that after this cannonade, the world

-would never be the same. He had been right. On that ever memorable day,

-Sovereignty by the grace of God was blown into limbo. The Crusaders of

-the Rights of Man did not run like chickens, as they had been expected to

-do. They stuck to their guns. And they pushed those guns forward through

-valleys and across mountains until they had carried their ideal of

-“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to the furthermost corners of Europe

-and had stabled their horses in every castle and church of the entire

-continent.

-

-It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence. The

-revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one hundred and fifty

-years and we can poke as much fun at them as we like. We can even be

-grateful for the many good things which they bestowed upon this world.

-

-But the men and women who lived through those days, who one morning had

-gaily danced around the Tree of Liberty and then during the next three

-months had been chased like rats through the sewers of their own city,

-could not possibly take such a detached view of those problems of civic

-upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their cellars and garrets

-and had combed the cobwebs out of their perukes, they began to devise

-measures by which to prevent a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity.

-

-But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must first of all bury

-the past. Not a vague past in the broad historical sense of the word but

-their own individual “pasts” when they had surreptitiously read the works

-of Monsieur de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for

-the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de Voltaire were

-stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur Diderot were sold to the

-junk-man. Pamphlets that had been reverently read as the true revelation

-of reason were relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an

-effort was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short sojourn in

-the realm of liberalism.

-

-Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the literary

-material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant brotherhood

-overlooked one item which was even more important as a telltale of the

-popular mind. That was the stage. It was a bit childish on the part of

-the generation that had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The

-Marriage of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment believed

-in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and the people who had

-wept over “Nathan the Wise” could never successfully prove that they

-had always regarded religious tolerance as a misguided expression of

-governmental weakness.

-

-The play and its success were there to convict them of the opposite.

-

-The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment of the

-latter half of the eighteenth century was a German, one Gotthold Ephraim

-Lessing. He was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology

-in the University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination for a

-religious career and had played hooky so persistently that his father

-heard of it, had told him to come home and had placed him before

-the choice of immediate resignation from the university or diligent

-application as a member of the medical department. Gotthold, who was no

-more of a doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was asked

-of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of his beloved actor

-friends and upon their subsequent disappearance from town was obliged to

-hasten to Wittenberg that he might escape arrest for debt.

-

-His flight meant the beginning of a period of long walks and short meals.

-First of all he went to Berlin where he spent several years writing badly

-paid articles for a number of theatrical papers. Then he engaged himself

-as private secretary to a rich friend who was going to take a trip around

-the world. But no sooner had they started than the Seven Years’ war must

-break out. The friend, obliged to join his regiment, had taken the first

-post-chaise for home and Lessing, once more without a job, found himself

-stranded in the city of Leipzig.

-

-But he was of a sociable nature and soon found a new friend in the person

-of one Eduard Christian von Kleist, an officer by day and a poet by

-night, a sensitive soul who gave the hungry ex-theologian insight into

-the new spirit that was slowly coming over this world. But von Kleist was

-shot to death in the battle of Kunersdorf and Lessing was driven to such

-dire extremes of want that he became a columnist.

-

-Then followed a period as private secretary to the commander of the

-fortress of Breslau where the boredom of garrison life was mitigated by a

-profound study of the works of Spinoza which then, a hundred years after

-the philosopher’s death, were beginning to find their way to foreign

-countries.

-

-All this, however, did not settle the problem of the daily Butterbrod.

-Lessing was now almost forty years old and wanted a home of his own. His

-friends suggested that he be appointed keeper of the Royal Library. But

-years before, something had happened that had made Lessing persona non

-grata at the Prussian court. During his first visit to Berlin he had made

-the acquaintance of Voltaire. The French philosopher was nothing if not

-generous and being a person without any idea of “system” he had allowed

-the young man to borrow the manuscript of the “Century of Louis XIV,”

-then ready for publication. Unfortunately, Lessing, when he hastily left

-Berlin, had (entirely by accident) packed the manuscript among his own

-belongings. Voltaire, exasperated by the bad coffee and the hard beds

-of the penurious Prussian court, immediately cried out that he had been

-robbed. The young German had stolen his most important manuscript, the

-police must watch the frontier, etc., etc., etc., after the manner of an

-excited Frenchman in a foreign country. Within a few days the postman

-returned the lost document, but it was accompanied by a letter from

-Lessing in which the blunt young Teuton expressed his own ideas of people

-who would dare to suspect his honesty.

-

-This storm in a chocolate-pot might have easily been forgotten, but the

-eighteenth century was a period when chocolate-pots played a great rôle

-in the lives of men and women and Frederick, even after a lapse of almost

-twenty years, still loved his pesky French friend and would not hear of

-having Lessing at his court.

-

-And so farewell to Berlin and off to Hamburg, where there was rumor of a

-newly to be founded national theater. This enterprise came to nothing and

-Lessing in his despair accepted the office of librarian to the hereditary

-grand duke of Brunswick. The town of Wolfenbüttel which then became

-his home was not exactly a metropolis, but the grand-ducal library was

-one of the finest in all Germany. It contained more than ten thousand

-manuscripts and several of these were of prime importance in the history

-of the Reformation.

-

-Boredom of course is the main incentive to scandal mongering and gossip.

-In Wolfenbüttel a former art critic, columnist and dramatic essayist was

-by this very fact a highly suspicious person and soon Lessing was once

-more in trouble. Not because of anything he had done but on account of

-something he was vaguely supposed to have done, to wit: the publication

-of a series of articles attacking the orthodox opinions of the old school

-of Lutheran theology.

-

-These sermons (for sermons they were) had actually been written by a

-former Hamburg minister, but the grand duke of Brunswick, panic stricken

-at the prospect of a religious war within his domains, ordered his

-librarian to be discreet and keep away from all controversies. Lessing

-complied with the wishes of his employer. Nothing, however, had been

-said about treating the subject dramatically and so he set to work to

-re-valuate his opinions in terms of the stage.

-

-The play which was born out of this small-town rumpus was called “Nathan

-the Wise.” The theme was very old and I have mentioned it before in this

-book. Lovers of literary antiquities can find it (if Mr. Sumner will

-allow them) in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” where it is called the “Sad Story

-of the Three Rings” and where it is told as follows:

-

-Once upon a time a Mohammedan prince tried to extract a large sum of

-money from one of his Jewish subjects. But as he had no valid reason to

-deprive the poor man of his property, he bethought himself of a ruse.

-He sent for the victim and having complimented him gracefully upon his

-learning and wisdom, he asked him which of the three most widely spread

-religions, the Turkish, the Jewish and the Christian, he held to be most

-true. The worthy patriarch did not answer the Padishah directly but said,

-“Let me, oh great Sultan, tell you a little story. Once upon a time there

-was a very rich man who had a beautiful ring and he made a will that

-whichever of his sons at the time of his death should be found with that

-ring upon his finger should fall heir to all his estates. His son made

-a like will. His grandson too, and for centuries the ring changed hands

-and all was well. But finally it happened that the owner of the ring

-had three sons whom he loved equally well. He simply could not decide

-which of the three should own that much valued treasure. So he went to a

-goldsmith and ordered him to make two other rings exactly like the one

-he had. On his death-bed he sent for his children and gave them each his

-blessing and what they supposed was the one and only ring. Of course, as

-soon as the father had been buried, the three boys all claimed to be his

-heir because they had The Ring. This led to many quarrels and finally

-they laid the matter before the Kadi. But as the rings were absolutely

-alike, even the judges could not decide which was the right one and so

-the case has been dragged on and on and very likely will drag on until

-the end of the world. Amen.”

-

-Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that no one

-religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it was the inner spirit

-of man that counted rather than his outward conformity to certain

-prescribed rituals and dogmas and that therefore it was the duty of

-people to bear with each other in love and friendship and that no one had

-the right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured perfection

-and say, “I am better than all others because I alone possess the Truth.”

-

-But this idea, much applauded in the year 1778, was no longer popular

-with the little princelings who thirty years later returned to salvage

-such goods and chattels as had survived the deluge of the Revolution. For

-the purpose of regaining their lost prestige, they abjectly surrendered

-their lands to the rule of the police-sergeant and expected the clerical

-gentlemen who depended upon them for their livelihood to act as a

-spiritual militia and help the regular cops to reëstablish law and order.

-

-But whereas the purely political reaction was completely successful, the

-attempt to reshape men’s minds after the pattern of fifty years before

-ended in failure. And it could not be otherwise. It was true that the

-vast majority of the people in all countries were sick and tired of

-revolution and unrest, of parliaments and futile speeches and forms of

-taxation that had completely ruined commerce and industry. They wanted

-peace. Peace at any price. They wanted to do business and sit in their

-own front parlors and drink coffee and not be disturbed by the soldiers

-billeted upon them and forced to drink an odious extract of oak-leaves.

-Provided they could enjoy this blessed state of well-being, they were

-willing to put up with certain small inconveniences such as saluting

-whoever wore brass buttons, bowing low before every imperial letter-box

-and saying “Sir” to every assistant official chimney-sweep.

-

-But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of sheer necessity,

-of the need for a short breathing space after the long and tumultuous

-years when every new morning brought new uniforms, new political

-platforms, new police regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and

-earth. It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general air

-of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely appointed

-masters, that the people in their heart of hearts had forgotten the new

-doctrines which the drums of Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into

-their heads and hearts.

-

-As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent in all

-reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward semblance

-of decency and order and cared not one whit for the inner spirit, the

-average subject enjoyed a fairly wide degree of independence. On Sunday

-he went to church with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week

-he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept his private

-opinions to himself and aired his views when a careful inspection of the

-premises had first assured him that no secret agent was hidden underneath

-the sofa or was lurking behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed

-the events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head when

-his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper told him what new

-idiotic measures his masters had taken to assure the peace of the realm

-and bring about a return to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.

-

-What his masters were doing was exactly what similar masters with

-an imperfect knowledge of the history of human nature under similar

-circumstances have been doing ever since the year one. They thought that

-they had destroyed free speech when they ordered the removal of the

-cracker-barrels from which the speeches that had so severely criticized

-their government had been made. And whenever they could, they sent the

-offending orators to jail with such stiff sentences (forty, fifty, a

-hundred years) that the poor devils gained great renown as martyrs,

-whereas in most instances they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a

-few books and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.

-

-Warned by this example, the others kept away from the public parks and

-did their grumbling in obscure wine shops or in the public lodging houses

-of overcrowded cities where they were certain of a discreet audience and

-where their influence was infinitely more harmful than it would have been

-on a public platform.

-

-There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom

-the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who

-is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne

-and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption

-of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears

-his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. But the mayor of a

-third rate town, once he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of

-office, is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself

-airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore woe unto

-him who dares to approach such a potentate pro tem without visible

-manifestations of that reverence and worship due to so exalted a human

-being.

-

-But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who openly questioned the

-existing order of things in learned tomes and handbooks of geology and

-anthropology and economics, fared infinitely worse.

-

-They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their livelihood. Then

-they were exiled from the town in which they had taught their pernicious

-doctrines and with their wives and children were left to the charitable

-mercies of the neighbors.

-

-This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience to a

-large number of perfectly sincere people who were honestly trying to go

-to the root of our many social ills. Time, however, the great laundress,

-has long since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates

-were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these amiable

-scholars. Today, King Frederick William of Prussia is chiefly remembered

-because he interfered with the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous

-radical who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be worthy of

-being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines, according to the

-police reports, appealed only to “beardless youths and idle babblers.”

-The Duke of Cumberland has gained lasting notoriety because as King of

-Hanover he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a protest against

-“His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the country’s constitution.” And

-Metternich has retained a certain notoriety because he extended his

-watchful suspicion to the field of music and once censored the music of

-Schubert.

-

-Poor old Austria!

-

-Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly disposed towards

-the “gay empire” and forgets that once upon a time it had an active

-intellectual life of its own and was something more than an amusing and

-well-mannered county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars

-and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted by no one less

-than Johann Strauss himself.

-

-We may go even further and state that during the entire eighteenth

-century Austria played a very important rôle in the development of the

-idea of religious tolerance. Immediately after the Reformation the

-Protestants had found a fertile field for their operations in the rich

-province between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had

-changed when Rudolf II became emperor.

-

-This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a ruler to whom

-treaties made with heretics were of no consequence whatsoever. But

-although educated by the Jesuits, he was incurably lazy and this saved

-his empire from too drastic a change of policy.

-

-That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This monarch’s chief

-qualification for office was the fact that he alone among all the

-Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons. Early during his reign he had

-visited the famous House of the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year

-1291 by a number of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central

-Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had sworn a dire

-oath to make his country one-hundred-percent Catholic.

-

-He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism once more

-was proclaimed the official and exclusive faith of Austria and Styria and

-Bohemia and Silesia.

-

-Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange family, which

-acquired vast quantities of European real estate with every new wife, an

-effort was made to drive the Protestants from their Magyar strongholds.

-But backed up by the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the

-Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain their

-independence until the second half of the eighteenth century. And by that

-time a great change had taken place in Austria itself.

-

-The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last even their

-sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference with their

-affairs on the part of the Popes and they were willing for once to risk a

-policy contrary to the wishes of Rome.

-

-In an earlier part of this book I have already told how many medieval

-Catholics believed that the organization of the Church was all wrong.

-In the days of the martyrs, these critics argued, the Church was a true

-democracy ruled by elders and bishops who were appointed by common

-consent of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede that the

-Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct successor of the

-Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite position in the councils

-of the Church, but they insisted that this power had been purely honorary

-and that the popes therefore should never have considered themselves

-superior to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend their

-influence beyond the confines of their own territory.

-

-The popes from their side had fought this idea with all the bulls,

-anathemas and excommunications at their disposal and several brave

-reformers had lost their lives as a result of their bold agitation for

-greater clerical decentralization.

-

-The question had never been definitely settled, and then during

-the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was revived by the

-vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop of Trier. His name

-was Johann von Hontheim, but he is better known by his Latin pseudonym

-of Febronius. Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberal

-education. After a few years spent at the University of Louvain he had

-temporarily forsaken his own people and had gone to the University

-of Leiden. He got there at a time when that old citadel of undiluted

-Calvinism was beginning to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This

-suspicion had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard Noodt,

-a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to enter the field of

-theology and had been permitted to publish a speech in which he had

-extolled the ideal of religious tolerance.

-

-His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.

-

-“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to lay down certain

-laws of science which hold good for all people at all times and under all

-conditions. It follows that it would have been very easy for him, had

-he desired to do so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that

-they all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject of

-religion. We know that He did not do anything of the sort. Therefore, we

-act against the express will of God if we try to coerce others by force

-to believe that which we ourselves hold to be true.”

-

-Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or not, it is hard to

-say. But something of that same spirit of Erasmian rationalism can be

-found in those works of Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own

-ideas upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.

-

-That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in February of

-the year 1764) is of course no more than was to be expected. But it

-happened to suit the interests of Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and

-Febronianism or Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started

-was called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practical

-shape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the son of Maria Theresa,

-bestowed upon his subjects on the thirteenth of October of the year 1781.

-

-Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great enemy, Frederick

-of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing the right thing at the wrong

-moment. During the last two hundred years the little children of Austria

-had been sent to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them

-if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those same infants

-henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors (who, as they all knew,

-had horns and a long black tail), as their dearly beloved brothers and

-sisters was to ask the impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard

-working, blundering Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles

-and aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and cardinals

-and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden outburst of

-courage. He was the first among the Catholic rulers who dared to advocate

-tolerance as a desirable and practical possibility of statecraft.

-

-And what he did three months later was even more startling. On the

-second of February of the year of grace 1782 he issued his famous

-decree concerning the Jews and extended the liberty then only enjoyed

-by Protestants and Catholics to a category of people who thus far had

-considered themselves fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the

-same air as their Christian neighbors.

-

-Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe that the good work

-continued indefinitely and that Austria now became a Paradise for those

-who wished to follow the dictates of their own conscience.

-

-I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers might rise to

-a sudden height of common sense, but the Austrian peasant, taught

-since time immemorial to regard the Jew as his natural enemy and the

-Protestant as a rebel and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that

-old and deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people as his

-natural enemies.

-

-A century and a half after the promulgation of these excellent Edicts

-of Tolerance, the position of those who did not belong to the Catholic

-Church was quite as unfavorable as it had been in the sixteenth century.

-Theoretically a Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers

-or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And in practice it was

-impossible for them to be invited to dinner by the imperial boot-black.

-

-So much for paper decrees.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXIX

-

-TOM PAINE

-

-

-Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect that God moves in a

-mysterious way, his wonders to perform.

-

-The truth of this statement is most apparent to those who have studied

-the history of the Atlantic seaboard.

-

-During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the

-American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their

-devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor

-might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of

-the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and

-very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up

-a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting

-orgies of the Mather family.

-

-Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two reverend

-gentlemen could in any way be held responsible for the very tolerant

-tendencies which we find expounded with such able vigor in the

-Constitution of the United States and in the many documents that were

-written immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between England

-and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case, for the period

-of repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was

-bound to create a furious reaction in favor of a more liberal point of

-view.

-

-This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent for the collected

-works of Socinius and ceased to frighten little children with stories

-about Sodom and Gomorrah. But their leaders were almost without

-exception representatives of the new school of thought and with great

-ability and tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into the

-parchment platform upon which the edifice of their new and independent

-nation was to be erected.

-

-They might not have been quite so successful if they had been obliged to

-deal with one united country. But colonization in the northern part of

-America had always been a complicated business. The Swedish Lutherans had

-explored part of the territory. The French had sent over some of their

-Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied a large share of the land.

-While almost every sort and variety of English sect had at one time or

-another tried to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness

-between the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

-

-This had made for a variety of religious expression and so well had the

-different denominations been balanced that in several of the colonies a

-crude and rudimentary form of mutual forbearance had been forced upon a

-people who under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at each

-other’s throats.

-

-This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend gentlemen who

-prospered where others quarreled. For years after the advent of the new

-spirit of charity they had continued their struggle for the maintenance

-of the old ideal of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had

-successfully estranged many of the younger men from a creed which seemed

-to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and kindliness from some of its

-more ferocious Indian neighbors.

-

-Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt of battle in the

-long struggle for freedom belonged to this small but courageous group of

-dissenters.

-

-Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner of eighty

-tons can carry enough new notions to upset an entire continent. The

-American colonists of the eighteenth century were obliged to do without

-sculpture and grand pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more

-intelligent among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand

-that there was something astir in the big world, of which they had

-never heard anything in their Sunday sermons. The booksellers then

-became their prophets. And although they did not officially break away

-from the established church and changed little in their outer mode of

-life, they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they were

-faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania, who had refused

-to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the ground that the good Lord had

-expressly reserved for himself the right to three things: “To be able

-to create something out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate

-man’s conscience.”

-

-And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political and social

-program for the future conduct of their country, these brave patriots

-incorporated their ideas into the documents in which they placed their

-ideals before the high court of public opinion.

-

-It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of Virginia had

-they known that some of the oratory to which they listened with such

-profound respect was directly inspired by their arch-enemies, the

-Libertines. But Thomas Jefferson, their most successful politician, was

-himself a man of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that

-religion could only be regulated by reason and conviction and not by

-force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal right to the free

-exercise of their religion according to the dictates of their conscience,

-he merely repeated what had been thought and written before by Voltaire

-and Bayle and Spinoza and Erasmus.

-

-And later when the following heresies were heard: “that no declaration of

-faith should be required as a condition of obtaining any public office in

-the United States,” or “that Congress should make no law which referred

-to the establishment of religion or which prohibited the free exercise

-thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.

-

-In this way the United States came to be the first country where religion

-was definitely separated from politics; the first country where no

-candidate for office was forced to show his Sunday School certificate

-before he could accept the nomination; the first country in which people

-could, as far as the law was concerned, worship or fail to worship as

-they pleased.

-

-But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter) the average

-man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable to follow them as soon

-as they deviated the least little bit from the beaten track. Not only

-did many of the states continue to impose certain restrictions upon

-those of their subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but

-the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or Bostonians or

-Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant of those who did not

-share their own views as if they had never read a single line of their

-own Constitution. All of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the

-case of Thomas Paine.

-

-Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of the Americans.

-

-He was the publicity man of the Revolution.

-

-By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor; by instinct

-and training, a rebel. He was forty years old before he visited the

-colonies. While on a visit to London he had met Benjamin Franklin and had

-received the excellent advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided

-with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had sailed for

-Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the son-in-law of Franklin, to

-found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania Gazette.”

-

-Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon found himself in the

-midst of those events that were trying men’s souls. And being possessed

-of a singularly well-ordered mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted

-collection of American grievances and had incorporated them into a

-pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application of “common

-sense” should convince the people that the American cause was a just

-cause and deserved the hearty coöperation of all loyal patriots.

-

-This little book at once found its way to England and to the continent

-where it informed many people for the first time in their lives that

-there was such a thing as “an American nation” and that it had an

-excellent right, yea, it was its sacred duty to make war upon the mother

-country.

-

-As soon as the Revolution was over, Paine went back to Europe to show the

-English people the supposed absurdities of the government under which

-they lived. It was a time when terrible things were happening along the

-banks of the Seine and when respectable Britishers were beginning to look

-across the Channel with very serious misgivings.

-

-A certain Edmund Burke had just published his panic-stricken “Reflections

-on the French Revolution.” Paine answered with a furious counter-blast of

-his own called “The Rights of Man” and as a result the English government

-ordered him to be tried for high treason.

-

-Meanwhile his French admirers had elected him to the Convention and

-Paine, who did not know a word of French but was an optimist, accepted

-the honor and went to Paris. There he lived until he fell under the

-suspicion of Robespierre. Knowing that at any moment he might be arrested

-and decapitated, he hastily finished a book that was to contain his

-philosophy of life. It was called “The Age of Reason.” The first part was

-published just before he was taken to prison. The second part was written

-during the ten months he spent in jail.

-

-Paine believed that true religion, what he called “the religion of

-humanity,” had two enemies, atheism on the one hand and fanaticism on

-the other. But when he gave expression to this thought he was attacked

-by every one and when he returned to America in 1802 he was treated with

-such profound and relentless hatred that his reputation as a “dirty

-little atheist” has survived him by more than a century.

-

-It is true that nothing happened to him. He was not hanged or burned or

-broken on the wheel. He was merely shunned by all his neighbors, little

-boys were encouraged to stick their tongues out at him when he ventured

-to leave his home, and at the time of his death he was an embittered and

-forgotten man who found relief for his anger in writing foolish political

-tracts against the other heroes of the Revolution.

-

-This seems a most unfortunate sequel to a splendid beginning.

-

-But it is typical of something that has repeatedly happened during the

-history of the last two thousand years.

-

-As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private intolerance

-begins.

-

-And lynchings start when official executions have come to an end.

-

-

-

-

-CHAPTER XXX

-

-THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS

-

-

-Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to write this book.

-The word “Intolerance,” in the minds of most people, was then almost

-exclusively identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when

-an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of tolerance” it

-was generally accepted that so and so had spent his life fighting the

-abuses of the Church and the tyranny of a professional priesthood.

-

-Then came the war.

-

-And much was changed in this world.

-

-Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen.

-

-Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his fellow-men, we

-got a hundred.

-

-And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of the horrors

-of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with the infinitely more

-painful manifestations of a paltry form of racial intolerance and social

-intolerance and a score of petty forms of intolerance, the existence of

-which had not even been suspected a decade ago.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-This seems very terrible to many good people who until recently lived in

-the happy delusion that progress was a sort of automatic time-piece which

-needed no other winding than their occasional approbation.

-

-They sadly shake their heads, whisper “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”

-and mutter disagreeable things about the cussedness of the human race

-which goes everlastingly to school, yet always refuses to learn.

-

-Until, in sheer despair, they join the rapidly increasing ranks of our

-spiritual defeatists, attach themselves to this or that or the other

-religious institution (that they may transfer their own burden to the

-back of some one else), and in the most doleful tones acknowledge

-themselves beaten and retire from all further participation in the

-affairs of their community.

-

-I don’t like such people.

-

-They are not merely cowards.

-

-They are traitors to the future of the human race.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-So far so good, but what is the solution, if a solution there be?

-

-Let us be honest with ourselves.

-

-There is not any.

-

-At least not in the eyes of a world which asks for quick results and

-expects to settle all difficulties of this earth comfortably and speedily

-with the help of a mathematical or medical formula or by an act of

-Congress. But those of us who have accustomed ourselves to consider

-history in the light of eternity and who know that civilization does not

-begin and end with the twentieth century, feel a little more hopeful.

-

-That vicious circle of despair of which we hear so much nowadays (“man

-has always been that way,” “man always will be that way,” “the world

-never changes,” “things are just about the same as they were four

-thousand years ago,”) does not exist.

-

-It is an optical illusion.

-

-The line of progress is often interrupted but if we set aside all

-sentimental prejudices and render a sober judgment upon the record of

-the last twenty thousand years (the only period about which we possess

-more or less concrete information) we notice an indubitable if slow rise

-from a condition of almost unspeakable brutality and crudeness to a state

-which holds the promise of something infinitely nobler and better than

-what has ever gone before and even the ghastly blunder of the Great War

-can not shake the firm conviction that this is true.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-The human race is possessed of almost incredible vitality.

-

-It has survived theology.

-

-It due time it will survive industrialism.

-

-It has lived through cholera and plague, high heels and blue laws.

-

-It will also learn how to overcome the many spiritual ills which beset

-the present generation.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-History, chary of revealing her secrets, has thus far taught us one great

-lesson.

-

-What the hand of man has done, the hand of man can also undo.

-

-It is a question of courage, and next to courage, of education.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-That of course sounds like a platitude. For the last hundred years we

-have had “education” driven into our ears until we are sick and tired

-of the word and look longingly back to a time when people could neither

-read nor write but used their surplus intellectual energy for occasional

-moments of independent thinking.

-

-But when I here speak of “education” I do not mean the mere accumulation

-of facts which is regarded as the necessary mental ballast of our modern

-children. Rather, I have in mind that true understanding of the present

-which is born out of a charitable and generous knowledge of the past.

-

-In this book I have tried to prove that intolerance is merely a

-manifestation of the protective instinct of the herd.

-

-A group of wolves is intolerant of the wolf that is different (be it

-through weakness or strength) from the rest of the pack and invariably

-tries to get rid of this offending and unwelcome companion.

-

-A tribe of cannibals is intolerant of the individual who by his

-idiosyncrasies threatens to provoke the wrath of the Gods and bring

-disaster upon the whole village and brutally relegates him or her to the

-wilderness.

-

-The Greek commonwealth can ill afford to harbor within its sacred walls a

-citizen who dares to question the very fundaments upon which the success

-of the community has been built and in a poor outburst of intolerance

-condemns the offending philosopher to the merciful death of poison.

-

-The Roman state cannot possibly hope to survive if a small group of

-well-meaning zealots is allowed to play fast and loose with certain laws

-which have been held indispensable ever since the days of Romulus, and

-much against her own will she is driven into deeds of intolerance which

-are entirely at variance with her age-old policy of liberal aloofness.

-

-The Church, spiritual heir to the material dominions of the ancient

-Empire, depends for her continued existence upon the absolute and

-unquestioning obedience of even the humblest of her subjects and is

-driven to such extremes of suppression and cruelty that many people

-prefer the ruthlessness of the Turk to the charity of the Christian.

-

-The great insurgents against ecclesiastical tyranny, beset by a thousand

-difficulties, can only maintain their rule if they show themselves

-intolerant to all spiritual innovations and scientific experiments and in

-the name of “Reform” they commit (or rather try to commit) the self-same

-mistakes which have just deprived their enemies of most of their former

-power and influence.

-

-And so it goes throughout the ages until life, which might be a glorious

-adventure, is turned into a horrible experience and all this happens

-because human existence so far has been entirely dominated by fear.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-For fear, I repeat it, is at the bottom of all intolerance.

-

-No matter what form or shape a persecution may take, it is caused by fear

-and its very vehemence is indicative of the degree of anguish experienced

-by those who erect the gallows or throw fresh logs upon the funeral pyre.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Once we recognize this fact, the solution of the difficulty immediately

-presents itself.

-

-Man, when not under the influence of fear, is strongly inclined to be

-righteous and just.

-

-Thus far he has had very few opportunities to practice these two virtues.

-

-But I cannot for the life of me see that this matters overmuch. It is

-part of the necessary development of the human race. And that race is

-young, hopelessly, almost ridiculously young. To ask that a certain form

-of mammal, which began its independent career only a few thousand years

-ago should already have acquired those virtues which go only with age and

-experience, seems both unreasonable and unfair.

-

-And furthermore, it warps our point of view.

-

-It causes us to be irritated when we should be patient.

-

-It makes us say harsh things where we should only feel pity.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-In the last chapters of a book like this, there is a serious temptation

-to assume the rôle of the prophet of woe and indulge in a little amateur

-preaching.

-

-Heaven forbid!

-

-Life is short and sermons are apt to be long.

-

-And what cannot be said in a hundred words had better never be said at

-all.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Our historians are guilty of one great error. They speak of prehistoric

-times, they tell us about the Golden Age of Greece and Rome, they talk

-nonsense about a supposedly dark period, they compose rhapsodies upon the

-tenfold glories of our modern era.

-

-If perchance these learned doctors perceive certain characteristics which

-do not seem to fit into the picture they have so prettily put together,

-they offer a few humble apologies and mumble something about certain

-undesirable qualities which are part of our unfortunate and barbaric

-heritage but which in due course of time will disappear, just as the

-stage-coach has given way before the railroad engine.

-

-It is all very pretty but it is not true. It may flatter our pride to

-believe ourselves heir to the ages. It will be better for our spiritual

-health if we know ourselves for what we are—contemporaries of the folks

-that lived in caves, neolithic men with cigarettes and Ford cars,

-cliff-dwellers who reach their homes in an elevator.

-

-For then and only then shall we be able to make a first step toward that

-goal that still lies hidden beyond the vast mountain ranges of the future.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-To speak of Golden Ages and Modern Eras and Progress is sheer waste of

-time as long as this world is dominated by fear.

-

-To ask for tolerance, as long as intolerance must of need be an integral

-part of our law of self-preservation, is little short of a crime.

-

-The day will come when tolerance shall be the rule, when intolerance

-shall be a myth like the slaughter of innocent captives, the burning of

-widows, the blind worship of a printed page.

-

-It may take ten thousand years, it may take a hundred thousand.

-

-But it will come, and it will follow close upon the first true victory of

-which history shall have any record, the triumph of man over his own fear.

-

-    _Westport, Connecticut_

-

-    _July, 19, 1925_

-

-

-

-*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***

+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TOLERANCE
+
+
+
+
+                                TOLERANCE
+
+                                   _By_
+                         HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON
+
+    _The final end of the State consists not in dominating over
+    men, restraining them by fear, subjecting them to the will of
+    others. Rather it has for its end so to act that its citizens
+    shall in security develop soul and body and make free use of
+    their reason. For the true end of the State is Liberty._
+
+                                                            SPINOZA.
+
+    _Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future. I will wait
+    for Humanity at the crossroads, three hundred years hence._
+
+                                                    LUIGI LUCATELLI.
+
+                              [Illustration]
+
+                                _NEW YORK_
+                             BONI & LIVERIGHT
+                                   1925
+
+                     COPYRIGHT 1925 [Illustration] BY
+                          BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
+                       PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
+
+                              [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+TO THE MEMORY OF
+
+JOHN W. T. NICHOLS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                        PAGE
+
+          PROLOGUE                                        11
+
+  CHAPTER
+
+       I. THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE                        17
+
+      II. THE GREEKS                                      28
+
+     III. THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT                      68
+
+      IV. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS                        80
+
+       V. IMPRISONMENT                                   104
+
+      VI. THE PURE OF LIFE                               114
+
+     VII. THE INQUISITION                                126
+
+    VIII. THE CURIOUS ONES                               146
+
+      IX. THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD                  160
+
+       X. CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL
+            AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR                  168
+
+      XI. RENAISSANCE                                    172
+
+     XII. THE REFORMATION                                181
+
+    XIII. ERASMUS                                        195
+
+     XIV. RABELAIS                                       212
+
+      XV. NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD                         223
+
+     XVI. THE ANABAPTISTS                                246
+
+    XVII. THE SOZZINI FAMILY                             257
+
+   XVIII. MONTAIGNE                                      269
+
+     XIX. ARMINIUS                                       275
+
+      XX. BRUNO                                          286
+
+     XXI. SPINOZA                                        292
+
+    XXII. THE NEW ZION                                   307
+
+   XXIII. THE SUN KING                                   321
+
+    XXIV. FREDERICK THE GREAT                            326
+
+     XXV. VOLTAIRE                                       330
+
+    XXVI. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA                               352
+
+   XXVII. THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION                  361
+
+  XXVIII. LESSING                                        372
+
+    XXIX. TOM PAINE                                      387
+
+     XXX. THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS                         393
+
+
+
+
+TOLERANCE
+
+
+
+
+TOLERANCE
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.
+
+To the north, to the south, to the west and to the east stretched the
+ridges of the Hills Everlasting.
+
+A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a deep worn gully.
+
+It came out of the Mountains of the Past.
+
+It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.
+
+It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the humble needs of
+the villagers.
+
+In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and had filled their
+casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy life.
+
+The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the shady corners where they
+had spent their day, pondering over the mysterious pages of an old book.
+
+They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who would have
+preferred to play with the pretty pebbles, brought down from distant
+lands.
+
+Often these words were not very clear.
+
+But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten race. Hence they
+were holy.
+
+For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was venerable. And those
+who dared to gainsay the wisdom of the fathers were shunned by all decent
+people.
+
+And so they kept their peace.
+
+Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused the common share
+of the products of the garden?
+
+Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the narrow streets
+of the little town, vague stories of men and women who had dared to ask
+questions.
+
+They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.
+
+A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range that hid the
+sun.
+
+Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.
+
+The years came and the years went by.
+
+Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out of the darkness crept a man.
+
+The nails of his hands were torn.
+
+His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of long marches.
+
+He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.
+
+Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he was carried to a
+cot.
+
+In the morning throughout the village it was known: “He has come back.”
+
+The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They had always known
+that this was to be the end.
+
+Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll away from the foot
+of the mountains.
+
+And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their heads and
+whispered burning words.
+
+They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law. Bitterly this man
+had sinned against the wishes of Those Who Knew.
+
+As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought to trial.
+
+They meant to be lenient.
+
+They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother. They recalled
+the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert these thirty years ago.
+
+The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be obeyed.
+
+The Men Who Knew would see to that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the people stood
+around in respectful silence.
+
+He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders bade him sit down.
+
+He refused.
+
+They ordered him to be silent.
+
+But he spoke.
+
+Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought those who but a
+short time before had been his comrades.
+
+“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be rejoiced. I have come
+back from beyond the mountains. My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands
+have felt the touch of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.
+
+“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my father.
+
+“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north lay the
+ranges from the Beginning of Time.
+
+“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush and a hasty shaking
+of heads. When I insisted, I was taken to the rocks and shown the
+bleached bones of those who had dared to defy the Gods.
+
+“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love those who are
+brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to me from their sacred books. The
+Law, they explained, had ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The
+Valley was ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the
+fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the mountains were
+of the Gods. What lay beyond was to remain unknown until the End of Time.
+
+“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as they have lied to
+you.
+
+“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as rich as any. And men
+and women of our own flesh and blood. And cities resplendent with the
+glories of a thousand years of labor.
+
+“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen the promise of a
+happier life. Follow me and I shall lead you thither. For the smile of
+the Gods is the same there as here and everywhere.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.
+
+“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege! A fit
+punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason. He dares to scoff at
+the Law as it was written down a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”
+
+And they took up heavy stones.
+
+And they killed him.
+
+And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that it might lie
+there as a warning to all who questioned the wisdom of the ancestors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Then it happened a short time later that there was a great drought. The
+little Brook of Knowledge ran dry. The cattle died of thirst. The harvest
+perished in the fields, and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.
+
+The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened. Everything would
+all come right in the end, they prophesied, for so it was writ in their
+most Holy Chapters.
+
+Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They were so very old.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Winter came.
+
+The village was deserted.
+
+More than half of the populace died from sheer want.
+
+The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the mountains.
+
+But the Law said “No!”
+
+And the Law must be obeyed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One night there was a rebellion.
+
+Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into silence.
+
+Feebly the Old Men protested.
+
+They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot. They bewailed the
+ingratitude of their children, but when the last wagon pulled out of the
+village, they stopped the driver and forced him to take them along.
+
+The flight into the unknown had begun.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It was no easy task to
+discover the road he had mapped out.
+
+Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the first cairn was
+found.
+
+From there on the trip was less difficult.
+
+The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the woods and amidst
+the endless wilderness of rock.
+
+By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.
+
+Silently the people looked at each other.
+
+“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and the Old Men were
+wrong....
+
+“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....
+
+“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the Old Men sit in
+our carts and chant their ancient lays....
+
+“He saved us, and we slew him....
+
+“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we could have known at
+the time....”
+
+Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and they drove their
+cows and their goats into the pastures and they built themselves houses
+and laid out their fields and they lived happily for a long time
+afterwards.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave pioneer in the
+fine new edifice which had been erected as a home for the Wise Old Men.
+
+A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley, but when the
+spot was reached where his body ought to have been, it was no longer
+there.
+
+A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.
+
+A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail (now a magnificent
+highway). It gave the name of the man who had first defied the dark
+terror of the unknown, that his people might be guided into a new freedom.
+
+And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some day (so we hope) it
+shall no longer be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE
+
+
+In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became ruler of the eastern
+half of the Roman Empire.
+
+This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the much disputed railroad
+junction of the late war) had no use for “book-learnin’.” It was by
+his orders that the ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally
+suppressed. And it was he who closed the doors of the only Egyptian
+temple that had continued to do business centuries after the valley of
+the Nile had been invaded by the monks of the new Christian faith.
+
+This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far from the
+first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men could remember, the
+spot had been dedicated to the worship of Isis and for some curious
+reason, the Goddess had survived where all her African and Greek and
+Roman rivals had miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth
+century, the island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of
+picture writing was still understood and where a small number of priests
+continued to practice a trade which had been forgotten in every other
+part of the land of Cheops.
+
+And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His Imperial
+Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were declared state
+property, the statues and images were sent to the museum of
+Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters were thrown into
+jail. And when the last of them had died from hunger and neglect, the
+age-old trade of making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.
+
+All this was a great pity.
+
+If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little less thorough
+and had saved just a few of those old picture experts in a sort of
+literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made the task of the historian a
+great deal easier. For while (owing to the genius of Champollion) we can
+once more spell out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly
+difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their message to
+posterity.
+
+And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient world.
+
+What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left us whole
+brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind when they exclaimed
+piously, “Who shall ever be able to understand the counsel of the Gods
+in Heaven?” How did they feel towards those divine spirits which they
+invoked so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret, whose
+commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of their most holy city?
+Why were they at once the most tolerant of men, encouraging their priests
+to study the high heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and
+at the same time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous
+punishments upon those of their neighbors who had committed some breach
+of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?
+
+Until recently we did not know.
+
+We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand of Sinai and
+deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And everywhere in Mesopotamia and
+Egypt we did our best to find the key that should unlock the front door
+of this mysterious store-house of wisdom.
+
+And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered that the back
+door had been wide open all the time and that we could enter the premises
+at will.
+
+But that convenient little gate was not situated in the neighborhood of
+Akkad or Memphis.
+
+It stood in the very heart of the jungle.
+
+And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan temple.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in contact with what
+they were pleased to call “wild men” or “savages.”
+
+The meeting had not been a pleasant one.
+
+The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the white men, had
+welcomed them with a salvo of spears and arrows.
+
+The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.
+
+After that there had been little chance for a quiet and unprejudiced
+exchange of ideas.
+
+The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing
+loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees and deserved all that was
+coming to him.
+
+Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau
+began to contemplate the world through a haze of sentimental tears.
+His contemporaries, much impressed by his ideas, pulled out their
+handkerchiefs and joined in the weeping.
+
+The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite subjects. In their
+hands (although they had never seen one) he became the unfortunate victim
+of circumstances and the true representative of all those manifold
+virtues of which the human race had been deprived by three thousand years
+of a corrupt system of civilization.
+
+Today, at least in this particular field of investigation, we know better.
+
+We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated animals, from
+which as a rule he is not so very far removed.
+
+In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble. The savage,
+but for the grace of God, is our own self under much less favorable
+conditions. By examining him carefully we begin to understand the early
+society of the valley of the Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia
+and by knowing him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange
+hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin crust of
+manners and customs which our own species of mammal has acquired during
+the last five thousand years.
+
+This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On the other hand a
+realization of the conditions from which we have escaped, together with
+an appreciation of the many things that have actually been accomplished,
+can only tend to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything
+it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among our distant
+cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.
+
+This is not a handbook of anthropology.
+
+It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.
+
+But tolerance is a very broad theme.
+
+The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten
+track, Heaven alone knows where we will land.
+
+I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state exactly and
+specifically what I mean by tolerance.
+
+Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the human race and
+all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It therefore behooves an
+humble student to go to that authority which is accepted as final by
+the largest number of those who speak the language in which this book is
+written.
+
+I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
+
+There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written: “Tolerance (from Latin
+_tolerare_—to endure):—The allowance of freedom of action or judgment
+to other people, the patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from
+one’s own or the generally received course or view.”
+
+There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this book I shall
+let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.
+
+And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a definite policy, I
+shall return to my savages and tell you what I have been able to discover
+about tolerance in the earliest forms of society of which we have any
+record.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is still generally believed that primitive society was very simple,
+that primitive language consisted of a few simple grunts and that
+primitive man possessed a degree of liberty which was lost only when the
+world became “complex.”
+
+The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers and
+missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central Africa and the
+Polar regions and Polynesia show the exact opposite. Primitive society
+was exceedingly complicated, primitive language had more forms and tenses
+and declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was a slave not
+only to the present, but also to the past and to the future; in short, an
+abject and miserable creature who lived in fear and died in terror.
+
+This may seem far removed from the popular picture of brave red-skins
+merrily roaming the prairies in search of buffaloes and scalps, but it is
+a little nearer to the truth.
+
+And how could it have been otherwise?
+
+I have read the stories of many miracles.
+
+But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival of man.
+
+How and in what manner and why the most defenseless of all mammals should
+have been able to maintain himself against microbes and mastodons and ice
+and heat and eventually become master of all creation, is something I
+shall not try to solve in the present chapter.
+
+One thing, however, is certain. He never could have accomplished all this
+alone.
+
+In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality in the
+composite character of the tribe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single idea, an
+all-overpowering desire to survive.
+
+This was very difficult.
+
+And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to the one
+supreme demand—to live.
+
+The individual counted for nothing, the community at large counted for
+everything, and the tribe became a roaming fortress which lived by itself
+and for itself and of itself and found safety only in exclusiveness.
+
+But the problem was even more complicated than at first appears. What
+I have just said held good only for the visible world, and the visible
+world in those early times was a negligible quantity compared to the
+realm of the invisible.
+
+In order to understand this fully we must remember that primitive people
+are different from ourselves. They are not familiar with the law of cause
+and effect.
+
+If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence, send
+for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid of the stuff as soon
+as he can. My ability to recognize cause and effect tells me that the
+poison ivy has caused the rash, that the doctor will be able to give me
+something that will make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine
+will prevent a repetition of this painful experience.
+
+The true savage would act quite differently. He would not connect the
+rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in a world in which past,
+present and future are inextricably interwoven. All his dead leaders
+survive as Gods and his dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all
+continue to be invisible members of the clan and they accompany each
+individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him and sleep with him
+and they stand watch over his door. It is his business to keep them at
+arm’s length or gain their friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will
+be immediately punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all
+those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune
+which comes as the revenge of the Gods.
+
+He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the ordinary
+not to a primary cause but to interference on the part of an invisible
+spirit and when he notices a rash on his arms he does not say, “Damn that
+poison ivy!” but he mumbles, “I have offended a God. The God has punished
+me,” and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion to
+counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm” that shall prove
+stronger than the charm which the irate God (and not the ivy) has thrown
+upon him.
+
+As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he lets it grow
+right there where it has always grown. And if perchance the white man
+comes with a can of kerosene and burns the shrub down, he will curse him
+for his trouble.
+
+It follows that a society in which everything happens as the result of
+the direct personal interference on the part of an invisible being must
+depend for its continued existence upon a strict obedience of such laws
+as seem to appease the wrath of the Gods.
+
+Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed. His ancestors
+had devised it and had bestowed it upon him and it was his most sacred
+duty to keep that law intact and hand it over in its present and perfect
+form to his own children.
+
+This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in progress, in
+growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.
+
+But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year before last,
+and it is typical of all low forms of society that the people see no
+possible reason why they should improve what (to them) is the best of all
+possible worlds because they never knew any other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent a change in the
+laws and in the established forms of society?
+
+The answer is simple.
+
+By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to regard common police
+regulations as an expression of the divine will, or in plain language, by
+a rigid system of intolerance.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant of human
+beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten to add that given the
+circumstances under which he lived, it was his duty to be intolerant. Had
+he allowed any one to interfere with the thousand and one rules upon
+which his tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind, the
+life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and that would have
+been the greatest of all possible crimes.
+
+But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group of people,
+relatively limited in number, protect a most complex system of verbal
+regulations when we in our own day with millions of soldiers and
+thousands of policemen find it difficult to enforce a few plain laws?
+
+Again the answer is simple.
+
+The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He accomplished by
+shrewd calculation what he could not do by force.
+
+He invented the idea of “taboo.”
+
+Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression. Such things are
+rarely the product of a sudden inspiration. They are the result of long
+years of growth and experiment. Let that be as it may, the wild men of
+Africa and Polynesia devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a
+great deal of trouble.
+
+The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know more or less what it
+means. Our own world is full of taboos, things we simply must not do or
+say, like mentioning our latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving
+our spoon in our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very
+serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette and rarely
+interfere with our own personal happiness.
+
+To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the utmost
+importance.
+
+It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had been “set apart”
+from the rest of the world, that they (to use the Hebrew equivalent) were
+“holy” and must not be discussed or touched on pain of instant death and
+everlasting torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who
+dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the priesthood was
+created to maintain the taboo is a problem which had not yet been solved.
+As tradition is much older than religion, it seems more than likely
+that taboos existed long before the world had heard of sorcerers and
+witch-doctors. But as soon as the latter had made their appearance, they
+became the staunch supporters of the idea of taboo and used it with such
+great virtuosity that the taboo became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric
+ages.
+
+When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt, those countries were
+still in a state of development in which the taboo counted for a great
+deal. Not a taboo in the crude and primitive form as it was afterwards
+found in New Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of
+conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we are all
+familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.
+
+Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely unknown in those
+lands at that early age.
+
+What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by
+ignorance.
+
+But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part
+of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of
+action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of
+dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the
+ideal of our modern age.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in
+prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.”
+
+The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the
+individual.
+
+And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs
+to the Greeks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE GREEKS
+
+
+How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the
+Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries
+with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in
+politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven
+knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for
+a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or
+another during his career, has tried to give an answer.
+
+Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and
+physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with
+ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call
+“the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and
+shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings.
+
+I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such
+laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them.
+But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy
+accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them
+and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which
+might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal.
+
+It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field
+of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s book, offer the
+following historical axiom.
+
+According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life (animate
+existence as differentiated from inanimate existence) began when for once
+all physical and chemical elements were present in the ideal proportion
+necessary for the creation of the first living cell.
+
+Translate this into terms of history and you get this:
+
+“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a very high form of
+civilization is only possible when all the racial, climatic, economic and
+political conditions are present in an ideal proportion or in as nearly
+an ideal condition and proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”
+
+Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.
+
+A race with the brain development of a cave-man would not prosper, even
+in Paradise.
+
+Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would not have composed
+fugues, Praxiteles would not have made statues if they had been born
+in an igloo near Upernivik and had been obliged to spend most of their
+waking hours watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.
+
+Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been
+obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And
+Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had
+been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow
+domains.
+
+In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the
+climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust
+or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly
+bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which
+afterwards moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates
+were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the
+climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from
+good.
+
+In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture was
+backward and there was little commerce outside of the caravan route
+which passed through the country from Africa to Asia and vice versa.
+Furthermore, in Palestine politics were entirely dominated by the priests
+of the temple of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the
+development of any sort of individual enterprise.
+
+In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The race was strong
+and trade conditions were good. The country, however, suffered from a
+badly balanced economic system. A small class of ship owners had been
+able to get hold of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial
+monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had at an early date
+fallen into the hands of the very rich. The poor, deprived of all excuse
+for the practice of a reasonable amount of industry, grew callous and
+indifferent and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and went
+to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her rulers.
+
+In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization, certain of
+the necessary elements for success were always lacking.
+
+When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur, in Greece in
+the fifth century before our era, it lasted only a very short time, and
+strange to say, even then it did not take place in the mother country but
+in the colonies across the Aegean Sea.
+
+In another book I have given a description of those famous island-bridges
+which connected the mainland of Asia with Europe and across which the
+traders from Egypt and Babylonia and Crete since time immemorial had
+traveled to Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise
+and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be found on the western coast
+of Asia Minor in a strip of land known as Ionia.
+
+A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow bit of mountainous
+territory, ninety miles long and only a few miles wide, had been
+conquered by Greek tribes from the mainland who there had founded a
+number of colonial towns of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus
+were the best known, and it was along those cities that at last the
+conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion that
+civilization reached a point which has sometimes been equaled but never
+has been surpassed.
+
+In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the most active and
+enterprising elements from among a dozen different nations.
+
+In the second place, there was a great deal of general wealth derived
+from the carrying trade between the old and the new world, between Europe
+and Asia.
+
+In the third place, the form of government under which the colonists
+lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance to develop their talents
+to the very best of their ability.
+
+If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that in countries
+devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate does not matter much. Ships
+can be built and goods can be unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does
+not get so cold that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are
+flooded, the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily
+weather reports.
+
+But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly favorable to
+the development of an intellectual class. Before the existence of books
+and libraries, learning was handed down from man to man by word of mouth
+and the town-pump was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest
+of universities.
+
+In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump for 350 out of
+every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors made such excellent use
+of their climatic advantages that they became the pioneers of all future
+scientific development.
+
+The first of whom we have any report, the real founder of modern
+science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in the sense that he had
+robbed a bank or murdered his family and had fled to Miletus from parts
+unknown. But no one knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian
+or a Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned racial
+experts) or a Semite?
+
+It shows what an international center this little old city at the mouth
+of the Meander was in those days. Its population (like that of New York
+today) consisted of so many different elements that people accepted their
+neighbors at their face value and did not look too closely into the
+family antecedents.
+
+Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook of philosophy,
+the speculations of Thales do not properly belong in these pages, except
+in so far as they tend to show the tolerance towards new ideas which
+prevailed among the Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town
+on a muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region, when the Jews
+were still captives in the land of Assyria and when northern and western
+Europe were naught but a howling wilderness.
+
+In order that we may understand how such a development was possible, we
+must know something about the changes which had taken place since the
+days when Greek chieftains sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the
+plunder of the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were still
+the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization. They were
+over-grown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house,
+full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the
+many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not
+forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and
+bananas.
+
+The relationship between these boisterous paladins and their Gods was as
+direct and as simple as their attitude towards the serious problems of
+every-day existence. For the inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the
+world of the Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this
+earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals. Exactly
+where and when and how man and his Gods had parted company was a more
+or less hazy point, never clearly established. Even then the friendship
+which those who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their
+subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no way been
+interrupted and it had remained flavored with those personal and intimate
+touches which gave the religion of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.
+
+Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that Zeus was a
+very powerful and mighty potentate with a long beard who upon occasion
+would juggle so violently with his flashes of lightning and his
+thunderbolts that it seemed that the world was coming to an end. But
+as soon as they were a little older and were able to read the ancient
+sagas for themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those
+terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their nursery
+and who now appeared in the light of a merry family-party—everlastingly
+playing practical jokes upon each other and taking such bitter sides in
+the political disputes of their mortal friends that every quarrel in
+Greece was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the denizens
+of the aether.
+
+Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings, Zeus remained a
+very great God, the mightiest of all rulers and a personage whom it was
+not safe to displease. But he was “reasonable” in that sense of the word
+which is so well understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was
+reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper way. And best
+of all, he had a sense of humor and did not take either himself or his
+world too seriously.
+
+This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a divine figure,
+but it offered certain very distinct advantages. Among the ancient Greeks
+there never was a hard and fast rule as to what people must hold true
+and what they must disregard as false. And because there was no “creed”
+in the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and a class
+of professional priests, ready to enforce them with the help of the
+secular gallows, the people in different parts of the country were able
+to reshape their religious ideas and ethical conceptions as best suited
+their own individual tastes.
+
+The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of Mount Olympus,
+showed of course much less respect for their august neighbors than did
+the Asopians who dwelled in a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The
+Athenians, feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own
+patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great liberties
+with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose valleys were far
+removed from the main trade routes, clung tenaciously to a simpler faith
+and frowned upon all levity in the serious matter of religion, and as
+for the inhabitants of Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound
+for the village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo (who
+was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the greatest of all divine
+spirits and deserved the special homage of those who came from afar and
+still had a couple of drachmas in their pocket.
+
+The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to set the Jews
+apart from all other nations, would never have been possible if the life
+of Judaea had not centered around a single city which was strong enough
+to destroy all rival places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an
+exclusive religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.
+
+In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither Athens nor Sparta
+ever succeeded in establishing itself as the recognized capital of a
+united Greek fatherland. Their efforts in this direction only led to long
+years of unprofitable civil war.
+
+No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists offered
+great scope for the development of a very independent spirit of thought.
+
+The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the Bible of the
+Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They were just books. They were
+never united into “The Book.” They told the adventures of certain
+wonderful heroes who were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of
+the generation then living. Incidentally they contained a certain amount
+of religious information because the Gods, without exception, had taken
+sides in the quarrel and had neglected all other business for the joy of
+watching the rarest prize-fight that had ever been staged within their
+domain.
+
+The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either directly or
+indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva or Apollo never even
+dawned upon the Greek mind. These were a fine piece of literature and
+made excellent reading during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they
+caused children to feel proud of their own race.
+
+And that was all.
+
+In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city
+filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich
+with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and
+contented populace, Thales was born. In such a city he worked and taught
+and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed
+greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that
+his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average
+Miletian may have heard the name of Thales, just as the average New
+Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,
+and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe
+and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through
+a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper.
+
+That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got
+hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least
+greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries,
+is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going
+citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict
+which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of
+gravity.
+
+The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty
+by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern
+science.” And we can almost see the headlines in the “Miletus Gazette”
+saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.”
+
+But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck
+out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain,
+that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his
+wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before
+Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had
+already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical
+and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those
+intelligent enough to make use of it.
+
+Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.
+
+Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared
+to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial
+chamber in the heart of a pyramid.
+
+The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior
+of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the
+peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms.
+
+All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded
+the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will
+of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of
+the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s
+cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the
+treasury.
+
+Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of
+his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors
+along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was
+an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual
+sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man
+to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an elementary knowledge
+of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th
+of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would
+find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of
+Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness.
+
+Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the
+Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous
+eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack
+of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities
+(following a famous precedent established a few years previously during
+a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and
+had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to
+those whom they favored.
+
+For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where
+he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will,
+subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence
+of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own
+image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the
+same if there had been no more important engagement that particular
+afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast
+in Halicarnassus.
+
+Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he
+laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed
+(and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all
+things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world
+on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of
+time.
+
+Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It
+is possible that he may have put his ideas into concrete form (for the
+Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not
+a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our
+knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of
+information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these,
+however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with
+wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was
+typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.”
+But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is
+found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite
+as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.
+
+To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad and indifferent,
+was the supreme measure of all things. Wherefore they spent their leisure
+time patiently studying this strange creature as he was and not as they
+thought that he ought to be.
+
+This made it possible for them to remain on the most amicable terms with
+their fellow citizens and allowed them to wield a much greater power
+than if they had undertaken to show their neighbors a short cut to the
+Millennium.
+
+They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.
+
+But by their own example they managed to show how a true understanding of
+the forces of nature must inevitably lead to that inner peace of the soul
+upon which all true happiness depends and having in this way gained the
+good-will of their community they were given full liberty to study and
+explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture within those
+domains which were popularly believed to be the exclusive property of the
+Gods. And as one of the pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the
+long years of his useful career.
+
+Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks apart, although he
+had examined each little piece separately, and had openly questioned all
+sorts of things which the majority of the people since the beginning of
+time had held to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully
+in his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his
+heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.
+
+And once he had shown the way, there were many others eager to follow.
+
+There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who left Asia Minor
+for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent the following years as a
+“sophist” or private tutor in different Greek cities. He specialized
+in astronomy and among other things he taught that the sun was not a
+heavenly chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a
+red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger than the
+whole of Greece.
+
+When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from Heaven killed him for
+his audacity, he went a little further in his theories and stated boldly
+that the moon was covered with mountains and valleys and finally he even
+hinted at a certain “original matter” which was the beginning and the end
+of all things and which had existed from the very beginning of time.
+
+But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover, he trod
+upon dangerous ground, for he discussed something with which people were
+familiar. The sun and the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek
+did not care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But when
+the professor began to argue that all things had gradually grown and
+developed out of a vague substance called “original matter”—then he went
+decidedly too far. Such an assertion was in flat contradiction with the
+story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated
+the world by turning bits of stone into men and women. To deny the truth
+of a most solemn tale which all little Greek boys and girls had been
+taught in their early childhood was most dangerous to the safety of
+established society. It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their
+elders and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the subject of
+a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian Parents’ League.
+
+During the monarchy and the early days of the republic, the rulers of the
+city would have been more than able to protect a teacher of unpopular
+doctrines from the foolish hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants.
+But Athens by this time had become a full-fledged democracy and the
+freedom of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore,
+Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority of the people,
+was himself a favorite pupil of the great astronomer, and the legal
+prosecution of Anaxagoras was welcomed as an excellent political move
+against the city’s old dictator.
+
+A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader in
+one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a law passed which
+demanded “the immediate prosecution of all those who disbelieved in the
+established religion or held theories of their own about certain divine
+things.” Under this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison.
+Finally, however, the better elements in the city prevailed. Anaxagoras
+was allowed to go free after the payment of a small fine and move to
+Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he died, full of years and honor, in the
+year 428 B.C.
+
+His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official
+suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras was forced
+to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind and two centuries later they
+came to the notice of one Aristotle, who in turn used them as a basis
+for many of his own scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a
+thousand years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid Muhammad
+ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës), the great Arab physician who in
+turn popularized them among the students of the Moorish universities of
+southern Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote them
+down in a number of books. These were duly carried across the Pyrenees
+until they reached the universities of Paris and Boulogne. There they
+were translated into Latin and French and English and so thoroughly were
+they accepted by the people of western and northern Europe that today
+they have become an integral part of every primer of science and are
+considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.
+
+But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation after his
+trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach doctrines which were at
+variance with popular belief. And then, during the last years of the
+fifth century, a second case took place.
+
+The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering teacher who
+hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian colony in northern Greece.
+This spot already enjoyed a doubtful reputation as the birthplace of
+Democritus, the original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the
+law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the largest
+number of people the greatest amount of happiness obtainable with the
+smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore was regarded as a good
+deal of a radical and a fellow who should be under constant police
+supervision.
+
+Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to Athens and there,
+after many years of study, proclaimed that man was the measure of all
+things, that life was too short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry
+into the doubtful existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought
+to be used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and more
+thoroughly enjoyable.
+
+This statement, of course, went to the very root of the matter and it
+was bound to shock the faithful more than anything that had ever been
+written or said. Furthermore it was made during a very serious crisis in
+the war between Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of
+defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most evidently
+it was not the right moment to incur the wrath of the Gods by an inquiry
+into the scope of their supernatural powers. Protagoras was accused of
+atheism, of “godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the
+courts.
+
+Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and Protagoras, although
+a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.
+
+He fled.
+
+Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked, and it seems
+that he was drowned, for we never hear of him again.
+
+As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence, he was really
+not a philosopher at all but a young writer who harbored a personal
+grudge against the Gods because they had once failed to give him their
+support in a law-suit. He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance
+that finally his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts
+of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just then enjoyed
+great popularity among the people of northern Hellas. For this unseemly
+conduct he was condemned to death. But ere the sentence was executed,
+the poor devil was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth,
+continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully died of his own
+bad temper.
+
+And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the most famous case
+of Greek intolerance of which we possess any record, the judicial murder
+of Socrates.
+
+When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and
+that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later
+times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible
+example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of
+the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this
+brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the
+spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece
+in the fifth century before our era.
+
+For Socrates, at a time when the common people still firmly believed in
+a large number of divine beings, made himself the prophet of an only
+God. And although the Athenians may not always have known what he meant
+when he spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration
+which told him what to do and say), they were fully aware of his very
+unorthodox attitude towards those ideals which most of his neighbors
+continued to hold in holy veneration and his utter lack of respect for
+the established order of things. In the end, however, politics killed the
+old man and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the crowd)
+had really very little to do with the outcome of the trial.
+
+Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children and little
+money. The boy therefore had never been able to pay for a regular
+college course, for most of the philosophers were practical fellows and
+often charged as much as two thousand dollars for a single course of
+instruction. Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study of
+useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere waste of time
+and energy. Provided a person cultivated his conscience, so he reasoned,
+he could well do without geometry and a knowledge of the true nature of
+comets and planets was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.
+
+All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken nose and the
+shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with the loafers on the corner
+of the street and his nights listening to the harangues of his wife (who
+was obliged to provide for a large family by taking in washing, as her
+husband regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible
+detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and expeditions
+and ex-member of the Athenian senate was chosen among all the many
+teachers of his day to suffer for his opinions.
+
+In order to understand how this happened, we must know something about
+the politics of Athens in the days when Socrates rendered his painful but
+highly useful service to the cause of human intelligence and progress.
+
+All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was executed) Socrates
+tried to show his neighbors that they were wasting their opportunities;
+that they were living hollow and shallow lives; that they devoted
+entirely too much time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost
+invariably squandered the divine gifts with which a great and mysterious
+God had endowed them for the sake of a few hours of futile glory and
+self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly convinced was he of man’s high
+destiny that he broke through the bounds of all old philosophies and
+went even farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught
+that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached that “man’s
+invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate measure of all
+things and that it is not the Gods but we ourselves who shape our
+destiny.”
+
+The speech which Socrates made before the judges who were to decide
+his fate (there were five hundred of them to be precise and they had
+been so carefully chosen by his political enemies that some of them
+could actually read and write) was one of the most delightful bits of
+commonsense ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.
+
+“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has the right to tell
+another man what he should believe or to deprive him of the right to
+think as he pleases,” and further, “Provided that man remain on good
+terms with his own conscience, he can well do without the approbation
+of his friends, without money, without a family or even a home. But
+as no one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough
+examination of all the pros and cons of every problem, people must be
+given a chance to discuss all questions with complete freedom and without
+interference on the part of the authorities.”
+
+Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong statement
+at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian war there had been
+a bitter struggle in Athens between the rich and the poor, between
+capital and labor. Socrates was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and
+evil in both systems of government and who tried to find a compromise
+which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course, had made
+him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but thus far they had been too
+evenly balanced to take action against him.
+
+When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent Democrats
+gained complete control of the state and expelled the aristocrats,
+Socrates was a doomed man.
+
+His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the city before it
+was too late and this would have been a very wise thing to do.
+
+For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During the greater
+part of a century he had been a sort of vocal “columnist,” a terribly
+clever busy-body who had made it his hobby to expose the shams and the
+intellectual swindles of those who regarded themselves as the pillars
+of Athenian society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His
+name had become a household word throughout eastern Greece. When he said
+something funny in the morning, by night the whole town had heard about
+it. Plays had been written about him and when he was finally arrested and
+taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of Attica who was
+not thoroughly familiar with all the details of his career.
+
+Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like that honorable
+grain merchant who could neither read nor write but who knew all about
+the will of the Gods and therefore was loudest in his accusations)
+were undoubtedly convinced that they were rendering a great service to
+the community by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of the
+so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could only lead to
+laziness and crime and discontent among the slaves.
+
+It is rather amusing to remember that even under those circumstances,
+Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous virtuosity that a majority
+of the jury was all for letting him go free and suggested that he might
+be pardoned if only he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of
+debating, of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave
+his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not bother them with
+his eternal doubts.
+
+But Socrates would not hear of it.
+
+“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the
+still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road
+to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and
+I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”
+
+After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to
+death.
+
+Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy ship which made an
+annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet returned from its voyage and until
+then, the Athenian law did not allow any executions. The whole of this
+month the old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system
+of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity to escape, he
+refused to go. He had lived his life and had done his duty. He was tired
+and ready to depart. Until the hour of his execution he continued to talk
+with his friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right
+and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things of the spirit
+rather than those of the material world.
+
+Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon his couch and
+settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.
+
+For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this terrible
+outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove themselves from the
+scene of their former activities.
+
+But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed their former
+occupation as public teachers, and within a dozen years after the death
+of the old philosopher, his ideas were more popular than ever.
+
+The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult period. It was five
+years since the struggle for the leadership of the Greek peninsula had
+ended with the defeat of Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans.
+This had been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to say
+that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never wrote a line
+worth remembering or contributed a single idea to the sum total of human
+knowledge (with the exception of certain military tactics which survive
+in our modern game of football) thought that they had accomplished
+their task when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the
+Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the Athenian mind
+had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A decade after the end of the
+Peloponnesian war, the old harbor of the Piraeus was once more filled
+with ships from all parts of the world and Athenian admirals were again
+fighting at the head of the allied Greek navies.
+
+Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated by his
+own contemporaries, had made the city the intellectual capital of the
+world—the Paris of the fourth century before the birth of Christ.
+Whosoever in Rome or Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a
+fashionable education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit a
+school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.
+
+For this ancient world, which we modern people find so difficult to
+understand properly, took the problem of existence seriously.
+
+Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of pagan civilization,
+the impression has gained ground that the average Roman or Greek was
+a highly immoral person who paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous
+Gods and for the rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners,
+drinking vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the pretty
+prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a change he went to war and
+slaughtered innocent Germans and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of
+shedding blood.
+
+Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there were a great
+many merchants and war contractors who had accumulated their millions
+without much regard for those ethical principles which Socrates had so
+well defined before his judges. Because these people were very wealthy,
+they had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that they
+enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded as commendable
+representatives of the civilization of their day.
+
+We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions as one of
+the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and her colonies. We look at the
+ruins of the forty room palace which the old profiteer built out of his
+ill-gotten gains. And we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”
+
+Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who was one of the
+house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find ourselves in the company
+of a spirit as lofty and as exalted as ever lived.
+
+I know that the making of generalizations about our neighbors and
+about other nations is one of the most popular of indoor sports, but
+let us not forget that Epictetus, the philosopher, was quite as truly
+a representative of the time in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the
+imperial flunkey, and that the desire for holiness was as great twenty
+centuries ago as it is today.
+
+Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from that which is
+practiced today. It was the product of an essentially European brain and
+had nothing to do with the Orient. But the “barbarians” who established
+it as their ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were
+our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy of life
+which was highly successful if we agree that a clear conscience and a
+simple, straightforward life, together with good health and a moderate
+but sufficient income, are the best guarantee for general happiness
+and contentment. The future of the soul did not interest these people
+overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special sort of mammal
+which by reason of its intellectual application had risen high above
+the other creatures which crawled upon this earth. If they frequently
+referred to the Gods, they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons”
+or “aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name, but Zeus
+in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical a value as x or y in the
+problems of Euclid and meant just as much or as little.
+
+Life it was which interested those men and next to living, art.
+
+Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied and following
+the method of reasoning which Socrates had originated and made popular,
+they achieved some very remarkable results.
+
+That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world they went to
+absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more than human. But Plato is the
+only one among all the teachers of antiquity who from sheer love for a
+perfect world ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.
+
+This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved disciple of
+Socrates and became his literary executor.
+
+In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates had ever said
+or thought into a series of dialogues which might be truthfully called
+the Socratian Gospels.
+
+When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain of the more
+obscure points in his master’s doctrines and explained them in a series
+of brilliant essays. And finally he conducted a number of lecture courses
+which spread the Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond
+the confines of Attica.
+
+In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and unselfish
+devotion that we might almost compare him to St. Paul. But whereas St.
+Paul had led a most adventurous and dangerous existence, ever traveling
+from north to south and from west to east that he might bring the Good
+Tidings to all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged from
+his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to come to him.
+
+Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent wealth
+allowed him to do this.
+
+In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through his mother
+could trace his descent to no one less than Solon. Then as soon as he
+came of age he inherited a fortune more than sufficient for his simple
+needs.
+
+And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly traveled to the
+Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to follow a few of the lectures in
+the Platonic University.
+
+For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young men of his time.
+He served in the army, but without any particular interest in military
+affairs. He went in for outdoor sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly
+good runner, but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium.
+Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal of his
+time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and paid a short visit
+to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather Solon had done before
+him. After that, however, he returned home for good and during fifty
+consecutive years he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners
+of a pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the river
+Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the Academy.
+
+He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched
+over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our
+modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and
+believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he
+taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful
+bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful
+institutions to beautiful ideas.
+
+This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain
+definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his
+zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they
+made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which
+has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by
+the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and
+reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of
+those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private
+income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound
+distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to
+have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the
+members of the “upper class.”
+
+Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval
+scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became
+a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.
+
+For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his
+conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in
+the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
+
+For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian
+sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded
+with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He
+had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in
+the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat
+and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated
+by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land,
+and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew
+convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average
+citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state
+of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of
+his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for
+all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these
+regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded
+like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that
+liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a
+short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.
+
+The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas
+Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped
+from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams.
+He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas
+ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states,
+whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun
+and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast
+Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the
+banks of the Indus River.
+
+But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon the unruly
+democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest
+of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under
+eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks.
+
+I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man
+who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added
+so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an
+intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans
+and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without
+exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.
+
+At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in
+Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university.
+After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336
+when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden
+near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and
+soon attracted pupils from all over the world.
+
+Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing
+the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last
+beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more
+energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other
+cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either
+too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of
+those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the
+glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded
+the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years
+after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught
+still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the
+limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and
+mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word
+for free thinking and unbelief.
+
+If they had had their own way, they would have forced him to leave their
+country. But they wisely kept these opinions to themselves. For this
+short-sighted, stoutish gentleman, famous for his good taste in books
+and in clothes, was no negligible quantity in the political life of that
+day, no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town by a
+couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the son of a Macedonian
+court-physician and he had been brought up with the royal princes.
+And furthermore, as soon as he had finished his studies, he had been
+appointed tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been the
+daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed the friendship and
+the protection of the most powerful ruler the world had ever seen and the
+regent who administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s absence
+on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm should befall one who had
+been the boon companion of his imperial master.
+
+No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death reached Athens than
+Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered what had happened to
+Socrates and felt no desire to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had
+carefully avoided mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his
+distaste for the democratic form of government and his lack of belief
+in the sovereign abilities of the common people were known to all. And
+when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst of fury, expelled the Macedonian
+garrison, Aristotle moved across the Euboean Sound and went to live in
+Calchis, where he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the
+Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.
+
+At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what positive
+grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as usual in that nation of
+amateur orators, his case was inextricably mixed up with politics and
+his unpopularity was due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few
+local ward-bosses, rather than to the expression of any startlingly new
+heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance of Zeus.
+
+Nor does it matter very much.
+
+The days of the small independent republics were numbered.
+
+Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European heritage of
+Alexander and Greece became one of their many provinces.
+
+Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the Romans in most
+matters were even more tolerant than the Greeks of the Golden Age had
+been and they permitted their subjects to think as they pleased, provided
+they did not question certain principles of political expediency upon
+which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had, since time
+immemorial, been safely builded.
+
+All the same there existed a subtle difference between the ideals which
+animated the contemporaries of Cicero and those which had been held
+sacred by the followers of such a man as Pericles. The old leaders of
+Greek thought had based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions
+which they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and
+meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without the preliminary
+study. They were merely indifferent, and were proud of the fact. They
+were interested in practical things. They were men of action and had a
+deep-seated contempt for words.
+
+If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath an old olive
+tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of government or the influence
+of the moon upon the tides, they were more than welcome to do so.
+
+If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some practical use,
+then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise, together with
+singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture and science, this business
+of philosophizing had better be left to the Greeks and to the other
+foreigners whom Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world
+with those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.
+
+Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention to the
+administration of their ever increasing domains; they would drill the
+necessary companies of foreign infantry and cavalry to protect their
+outlying provinces; they would survey the roads that were to connect
+Spain with Bulgaria; and generally they would devote their energies to
+the keeping of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and
+nations.
+
+Let us give honor where honor is due.
+
+The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected a structure
+which under one form or another has survived until our own time, and that
+in itself is no mean accomplishment. As long as the necessary taxes were
+paid and a certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct
+laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes enjoyed a very
+large degree of liberty. They could believe or disbelieve whatever they
+pleased. They could worship one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples
+full of Gods. It made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to
+profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling empire
+were forever reminded that the “pax Romana” depended for its success upon
+a liberal application of the principle of “live and let live.” They must
+under no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or with the
+strangers within their gates. And if perchance they thought that their
+Gods had been insulted, they must not rush to the magistrate for relief.
+“For,” as the Emperor Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if
+the Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely
+take care of themselves.”
+
+And with such scant words of consolation, all similar cases were
+instantly dismissed and people were requested to keep their private
+opinions out of the courts.
+
+If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle down among the
+Colossians, they had a right to bring their own Gods with them and erect
+a temple of their own in the town of Colossae. But if the Colossians
+should for similar reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they
+must be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal freedom of
+worship.
+
+It has often been argued that the Romans could permit themselves the
+luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude because they felt an
+equal contempt for both the Colossians and the Cappadocians and all the
+other savage tribes who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been
+true. I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand years,
+a form of almost complete religious tolerance was strictly maintained
+within the greater part of civilized and semi-civilized Europe, Asia and
+Africa and that the Romans developed a technique of statecraft which
+produced a maximum of practical results together with a minimum of
+friction.
+
+To many people it seemed that the millennium had been achieved and that
+this condition of mutual forbearance would last forever.
+
+But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built upon force.
+
+Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had destroyed herself.
+
+The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand battlefields.
+
+For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens
+had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial
+empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.
+
+At last the reaction set in.
+
+Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted by the impossible
+task of a single city ruling an entire world.
+
+And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people grew tired of life and
+lost the zest for living.
+
+They had come to own all the country-houses, all the town-houses, all the
+yachts and all the stage-coaches they could ever hope to use.
+
+They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the world.
+
+They had eaten everything, they had seen everything, they had heard
+everything.
+
+They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been everywhere,
+they had made love to all the women from Barcelona to Thebes. All the
+books that had ever been written were in their libraries. The best
+pictures that had ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest
+musicians of the entire world had entertained them at their meals.
+And, as children, they had been instructed by the best professors and
+pedagogues who had taught them everything there was to be taught. As a
+result, all food and drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull,
+all women had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed
+into a burden which a good many people were willing to drop at the first
+respectable opportunity.
+
+There remained only one consolation, the contemplation of the Unknown and
+the Invisible.
+
+The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent Roman any
+longer took stock in the silly nursery rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.
+
+There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics and
+the Cynics, all of whom preached charity and self-denial and the virtues
+of an unselfish and useful life.
+
+But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in the books of Zeno
+and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch, which were to be found in every
+cornerstore library.
+
+But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found to lack the
+necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans began to clamor for a certain
+amount of “emotion” with their spiritual meals.
+
+Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they really were, if
+we associate the idea of religion with a desire to lead useful and noble
+lives) could only appeal to a very small number of people, and almost all
+of those belonged to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of
+private instruction at the hands of competent Greek teachers.
+
+To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies meant less than
+nothing at all. They too had reached a point of development at which a
+good deal of the ancient mythology seemed the childish invention of rude
+and credulous ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as their
+so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence of any and all
+personal Gods.
+
+Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do under such
+circumstances. They paid a formal and outward tribute of respect to the
+official Gods of the Republic and then betook themselves for real comfort
+and happiness to one of the many mystery religions which during the last
+two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the ancient city on the
+banks of the Tiber.
+
+The word “mystery” which I have used before was of Greek origin. It
+originally meant a gathering of “initiated people”—of men and women whose
+“mouth had been shut” against the betrayal of those most holy secrets
+which only the true members of the mystery were supposed to know and
+which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a college fraternity or
+the cabalistic incantations of the Independent Order of Sea-Mice.
+
+During the first century of our era, however, a mystery was nothing more
+nor less than a special form of worship, a denomination, a church. If a
+Greek or a Roman (if you will pardon a little juggling with time) had
+left the Presbyterian church for the Christian Science church, he would
+have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.” For the
+word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of the Lord,” is of comparatively
+recent origin and was not known in those days.
+
+If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish
+to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next
+Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five
+columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported
+from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries
+and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and
+salvation everlasting.
+
+Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of
+imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had
+made this unavoidable. From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern
+Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the
+mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly
+outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been
+forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic
+laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public
+drunkenness and many other things that were even worse.
+
+Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen
+strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become
+as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.
+
+As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto the world a
+primary system of abstract truth and a practical code of conduct, based
+upon virtue, they now supplied the people of foreign lands who insisted
+upon images and incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and
+Dionysus and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above suspicion as
+far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless enjoying immense
+popularity.
+
+The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had frequented the
+shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar with their great God Baal
+(the arch-enemy of Jehovah) and with Astarte his wife, that strange
+creature to whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all
+his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very heart of
+Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized as the official
+protector of the city of Carthage during her long struggle for the
+supremacy of the Mediterranean and who finally after the destruction of
+all her temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the shape
+of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.
+
+But the most important of all, because highly popular among the soldiers
+of the army, was a deity whose broken images can still be found
+underneath every rubbish pile that marks the Roman frontier from the
+mouth of the Rhine to the source of the Tigris.
+
+This was the great God Mithras.
+
+Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of Light and Air and
+Truth, and he had been worshiped in the plains of the Caspian lowlands
+when our first ancestors took possession of those wonderful grazing
+fields and made ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards
+became known as Europe. To them he had been the giver of all good things
+and they believed that the rulers of this earth exercised their power
+only by the grace of his mighty will. Hence, as a token of his divine
+favor, he sometimes bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit
+of that celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded, and
+although he is gone and his name has been forgotten, the kindly saints
+of the Middle Ages, with their halo of light, remind us of an ancient
+tradition which was started thousands of years before the Church was ever
+dreamed of.
+
+But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly long time,
+it has been very difficult to reconstruct his life with any degree
+of accuracy. There was a good reason for this. The early Christian
+missionaries abhorred the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more
+bitter than that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their
+heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their most serious
+rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible to remove everything that
+might possibly remind people of his existence. In this task they
+succeeded so well that all Mithras temples have disappeared and that
+not a scrap of written evidence remains about a religion which for
+more than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as Methodism or
+Presbyterianism is in the United States of today.
+
+However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a careful perusal
+of certain ruins which could not be entirely destroyed in the days before
+the invention of dynamite, we have been able to overcome this initial
+handicap and now possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting
+God and the things for which he stood.
+
+Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously born of a
+rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle, several nearby shepherds came to
+worship him and make him happy with their gifts.
+
+As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange adventures. Many
+of these remind us closely of the deeds which had made Hercules such a
+popular hero with the children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was
+often very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had engaged in
+a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten him. But he was so generous
+in his victory, that the sun and he had become like brothers, and were
+often mistaken for each other.
+
+When the God of all evil had sent a drought which threatened to kill
+the race of man, Mithras had struck a rock with his arrow, and behold!
+plentiful water had gushed forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman
+(for that was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to achieve
+his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had heard of it, had
+warned one man, had told him to build a big boat and load it with his
+relatives and his flocks and in this way had saved the human race from
+destruction. Until finally, having done all he could to save the world
+from the consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven to
+rule the just and righteous for all time.
+
+Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged to go through an
+elaborate form of initiation and were forced to eat a ceremonious meal
+of bread and wine in memory of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and
+his friend the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism in
+a font of water and do many other things which have no special interest
+to us, as that form of religion was completely exterminated more than
+fifteen hundred years ago.
+
+Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon a footing of
+absolute equality. Together they prayed before the same candle-lit
+altars. Together they chanted the same holy hymns and together they took
+part in the festivities which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of
+December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore they abstained
+from all work on the first day of the week, which even today is called
+Sun-day in honor of the great God. And finally when they died, they were
+laid away in patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good
+should enter into their just reward and the wicked should be cast into
+the fire everlasting.
+
+The success of these different mysteries, the widespread influence of
+Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points to a condition far removed
+from religious indifference. Indeed the early centuries of the empire
+were a period of restless search after something that should satisfy the
+emotional needs of the masses.
+
+But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened. A small
+vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga, the starting point for
+the overland route to Europe. Among the passengers were two men not
+overburdened with luggage.
+
+Their names were Paul and Barnabas.
+
+They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport and was well
+versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.
+
+It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.
+
+Christianity had set out to conquer the world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT
+
+
+The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used
+as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine
+origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest
+that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans
+were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest
+missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.
+
+Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the
+soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate
+folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the
+Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere
+along the bay of Naples.
+
+But they were only part of the story.
+
+Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence
+of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the
+Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.
+
+There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking
+tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an
+uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and
+women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village
+beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own
+hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore had
+been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very
+real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis
+and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and
+thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by
+hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of
+years ago.
+
+Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the anointed, as the
+Greek missionaries called him, had been on this earth only a short time
+ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to
+him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the
+Emperor Tiberius.
+
+And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from
+the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken
+with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had
+actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon
+when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the
+Roman governor.
+
+We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular
+appeal of this new faith.
+
+It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy
+and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage
+over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly
+expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which
+radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the
+exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The
+slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the
+high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives
+beheld the rays of a new hope.
+
+At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free.
+
+No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the
+great of this world.
+
+On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father.
+
+They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.
+
+They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters
+who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas.
+
+For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity was the
+first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance.
+
+Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the
+soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in
+a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with
+the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon
+rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of
+private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures
+have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies,
+brotherhoods and federations; when they have begun to obey a single
+directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes
+and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest,
+then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers
+and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the
+early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true
+founders of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early
+development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in
+all history.
+
+The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the ancient empire
+was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side
+it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and
+charity which the Master himself had taught. But on the other side it
+found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism
+which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart
+from the rest of the world.
+
+In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance
+and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men
+which was as efficient as it was illogical.
+
+To understand how this could have happened, we must go back once more to
+the days of Paul and to the first fifty years after the death of Christ,
+and we must firmly grasp the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform
+movement within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely
+nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened the rulers
+of the Jewish state and no one else.
+
+The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when Jesus lived had
+understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally they had feared the
+ultimate consequences of an agitation which boldly threatened to question
+a spiritual monopoly which was based upon nothing more substantial than
+brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they had been forced
+to act in a spirit of panic and had sent their enemy to the gallows
+before the Roman authorities had had time to intervene and deprive them
+of their victim.
+
+What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible to say. He was
+killed long before he was able to organize his disciples into a special
+sect nor did he leave a single word of writing from which his followers
+could conclude what he wanted them to do.
+
+In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in disguise.
+
+The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection of
+ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free to follow the
+spirit of their master’s words rather than the letter of his law. Had
+they been bound by a book, they would very likely have devoted all their
+energies to a theological discussion upon the ever enticing subject of
+commas and semi-colons.
+
+In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional scholars
+could have possibly shown the slightest interest in the new faith and
+Christianity would have gone the way of so many other sects which begin
+with elaborate written programs and end when the police are called upon
+to throw the haggling theologians into the street.
+
+At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize what
+tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman Empire, it is a matter
+of surprise that the authorities took practically no steps to quell a
+movement which was fully as dangerous to the safety of the state as an
+invasion by Huns or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this
+eastern prophet had caused great excitement among their house slaves,
+that the women were forever telling each other about the imminent
+reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that quite a number of old men
+had solemnly predicted the impending destruction of this world by a ball
+of fire.
+
+But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had gone into
+hysterics about some new religious hero. Most likely it would not be the
+last time, either. Meanwhile the police would see to it that these poor,
+frenzied fanatics did not disturb the peace of the realm.
+
+And that was that.
+
+The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act. The
+followers of the new mystery went about their business in a most
+exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow the government. At
+first, several slaves had expected that the common fatherhood of God and
+the common brotherhood of man would imply a cessation of the old relation
+between master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had hastened
+to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was an invisible and
+intangible kingdom of the soul and that people on this earth had better
+take things as they found them, in expectation of the final reward which
+awaited them in Heaven.
+
+Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of matrimony as
+established by the harsh laws of Rome, had rushed to the conclusion that
+Christianity was synonymous with emancipation and full equality of rights
+between men and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a number
+of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to refrain from all
+those extremes which would make their church suspect in the eyes of the
+more conservative pagans and had persuaded them to continue in that state
+of semi-slavery which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and Eve had
+been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most commendable respect
+for the law and as far as the authorities were concerned, the Christian
+missionaries could therefore come and go at will and preach as best
+suited their own individual tastes and preferences.
+
+But as has happened so often in history, the masses had shown themselves
+less tolerant than their rulers. Just because people are poor it does
+not necessarily follow that they are high-minded citizens who could be
+prosperous and happy if their conscience would only permit them to make
+those compromises which are held to be necessary for the accumulation of
+wealth.
+
+And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by free meals and
+free prize-fights, was no exception to this rule. At first it derived a
+great deal of rough pleasure from those sober-faced groups of men and
+women who with rapt attention listened to the weird stories about a God
+who had ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal,
+and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for the hoodlums who
+pelted their gatherings with stones and dirt.
+
+The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a detached view of
+this new development.
+
+The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted of certain
+solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified occasions and paid for in
+cash. This money went toward the support of the church officers. When
+thousands of people began to desert the old shrines and went to another
+church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests were faced
+by a very serious reduction in their salary. This of course did not
+please them at all, and soon they were loud in their abuse of the godless
+heretics who turned their backs upon the Gods of their fathers and burned
+incense to the memory of a foreign prophet.
+
+But there was another class of people in the city who had even better
+reason to hate the Christians. Those were the fakirs, who as Indian Yogis
+and Pooughies and hierophants of the great and only mysteries of Isis
+and Ishtar and Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and
+easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle classes. If the
+Christians had set up a rival establishment and had charged a handsome
+price for their own particular revelations, the guild of spook-doctors
+and palmists and necromancers would have had no reason for complaint.
+Business was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not mind if a
+bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a plague upon
+their silly notions!—refused to take any reward. Yea, they even gave
+away what they had, fed the hungry and shared their own roof with the
+homeless. And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and
+they never could have done this unless they were possessed of certain
+hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no one thus far had been
+able to discover.
+
+Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers. It was
+the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited
+peasants from all parts of the empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious
+laws that rule the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those
+who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no
+apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The
+hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay
+for one is a fine neighbor and a good fellow. But the man who holds
+himself aloof and refuses to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum,
+who does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being dragged
+through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a spoil-sport and an enemy
+of the community at large.
+
+When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that part of Rome
+inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was set for the first
+organized attacks upon the Christians.
+
+At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of drunken
+conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire that he might get rid
+of the slums and rebuild the city according to his own plans. The crowd,
+however, knew better. It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who
+were forever telling each other about the happy day when large balls of
+fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the wicked would go up in
+flames.
+
+Once this story had been successfully started, others followed in rapid
+succession. One old woman had heard the Christians talk with the dead.
+Another knew that they stole little children and cut their throats and
+smeared their blood upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course,
+no one had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous
+practices, but that was only because they were so terribly clever and had
+bribed the police. But now at last they had been caught red-handed and
+they would be made to suffer for their vile deeds.
+
+Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this occasion, we
+know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems, were among the victims for
+thereafter their names are never heard again.
+
+That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished nothing, it
+is needless to state. The noble dignity with which the martyrs accepted
+their fate was the best possible propaganda for the new ideas and for
+every Christian who perished, there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager
+to take his place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act
+of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year 68), the
+Christians returned to their old haunts and everything was as it had been
+before.
+
+By this time the Roman authorities were making a great discovery. They
+began to suspect that a Christian was not exactly the same thing as a Jew.
+
+We can hardly blame them for having committed this error. The historical
+researches of the last hundred years have made it increasingly clear that
+the Synagogue was the clearing-house through which the new faith was
+passed on to the rest of the world.
+
+Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had always been most
+careful in observing the ancient laws of his fathers and that he had
+addressed himself almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. Once, and then
+only for a short time, had he left his native country, but the task
+which he had set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his
+fellow-Jews. Nor was there anything in what he had ever said which could
+have given the average Roman the impression that there was a deliberate
+difference between Christianity and Judaism.
+
+What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had clearly seen the
+terrible abuses which had entered the church of his fathers. He had
+loudly and sometimes successfully protested against them. But he had
+fought his battles for reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned
+upon him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some one had
+mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he would have rejected
+the idea as preposterous. But like many a reformer before his day and
+after, he had gradually been forced into a position where compromise
+was no longer possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a
+fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of reform, who
+were deeply perplexed when they suddenly found themselves at the head
+of a brand new party “outside” the organization to which they belonged,
+whereas they were merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”
+
+For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity (to use the name
+long before it had been coined) was the religion of a small Jewish sect
+which had a few adherents in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and
+Galilee and which had never been heard of outside of the province of
+Syria.
+
+It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen of Jewish
+descent, who had first recognized the possibilities of the new doctrine
+as a religion for all the world. The story of his suffering tells us
+how bitterly the Jewish Christians had been opposed to the idea of a
+universal religion instead of a purely national denomination, membership
+to which should only be open to people of their own race. They had hated
+the man who dared preach salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly
+that on his last visit to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered
+the fate of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the fury
+of his enraged compatriots.
+
+But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman soldiers to
+protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal town from where he
+could be shipped to Rome for that famous trial which never took place.
+
+A few years after his death, that which he had so often feared during his
+lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold actually occurred.
+
+Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place of the temple of
+Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor of Jupiter. The name of the
+city was changed to Aelia Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of
+the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they were
+either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed to live within
+several miles of the ruins on pain of death.
+
+It was the final destruction of their holy city which had been so
+disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several centuries afterwards,
+in the little villages of the Judaean hinterland colonies might have
+been found of strange people who called themselves “poor men” and who
+waited with great patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end
+of the world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the old
+Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time to time we hear them
+mentioned in books written during the fifth and sixth centuries. Far away
+from civilization, they developed certain strange doctrines of their own
+in which hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After the
+seventh century however we no longer find any trace of these so-called
+Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious Mohammedans had killed them all.
+And, anyway, if they had managed to exist a few hundred years longer,
+they would not have been able to avert the inevitable.
+
+Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into one large
+political union, had made the world ready for the idea of a universal
+religion. Christianity, because it was both simple and practical and
+full of a direct appeal, was predestined to succeed where Judaism and
+Mithraism and all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail.
+But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of certain
+rather unpleasant characteristics which only too clearly betrayed its
+origin.
+
+The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe
+had carried a message of hope and mercy.
+
+But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.
+
+He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.
+
+But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.
+
+And his name was Religious Intolerance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
+
+
+The early church was a very simple organization. As soon as it became
+apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death
+of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and
+that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a
+good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of
+government.
+
+Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews) had come together
+in the synagogue. When the rift had occurred between the Jews and the
+Gentiles, the latter had betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house
+and if none could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the
+curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone quarry.
+
+At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath, but when
+bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians
+increased, the latter began to drop the habit of keeping the Sabbath-day
+and preferred to meet on Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had
+taken place.
+
+These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to the popular as
+well as to the emotional character of the entire movement. There were no
+set speeches or sermons. There were no preachers. Both men and women,
+whenever they felt themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in
+meeting to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes, if we
+are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout brethren, “speaking with
+tongues,” had filled the heart of the great apostle with apprehension for
+the future. For most of them were simple folk without much education. No
+one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations but very often
+they got so excited that they raved like maniacs and while a church may
+survive persecution, it is helpless against ridicule. Hence the efforts
+of Paul and Peter and their successors to bring some semblance of order
+into this chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.
+
+At first these efforts met with little success. A regular program seemed
+in direct contradiction to the democratic nature of the Christian faith.
+In the end, however, practical considerations supervened and the meetings
+became subject to a definite ritual.
+
+They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to placate the Jewish
+Christians who might be present). Then the congregation united in a song
+of praise of more recent composition for the benefit of the Roman and the
+Greek worshipers.
+
+The only prescribed form of oration was the famous prayer in which Jesus
+had summed up his entire philosophy of life. The preaching, however, for
+several centuries remained entirely spontaneous and the sermons were
+delivered only by those who felt that they had something to say.
+
+But when the number of those gatherings increased, when the police,
+forever on the guard against secret societies, began to make inquiries,
+it was necessary that certain men be elected to represent the Christians
+in their dealings with the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken
+highly of the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities
+which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny vessels which were
+tossed upon a turbulent sea and were very much in need of a clever pilot
+if they were to survive the fury of the angry ocean.
+
+And so the faithful came together once more and elected deacons and
+deaconesses, pious men and women who were the “servants” of the
+community, who took care of the sick and the poor (an object of great
+concern to the early Christians) and who looked after the property of the
+community and took care of all the small daily chores.
+
+Still later when the church continued to grow in membership and the
+business of administration had become too intricate for mere amateurs,
+it was entrusted to a small group of “elders.” These were known by their
+Greek name of Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”
+
+After a number of years, when every village or city possessed a Christian
+church of its own, the need was felt for a common policy. Then an
+“overseer” (an Episkopos or Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire
+district and direct its dealings with the Roman government.
+
+Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the empire, and
+those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem and Carthage and Rome
+and Alexandria and Athens were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who
+were almost as important as the civil and military governors of their
+provinces.
+
+In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over that part of the
+world where Jesus had lived and suffered and died enjoyed the greatest
+respect. But after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the generation which
+had expected the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared
+from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in his ruined palace saw
+himself deprived of his former prestige.
+
+And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was taken by
+the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the civilized world and who
+guarded the sites where Peter and Paul, the great apostles of the west,
+had suffered their martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.
+
+This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa, the common
+expression of love and respect bestowed upon members of the clergy.
+In the course of centuries, the title of Papa however became almost
+exclusively associated in people’s minds with the particular “Father”
+who was the head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the
+Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of Rome, and not by
+any chance the Bishop of Constantinople or the Bishop of Carthage. This
+was an entirely normal development. When we read in our newspaper about
+“the President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.” We
+know that the head of our government is meant and not the President of
+the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President of Harvard University or the
+President of the League of Nations.
+
+The first time the name occurred officially in a document was in the
+year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital of a highly successful
+empire and the power of the bishops was entirely overshadowed by that of
+the emperors. But during the next three hundred years, under the constant
+menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors of Caesar
+began to look for a new home that would offer them greater safety. This
+they found in a city in a different part of their domains. It was called
+Byzantium, after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said to
+have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated on the straits
+which separated Europe from Asia and dominating the trade route between
+the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, it controlled several important
+monopolies and was of such great commercial importance that already
+Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this rich fortress.
+
+Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of Alexander and
+after having been for a short while part of Macedonia it had finally been
+incorporated into the Roman Empire.
+
+And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its Golden Horn
+filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the
+center of the empire.
+
+The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven
+knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had
+come when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time; when
+one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the
+Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws
+made a thousand miles away.
+
+But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow some
+one good. With the emperors gone, the bishops remained behind as the
+most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible
+successors to the glory of the imperial throne.
+
+And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were
+shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office
+had attracted the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be
+the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a
+hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared
+to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate
+necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and failed.
+
+But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved
+consistently and persistently towards one goal. In all they did and said
+and thought they were guided by the desire to increase the glory of God
+and the strength and power of the organization which represented the
+divine will on earth.
+
+How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.
+
+While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which
+hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the
+empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand
+institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much
+useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but
+more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.
+
+The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought at a terrible
+cost.
+
+For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a
+palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in
+which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and
+mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary
+human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred
+years it developed into a new supertheocracy, compared to which the
+old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and
+carefree citizens.
+
+And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall
+now try to show you.
+
+Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Coliseum and
+within those wind-swept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where
+thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.
+
+But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions
+of the adherents of the new faith, these had very little to do with
+religious intolerance.
+
+They were purely political.
+
+The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed the greatest
+possible freedom.
+
+But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector,
+who bragged of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with
+foreign invasion and openly defied the laws of the land upon every
+suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an
+enemy of the state and was treated as such.
+
+That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the
+slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when
+he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary
+looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.
+
+A Roman police judge after all was only human. When he suddenly found
+himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him
+a very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience
+had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides
+he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use
+“tact” in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and
+argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles,
+very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.
+
+In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering
+the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified
+vindication of the supreme power of the state. But prison and torture
+meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until
+after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to
+leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.
+
+The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out between the
+authorities and their Christian subjects was long and painful. We
+possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims.
+According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century,
+several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one
+of the persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for their
+convictions could easily be enumerated.”
+
+On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early saints we
+find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of bloodshed that we
+begin to wonder how a religion exposed to these constant and murderous
+persecutions could ever have survived at all.
+
+No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call me a
+prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to myself and let my
+readers draw their own conclusions. By studying the lives of the Emperors
+Decius (249-251) and Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a
+fairly accurate opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance
+during the worst era of persecution.
+
+Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and liberal minded a ruler
+as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself unable to handle the problem of his
+Christian subjects successfully, they will derive some idea about the
+difficulties which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of
+the empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful to
+their oath of office or execute those of their relatives and neighbors
+who could not or would not obey those few and very simple ordinances upon
+which the imperial government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.
+
+Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality towards
+their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily extending the sphere of their
+influence.
+
+Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the request of the
+Christian members of the Roman senate who complained that it hurt their
+feelings to gather in the shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the
+removal of the statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years
+had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators protested.
+This did very little good and only caused a number of them to be sent
+into exile.
+
+It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted patriot of great
+personal distinction, wrote his famous letter in which he tried to
+suggest a compromise.
+
+“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian neighbors
+not live in peace and harmony? We look up to the same stars, we are
+fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky.
+What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the
+ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be
+only one path leading to an answer.”
+
+He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the danger which
+threatened the old Roman tradition of a broadminded religious policy.
+Simultaneously with the removal of the statue of Victory in Rome a
+violent quarrel had broken out between two contending factions of the
+Christians who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute gave rise
+to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance to which the
+world had ever listened. Themistius the philosopher, who was the author,
+had remained faithful to the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor
+Valens took sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox
+Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of his true
+duty.
+
+“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can hope to
+exercise any authority. That is the domain of the virtues and especially
+that of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion within that
+field causes hypocrisy and conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence
+it is much better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only
+by toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance is
+a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated his desire for
+a number of different religions. And God alone can judge the methods by
+which humanity aspires to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery.
+God delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him. He likes
+the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others, the Egyptians
+again others.”
+
+Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.
+
+The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was dead and all
+efforts to set back the clock of history were doomed beforehand. Life
+means progress, and progress means suffering. The old order of society
+was rapidly disintegrating. The army was a mutinous mob of foreign
+mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England and the other
+outlying districts had long since been surrendered to the barbarians.
+
+When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant young men who in
+centuries past had entered the service of the state found themselves
+deprived of all but one chance for advancement. That was a career in the
+Church. As Christian archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise
+the power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors, they
+could be certain of a fairly large public if they were willing to devote
+themselves exclusively to theological subjects. As Christian diplomats,
+they could be sure of rapid promotion if they were willing to represent
+the bishop of Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake
+the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous chieftain in
+the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And finally, as Christian financiers,
+they could hope to make fortunes administering those rapidly increasing
+estates which had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest
+landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.
+
+We have seen something of the same nature during the last five years.
+Up to the year 1914 the young men of Europe who were ambitious and did
+not depend upon manual labor for their support almost invariably entered
+the service of the state. They became officers of the different imperial
+and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher judicial positions,
+administered the finances or spent years in the colonies as governors
+or military commanders. They did not expect to grow very rich, but the
+social prestige of the offices which they held was very great and by the
+application of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty,
+they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable old age.
+
+Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal
+fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some
+few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a
+lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however,
+surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had been educated
+to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention.
+Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between
+an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry
+for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And so
+within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most of the former
+officers and state officials doing the sort of work which they would not
+have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly. Besides, as most
+of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in
+executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they have
+found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are
+today a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had
+ever expected to be.
+
+What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries ago.
+
+It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry
+back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan war to take
+orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple
+cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young
+men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes
+of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly. And therefore if they were
+both bright fellows (as they well may have been) they soon learned to
+appreciate the other fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully.
+For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things
+appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.
+
+Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that there shall
+be one small group of clever men and women who do the ruling and a much
+larger group of not-quite-so-bright men and women who shall do the
+obeying. The stakes for which these two groups play are at different
+periods known by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and
+Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance on the other.
+They have been called Empire and Church and Knighthood and Monarchy and
+Democracy and Slavery and Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious
+law which governs human development works the same in Moscow as it does
+in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound to neither time nor
+place. It has often manifested itself under strange forms and disguises.
+More than once it has worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its
+love for humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring
+about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath such
+pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and continues to hide the grim
+truth of that primeval law which insists that the first duty of man
+is to keep alive. People who resent the fact that they were born in a
+world of mammals are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us
+“materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they have always
+regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they are shocked to discover
+that it is a science which obeys the same iron rules which govern the
+rest of the universe. They might as well fight against the habits of
+parallel lines or the results of the tables of multiplication.
+
+Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.
+
+For then and only then can history some day be turned into something
+that shall have a practical value to the human race and cease to be the
+ally and confederate of those who profit by racial prejudice, tribal
+intolerance and the ignorance of the vast majority of their fellow
+citizens.
+
+And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him look for the
+proof in the chronicles of those centuries of which I was writing a few
+pages back.
+
+Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the
+first four centuries.
+
+Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of
+the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the
+Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterwards, when
+they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were
+attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart
+and soul. But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly
+master to a Heavenly ruler because the chances for advancement with the
+latter were infinitely greater.
+
+The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did
+not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new
+disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to
+be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical
+and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of
+politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took
+their faith more emotionally, were offered every possible opportunity
+to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence
+upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal
+holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their
+souls.
+
+In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion
+and contemplation.
+
+The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely
+a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from
+the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as
+ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast
+real-estate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less
+opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to
+harken back to the “good old days” when all true Christians had spent
+their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might
+again be happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been a
+natural development of the times.
+
+This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an
+enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the
+next thousand years and which was to give the Church a devoted group of
+very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was of
+Oriental origin.
+
+This need not surprise us.
+
+In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,
+civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point
+of exhaustion. In Egypt alone, ten different and separate cycles of
+culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied
+the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between
+the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter futility of
+all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples
+and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as
+an eager promise of life, a constant appeal to their newly regained
+energy and enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious
+experiences in a different mood.
+
+To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being
+alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from
+the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert
+that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore
+look upon the reality of existence.
+
+For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have
+had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people,
+have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of
+civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be
+accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors
+to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of
+the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual
+stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of
+the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian.
+When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group
+of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed
+from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully
+among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead
+to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very
+regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on
+the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby
+giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief
+to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a
+more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first
+religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century)
+hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who
+was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots
+who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so
+many fortresses of the Lord.
+
+Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from
+Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of
+people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its
+wickedness and its too insistent creditors.
+
+The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it
+necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed.
+Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in
+the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was
+disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which
+seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.
+
+“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become
+of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress?
+Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by
+the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in
+the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”
+
+The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic
+institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation
+goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His
+name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His
+parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his
+Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in
+the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that
+once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.
+
+There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame
+of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the
+number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had
+enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.
+
+He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European
+monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it
+showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to
+obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours
+which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled
+with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were
+expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful
+citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the
+Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of
+education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional
+ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.
+
+In return for their labors, the monks were decently clothed, received a
+sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they
+could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to
+work or to prayer.
+
+But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that
+the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and
+their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became
+the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity
+by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were
+expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the
+glory of the kingdom of God.
+
+The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had
+already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come
+to naught, the labors of the individual preachers must be followed up
+by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The
+monks now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book into the
+wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland.
+They plowed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school
+and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a
+civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.
+
+In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the entire Church, make
+use of all the manifold forces of the human spirit.
+
+The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of an opportunity to
+distinguish himself as the dreamer who found happiness in the silence of
+the woods. There was no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste.
+And the result was such an increase of power that soon neither emperor
+nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying humble attention
+to the wishes of those of his subjects who confessed themselves the
+followers of the Christ.
+
+The way in which the final victory was gained is not without interest.
+For it shows that the triumph of Christianity was due to practical
+causes and was not (as is sometimes believed) the result of a sudden and
+overwhelming outburst of religious ardor.
+
+The last great persecution of the Christians took place under the Emperor
+Diocletian.
+
+Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of the worst among those
+many potentates who ruled Europe by the grace of their body-guards. But
+he suffered from a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who
+are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely ignorant upon
+the subject of elementary economics.
+
+He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly going to pieces.
+Having spent all his life in the army, he believed the weak point lay
+in the organization of the Roman military system, which entrusted the
+defenses of the outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had
+gradually lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics,
+selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom they were
+supposed to keep at a safe distance from the frontiers.
+
+It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable system. He
+therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating a new field army,
+composed of young and agile men who at a few weeks’ notice could be
+marched to any particular part of the empire that was threatened with an
+invasion.
+
+This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a military
+nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money had to be produced in
+the form of taxes by the people in the interior of the country. As was
+to be expected, they raised a great hue and cry and claimed that they
+could not pay another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor
+answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his tax-gatherers
+certain powers thus far only possessed by the hangman. But all to no
+avail. For the subjects, rather than work at a regular trade which
+assured them a deficit at the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house
+and home and family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos.
+His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures and he solved
+the difficulty by a decree which shows how completely the old Roman
+Republic had degenerated into an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of
+his pen he made all government offices and all forms of handicraft and
+commerce hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers
+were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or not. The sons
+of bakers must themselves become bakers, although they might have greater
+aptitude for music or pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed
+to a life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they rowed across
+the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although technically they
+continued to be freemen, were constrained to live and die on the same
+piece of soil on which they had been born and were henceforth nothing but
+a very ordinary variety of slaves.
+
+To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence in his own ability
+either could or would tolerate the continued existence of a relatively
+small number of people who only obeyed such parts of his regulations and
+edicts as pleased them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for
+his harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember that he
+was fighting with his back against the wall and that he had good cause
+to suspect the loyalty of several million of his subjects who profited
+by the measures he had taken for their protection but refused to carry
+their share of the common burden.
+
+You will remember that the earliest Christians had not taken the trouble
+to write anything down. They expected the world to come to an end at
+almost any moment. Therefore why waste time and money upon literary
+efforts which in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from
+Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and when the story
+of Christ (after a hundred years of patient waiting) was beginning to
+be repeated with such strange additions and variations that a true
+disciple hardly knew what to believe and what not, the need was felt for
+some authentic book upon the subject and a number of short biographies
+of Jesus and such of the original letters of the apostles as had been
+preserved were combined into one large volume which was called the New
+Testament.
+
+This book contained among others a chapter called the Book of Revelations
+and therein were to be found certain references and certain prophecies
+about and anent a city built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built
+on seven hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days of
+Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this curious chapter
+carefully called the city of his abomination Babylon. But it took no
+great degree of perspicacity on the part of the imperial magistrate to
+understand what was meant when he read these pleasant references to the
+“Mother of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town that was
+drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs, foredoomed to become
+the habitation of all devils, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of
+every unclean and hateful bird, and more expressions of a similar and
+slightly uncomplimentary nature.
+
+Such sentences might have been explained away as the ravings of a poor
+fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he thought of his many friends
+who had been killed during the last fifty years. But they were part of
+the solemn services of the Church. Week after week they were repeated
+in those places where the Christians came together and it was no more
+than natural that outsiders should think that they represented the true
+sentiments of all Christians towards the mighty city on the Tiber. I do
+not mean to imply that the Christians may not have had excellent reason
+to feel the way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because he
+failed to share their enthusiasm.
+
+But that was not all.
+
+The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with an expression which
+the world thus far had never heard. That was the word “heretics.”
+Originally the name “heretic” was given only to those people who had
+“chosen” to believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.”
+But gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had chosen
+to believe certain doctrines which were not held “correct” or “sound”
+or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly established authorities of the
+Church and which therefore, to use the language of the Apostles, were
+“heretical, unsound, false and eternally wrong.”
+
+The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were technically
+free from the charge of heresy because they had remained outside of the
+fold of the Church and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be held
+to account for their private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter
+the imperial pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that
+“heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
+idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder, sedition and drunkenness”
+and a few other things which common decency prevents me from repeating on
+this page.
+
+All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction and
+misunderstanding led to persecution and once more Roman jails were filled
+with Christian prisoners and Roman executioners added to the number of
+Christian martyrs and a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was
+accomplished and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his
+home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from the business of
+ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the even more exciting pastime
+of raising great big cabbages in his back yard.
+
+His successor did not continue the policy of repression. On the contrary,
+since he could not hope to eradicate the Christian evil by force, he
+decided to make the best of a bad bargain and gain the good will of his
+enemies by offering them some special favors.
+
+This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having been the first to
+“recognize” the Christian church officially belongs to a man by the name
+of Constantine.
+
+Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning
+Historians before whom all emperors, kings, pontiffs, presidents and
+mayors who now enjoy the title of the “great” shall have to submit their
+claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will
+have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is
+the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.
+
+This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle field of
+Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus,
+was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his
+brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the
+executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.
+Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just
+before he marched against his most dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had
+made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the
+“second Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the
+Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and died a barbarian
+who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days
+tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of
+sacrificial sheep, all this was most considerately overlooked in view
+of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto
+his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess their
+private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place without fear of
+molestation.”
+
+For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century,
+as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians and when
+they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree,
+they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity
+of the official church of the state. But they knew how and in what manner
+this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and
+although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks
+the arrangement never quite lost its original character.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto
+Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all the enemies of my church and
+in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who
+disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting
+down thine enemies.”
+
+There have been other bargains during the history of the last twenty
+centuries.
+
+But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came
+to power.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+IMPRISONMENT
+
+
+Just before the curtain rings down for the last time upon the ancient
+world, a figure crosses the stage which had deserved a better fate than
+an untimely death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”
+
+The Emperor Julian, to whom I refer, was a nephew of Constantine the
+Great and was born in the new capital of the empire in the year 331. In
+337 his famous uncle died. At once his three sons fell upon their common
+heritage and upon each other with the fury of famished wolves.
+
+To rid themselves of all those who might possibly lay claim to part of
+the spoils, they ordered that those of their relatives who lived in or
+near the city be murdered. Julian’s father was one of the victims. His
+mother had died a few years after his birth. In this way, at the age
+of six, the boy was left an orphan. An older half-brother, an invalid,
+shared his loneliness and his lessons. These consisted mostly of lectures
+upon the advantages of the Christian faith, given by a kindly but
+uninspired old bishop by the name of Eusebius.
+
+But when the children grew older, it was thought wiser to send them
+a little further away where they would be less conspicuous and might
+possibly escape the usual fate of junior Byzantine princes. They were
+removed to a little village in the heart of Asia Minor. It was a dull
+life, but it gave Julian a chance to learn many useful things. For his
+neighbors, the Cappadocian mountaineers, were a simple people and still
+believed in the gods of their ancestors.
+
+There was not the slightest chance that the boy would ever hold a
+responsible position and when he asked permission to devote himself to a
+life of study, he was told to go ahead.
+
+First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places where the old
+Greek philosophy continued to be taught. There he crammed his head so
+full of literature and science that there was no space left for the
+things he had learned from Eusebius.
+
+Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might study on the very
+spot hallowed by the recollections of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.
+
+Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and Constantius,
+his cousin and the one and only remaining son of Constantine, remembering
+that he and his cousin, the boy philosopher, were by this time the only
+two surviving male members of the imperial family, sent for Julian,
+received him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his
+own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and defend that
+province against the barbarians.
+
+It seems that Julian had learned something more practical from his Greek
+teachers than an ability to argue. When in the year 357 the Alamanni
+threatened France, he destroyed their army near Strassburg, and for good
+measure added all the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his
+own province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a fresh
+supply of books by his favorite authors and was as happy as his serious
+nature allowed him to be.
+
+When news of these victories reached the ears of the Emperor, little
+Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the event. On the contrary,
+elaborate plans were laid to get rid of a competitor who might be just a
+trifle too successful.
+
+But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When they heard that
+their commander-in-chief had been ordered to return home (a polite
+invitation to come and have one’s head cut off), they invaded his palace
+and then and there proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it
+be known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.
+
+Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.
+
+Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been in a remarkably
+good state of preservation. Julian was able to break all records by the
+speed with which he marched his troops from the heart of France to the
+shores of the Bosphorus. But ere he reached the capital, he heard that
+his cousin Constantius had died.
+
+And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the western world.
+
+Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do was impossible.
+It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent a man should have been
+under the impression that the dead past could ever be brought back to
+life by the use of force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by
+reconstructing an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating the
+deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed up in togas of a
+bygone age and talking to each other in a tongue that had disappeared
+from the face of the earth more than five centuries before.
+
+And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.
+
+All his efforts during the two short years of his reign were directed
+towards the reëstablishment of that ancient science which was now held in
+profound contempt by the majority of his people; towards the rekindling
+of a spirit of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt
+certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a single book and
+that independent study and investigation could only lead to unbelief and
+hell fire; towards the requickening of the joy-of-living among those who
+had the vitality and the enthusiasm of ghosts.
+
+Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have been driven to
+madness and despair by the spirit of opposition which met him on all
+sides. As for Julian, he simply went to pieces under it. Temporarily at
+least he clung to the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The
+Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and mud, yet he
+refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks might try to provoke him
+into another era of persecution, yet the Emperor persistently continued
+to instruct his officials “not to make any martyrs.”
+
+In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end to this strange
+career.
+
+It was the best thing that could have happened to this, the last and
+greatest of the Pagan rulers.
+
+Had he lived any longer, his sense of tolerance and his hatred of
+stupidity would have turned him into the most intolerant man of his age.
+Now, from his cot in the hospital, he could reflect that during his
+rule, not a single person had suffered death for his private opinions.
+For this mercy, his Christian subjects rewarded him with their undying
+hatred. They boasted that an arrow from one of his own soldiers (a
+Christian legionary) had killed the Emperor and with rare delicacy
+they composed eulogies in praise of the murderer. They told how, just
+before he collapsed, Julian had confessed the errors of his ways and had
+acknowledged the power of Christ. And they emptied the arsenal of foul
+epithets with which the vocabulary of the fourth century was so richly
+stocked to disgrace the fame of an honest man who had lived a life of
+ascetic simplicity and had devoted all his energies to the happiness of
+the people who had been entrusted to his care.
+
+When he had been carried to his grave the Christian bishops could at last
+consider themselves the veritable rulers of the Empire and immediately
+began the task of destroying whatever opposition to their domination
+might remain in isolated corners of Europe, Asia and Africa.
+
+Under Valentinian and Valens, two brothers who ruled from 364 to 378, an
+edict was passed forbidding all Romans to sacrifice animals to the old
+Gods. The pagan priests were thereby deprived of their revenue and forced
+to look for other employment.
+
+But the regulations were mild compared to the law by which Theodosius
+ordered all his subjects not only to accept the Christian doctrines,
+but to accept them only in the form laid down by the “universal” or
+“Catholic” church of which he had made himself the protector and which
+was to have a monopoly in all matters spiritual.
+
+All those who after the promulgation of this ordinance stuck to their
+“erroneous opinions”—who persisted in their “insane heresies”—who
+remained faithful to their “scandalous doctrines”—were to suffer the
+consequences of their willful disobedience and were to be exiled or put
+to death.
+
+From then on the old world marched rapidly to its final doom. In Italy
+and Gaul and Spain and England hardly a pagan temple remained. They were
+either wrecked by the contractors who needed stones for new bridges and
+streets and city-walls and water-works, or they were remodeled to serve
+as meeting places for the Christians. The thousands of golden and silver
+images which had been accumulated since the beginning of the Republic
+were publicly confiscated and privately stolen and such statues as
+remained were made into mortar.
+
+The Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple which Greeks and Romans and
+Egyptians alike had held in the greatest veneration for more than six
+centuries, was razed to the ground. There remained the university,
+famous all over the world ever since it had been founded by Alexander
+the Great. It had continued to teach and explain the old philosophies
+and as a result attracted a large number of students from all parts of
+the Mediterranean. When it was not closed at the behest of the Bishop
+of Alexandria, the monks of his diocese took the matter into their own
+hands. They broke into the lecture rooms, lynched Hypatia, the last
+of the great Platonic teachers, and threw her mutilated body into the
+streets where it was left to the mercy of the dogs.
+
+In Rome things went no better.
+
+The temple of Jupiter was closed, the Sibylline books, the very basis of
+the old Roman faith, were burned. The capital was left a ruin.
+
+In Gaul, under the leadership of the famous bishop of Tours, the old Gods
+were declared to be the predecessors of the Christian devils and their
+temples were therefore ordered to be wiped off the face of the earth.
+
+If, as sometimes happened in remote country districts, the peasants
+rushed forth to the defense of their beloved shrines, the soldiers were
+called out and by means of the ax and the gallows made an end to such
+“insurrections of Satan.”
+
+In Greece, the work of destruction proceeded more slowly. But finally in
+the year 394, the Olympic games were abolished. As soon as this center of
+Greek national life (after an uninterrupted existence of eleven hundred
+and seventy years) had come to an end, the rest was comparatively easy.
+One after the other, the philosophers were expelled from the country.
+Finally, by order of the Emperor Justinian, the University of Athens was
+closed. The funds established for its maintenance were confiscated. The
+last seven professors, deprived of their livelihood, fled to Persia
+where King Chosroes received them hospitably and allowed them to spend
+the rest of their days peacefully playing the new and mysterious Indian
+game called “chess.”
+
+In the first half of the fifth century, archbishop Chrysostomus could
+truthfully state that the works of the old authors and philosophers had
+disappeared from the face of the earth. Cicero and Socrates and Virgil
+and Homer (not to mention the mathematicians and the astronomers and
+the physicians who were an object of special abomination to all good
+Christians) lay forgotten in a thousand attics and cellars. Six hundred
+years were to go by before they were called back to life, and in the
+meantime the world would be obliged to subsist on such literary fare as
+it pleased the theologians to place before it.
+
+A strange diet, and not exactly (in the jargon of the medical faculty) a
+balanced one.
+
+For the Church, although triumphant over its pagan enemies, was beset by
+many and serious tribulations. The poor peasant in Gaul and Lusitania,
+clamoring to burn incense in honor of his ancient Gods, could be silenced
+easily enough. He was a heathen and the law was on the side of the
+Christian. But the Ostrogoth or the Alaman or the Longobard who declared
+that Arius, the priest of Alexandria, was right in his opinion upon the
+true nature of Christ and that Athanasius, the bishop of that same city
+and Arius’ bitter enemy, was wrong (or vice versa)—the Longobard or Frank
+who stoutly maintained that Christ was not “of the same nature” but of
+a “like nature only” with God (or vice versa)—the Vandal or the Saxon
+who insisted that Nestor spoke the truth when he called the Virgin Mary
+the “mother of Christ” and not the “mother of God” (or vice versa)—the
+Burgundian or Frisian who denied that Jesus was possessed of two natures,
+one human and one divine (or vice versa)—all these simple-minded but
+strong-armed barbarians who had accepted Christianity and were, outside
+of their unfortunate errors of opinion, staunch friends and supporters
+of the Church—these indeed could not be punished with a general anathema
+and a threat of perpetual hell fire. They must be persuaded gently that
+they were wrong and must be brought within the fold with charitable
+expressions of love and devotion. But before all else they must be given
+a definite creed that they might know for once and for all what they must
+hold to be true and what they must reject as false.
+
+It was that desire for unity of some sort in all matters pertaining to
+the faith which finally caused those famous gatherings which have become
+known as Oecumenical or Universal Councils, and which since the middle
+of the fourth century have been called together at irregular intervals
+to decide what doctrine is right and what doctrine contains the germ of
+heresy and should therefore be adjudged erroneous, unsound, fallacious
+and heretical.
+
+The first of those Oecumenical councils was held in the town of Nicaea,
+not far from the ruins of Troy, in the year 325. The second one,
+fifty-six years later, was held in Constantinople. The third one in
+the year 431 in Ephesus. Thereafter they followed each other in rapid
+succession in Chalcedon, twice again in Constantinople, once more in
+Nicaea and finally once again in Constantinople in the year 869.
+
+After that, however, they were held in Rome or in some particular town of
+western Europe designated by the Pope. For it was generally accepted from
+the fourth century on that although the emperor had the technical right
+to call together such meetings (a privilege which incidentally obliged
+him to pay the traveling expenses of his faithful bishops) that very
+serious attention should be paid to the suggestions made by the powerful
+Bishop of Rome. And although we do not know with any degree of certainty
+who occupied the chair in Nicaea, all later councils were dominated by
+the Popes and the decisions of these holy gatherings were not regarded
+as binding unless they had obtained the official approval of the supreme
+pontiff himself or one of his delegates.
+
+Hence we can now say farewell to Constantinople and travel to the more
+congenial regions of the west.
+
+The field of Tolerance and Intolerance has been fought over so repeatedly
+by those who hold tolerance the greatest of all human virtues and those
+who denounce it as an evidence of moral weakness, that I shall pay
+very little attention to the purely theoretical aspects of the case.
+Nevertheless it must be confessed that the champions of the Church follow
+a plausible line of reasoning when they try to explain away the terrible
+punishments which were inflicted upon all heretics.
+
+“A church,” so they argue, “is like any other organization. It is
+almost like a village or a tribe or a fortress. There must be a
+commander-in-chief and there must be a definite set of laws and
+by-laws, which all members are forced to obey. It follows that those
+who swear allegiance to the Church make a tacit vow both to respect the
+commander-in-chief and to obey the law. And if they find it impossible to
+do this, they must suffer the consequences of their own decisions and get
+out.”
+
+All of which, so far, is perfectly true and reasonable.
+
+If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in the articles
+of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn Methodist, and if for some
+reason he ceases to believe in the creed as laid down by the Methodist
+Church, he can become a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that
+matter, a Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open. There
+is no one outside his own hungry family to say him nay.
+
+But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and unlimited
+economic opportunities.
+
+The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple. It was far from
+easy to discover a region where the influence of the Bishop of Rome did
+not make itself felt. One could of course go to Persia or to India, as
+a good many heretics did, but the voyage was long and the chances of
+survival were small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self
+and one’s children.
+
+And finally, why should a man surrender his good right to believe what he
+pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception of the idea of Christ
+was the right one and that it was only a question of time for him to
+convince the Church that its doctrines needed a slight modification?
+
+For that was the crux of the whole matter.
+
+The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics, dealt with
+ideas which had a relative and not a positive value.
+
+A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the gallows because they
+cannot agree upon the absolute value of x would be no more absurd than
+a council of learned theologians trying to define the undefinable and
+endeavoring to reduce the substance of God to a formula.
+
+But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and intolerance
+got hold of the world that until very recently all those who advocated
+tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot ever possibly know who is right
+and who is wrong” did so at the risk of their lives and usually couched
+their warnings in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or
+two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they meant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PURE OF LIFE
+
+
+Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a
+book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like
+this:
+
+[Illustration: I]
+
+In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.
+
+AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.
+
+But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two sides. Then
+the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The diameters are thrown out
+of gear. A few like AB and EF have been greatly shortened. Others, and
+especially CD, have been lengthened.
+
+[Illustration: II]
+
+Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake
+of argument suppose that
+
+    AB represents politics
+    CD     ”      trade
+    EF     ”      art
+    GH     ”      militarism
+
+In the figure I the perfectly balanced state, all lines are equally long
+and quite as much attention is paid to politics as to trade and art and
+militarism.
+
+But in figure II (which is no longer a perfect circle) trade has got an
+undue advantage at the expense of politics and art has almost entirely
+disappeared, while militarism shows a gain.
+
+Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the others will tend to
+disappear altogether.
+
+[Illustration: III]
+
+You will find this a handy key to a great many historical problems.
+
+Try it on the Greeks.
+
+For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain a perfect circle
+of all-around accomplishments. But the foolish quarrels between the
+different political parties soon grew to such proportions that all the
+surplus energy of the nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil
+wars. The soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending the
+country against foreign aggression. They were turned loose upon their own
+neighbors, who had voted for a different candidate, or who believed in a
+slightly modified form of taxation.
+
+Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at first became
+difficult, then became entirely impossible and fled to other parts of the
+world, where business enjoyed a greater degree of stability.
+
+The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the city, the arts
+escaped by way of the back door, never to be seen again. Capital sailed
+away on the fastest ship it could find within a hundred miles, and since
+intellectualism is a very expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible
+to maintain good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to
+Alexandria.
+
+What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who subsisted upon
+tradition and routine.
+
+And all this happened because the line of politics had grown out of all
+proportion, because the perfect circle had been destroyed, and the other
+lines, art, science, philosophy, etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.
+
+If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find that there the
+particular line called “political power” grew and grew and grew until
+there was nothing left of any of the others. The circle which had spelled
+the glory of the Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight,
+narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.
+
+And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the history of the
+medieval Church to this sort of mathematics, this is what you will find.
+
+The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain a circle of
+conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they had rather neglected the
+diameter of science, but since they were not interested in the life of
+the world, they could not very well be expected to pay much attention to
+medicine or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of small
+appeal to men and women who were making ready for the last judgment and
+who regarded this world merely as the ante-room to Heaven.
+
+But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored (however
+imperfectly) to lead the good life and to be as industrious as they were
+charitable and as kindly as they were honest.
+
+As soon, however, as their little communities had been united into a
+single powerful organization, the perfect balance of the old spiritual
+circle was rudely upset by the obligations and duties of the new
+international responsibilities. It was easy enough for small groups of
+half-starved carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of
+poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was founded. But the
+heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus of the western
+world, the richest landowner of the entire continent, could not live
+as simply as if he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in
+Pomerania or Spain.
+
+Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter
+representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing “foreign policy”
+were lengthened to such an extent that the diameters representing
+“humility” and “poverty” and “self-negation” and the other elementary
+Christian virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.
+
+It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly of the
+benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all know, lived in utter
+darkness. It is true they burned wax tapers in their churches and went
+to bed by the uncertain light of a sconce, they possessed few books,
+they were ignorant of many things which are now being taught in our
+grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums. But knowledge
+and intelligence are two very different things and of the latter, these
+excellent burghers, who constructed the political and social structure in
+which we ourselves continue to live, had their full share.
+
+If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently helpless
+before the many and terrible abuses in their Church, let us judge them
+mercifully. They had at least the courage of their convictions and they
+fought whatever they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for
+personal happiness and comfort that they frequently ended their lives on
+the scaffold.
+
+More than that we can ask of no one.
+
+It is true that during the first thousand years of our era, comparatively
+few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not, however, because the
+Church felt less strongly about heresy than she did at a later date, but
+because she was too much occupied with more important questions to have
+any time to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.
+
+In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe where Odin and
+the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.
+
+And in the second place, something very unpleasant had happened, which
+had wellnigh threatened the whole of Europe with destruction.
+
+This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance of a brand-new
+prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the conquest of western Asia and
+northern Africa by the followers of a new God who was called Allah.
+
+The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of “infidel dogs”
+and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us under the impression that Jesus
+and Mahomet represented ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as
+fire and water.
+
+But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the same race, they
+spoke dialects which belonged to the same linguistic group, they both
+claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather and they both looked
+back upon a common ancestral home, which a thousand years before had
+stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.
+
+And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who were such close
+relatives have always regarded each other with bitter scorn and have
+fought a war which has lasted more than twelve centuries and which has
+not yet come to an end.
+
+At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon what might have
+happened, but there was a time when Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might
+have easily been gained for the Christian faith.
+
+The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of their time
+tending their flocks and therefore were much given to meditation.
+People in cities can drug their souls with the pleasures of a perennial
+county-fair. But shepherds and fisher folk and farmers lead solitary
+lives and want something a little more substantial than noise and
+excitement.
+
+In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions, but had
+shown a distinct preference for Judaism. This is easily explained, as
+Arabia was full of Jews. In the tenth century B.C., a great many of King
+Solomon’s subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism of
+their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred years later in
+586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, there had been a second
+wholesale exodus of Jews towards the desert lands of the south.
+
+Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the quest of the Jews
+after the one and only true God was entirely in line with the aspirations
+and ideals of the Arabian tribes.
+
+Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet will know how much
+the Medinite had borrowed from the wisdom contained in some of the books
+of the Old Testament.
+
+Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with his mother Hagar
+lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the heart of Arabia) hostile to the
+ideas expressed by the young reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary,
+they followed Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was a
+loving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept those miracles
+of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter made so much. And as for
+the resurrection, they flatly refused to believe in it. But generally
+speaking, they felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were
+willing to give it a chance.
+
+But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the hands of certain
+Christian zealots who with their usual lack of discretion had denounced
+him as a liar and a false prophet before he had fairly opened his
+mouth. That and the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that
+the Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods instead
+of one, made the people of the desert finally turn their backs upon
+Christianity and declare themselves in favor of the Medinese camel driver
+who spoke to them of one and only one God and did not confuse them with
+references to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one, but
+were one or three as it might please the convenience of the moment and
+the interests of the officiating priest.
+
+Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of
+which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which
+insisted that all other Gods were impostors.
+
+Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.
+
+Mahomet died in 632.
+
+Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had
+been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire.
+
+Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted
+Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of
+Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a
+Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off
+and the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted
+until the end of the seventeenth century.
+
+Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry
+her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what
+she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and
+Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable
+field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was
+done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety
+of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might
+revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects
+who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large,
+however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were
+honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the
+people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of
+order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife
+and highway robbery.
+
+But while this was happening along the frontier, things had not gone so
+well in the heart of the pontifical empire. Incessantly (to revert to
+the mathematics explained in the first pages of this chapter) the line
+of worldliness had been lengthened until at last the spiritual element
+in the Church had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a
+purely political and economic nature and although Rome was to grow in
+power and exercise a tremendous influence upon the development of the
+next twelve centuries, certain elements of disintegration had already
+made their appearance and were being recognized as such by the more
+intelligent among the laity and the clergy.
+
+We modern people of the Protestant north think of a “church” as a
+building which stands empty six days out of every seven and a place
+where people go on a Sunday to hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We
+know that some of our churches have bishops and occasionally these
+bishops hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves
+surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their collars turned
+backwards and we read in the papers that they have declared themselves
+in favor of dancing or against divorce, and then they go home again and
+nothing has happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.
+
+We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to be our own) with
+the sum total of all our experiences, both in life and in death.
+
+The State, of course, is something very different. The State may take
+our money and may kill us if it feels that such a course is desirable
+for the public good. The State is our owner, our master, but what is now
+generally called “the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or,
+if we happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.
+
+But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different. Then, the Church
+was something visible and tangible, a highly active organization which
+breathed and existed, which shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than
+the State would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes who
+accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced the ancient
+ideal of poverty did not foresee the consequences to which such a policy
+was bound to lead. In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and
+quite appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow upon
+the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own worldly goods.
+Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated administration which
+reached all the way from John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage
+to Upsala. Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks
+and scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different
+departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed. Think of the
+amount spent upon a courier service across an entire continent; the
+traveling expenses of diplomatic agents now going to London, then
+returning from Novgorod; the sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers
+in the style that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly
+princes on a footing of complete equality.
+
+All the same, looking back upon what the Church came to stand for and
+contemplating what it might have been under slightly more favorable
+circumstances, this development seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew
+into a gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the pope
+became an international autocrat who held all the nations of western
+Europe in a bondage compared to which the rule of the old emperors had
+been mild and generous.
+
+And then, when complete success seemed within certain reach, something
+happened which proved fatal to the ambition for world dominion.
+
+The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir among the masses
+and that is one of the most uncomfortable things that can happen to any
+religious organization.
+
+Heretics were nothing new.
+
+There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a single rule of
+faith from which people could possibly dissent and disputes, which
+had divided Europe and Africa and western Asia into hostile camps for
+centuries at a time, were almost as old as the Church herself.
+
+But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and Sabellianists and
+Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians hardly come within the
+scope of this book. As a rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as
+the other and there was little to choose between the intolerance of a
+follower of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.
+
+Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain obscure points
+of theology which are gradually beginning to be forgotten. Heaven forbid
+that I should drag them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting
+my time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh outbreak of
+theological fury. Rather, I am writing these pages to tell our children
+of certain ideals of intellectual liberty for which some of their
+ancestors fought at the risk of their lives and to warn them against that
+attitude of doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused such
+a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand years.
+
+But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very different story.
+
+Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious fellow with
+a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong translation of an obscure
+sentence in the Apocalypse or the mis-spelling of a holy word in the
+gospel of St. John.
+
+Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which during the reign
+of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the village of Nazareth went to his
+death, and behold! he stands revealed as the only true Christian!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INQUISITION
+
+
+In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high
+honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as
+Innocent III took possession of the papal chair.
+
+He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided in the Lateran
+Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time of his ascension. An
+honor-student in the universities of Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever,
+full of energy and high ambition, he used his office so well that he
+could rightly claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone
+but of the entire world.”
+
+He set Italy free from German interference by driving the imperial
+governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering those parts of
+the peninsula which were held by imperial troops; and finally by
+excommunicating the candidate to the imperial throne until that poor
+prince found himself beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew
+entirely from his domains on the other side of the Alps.
+
+He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight
+of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number
+of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and
+generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show
+himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as
+an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these
+proceedings which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable
+minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a
+practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed
+a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this
+clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman
+jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian
+Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her
+eastern colonies and treated them accordingly.
+
+In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished
+and tactful person.
+
+The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last
+begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between
+a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public
+blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France
+and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs
+according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily
+reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to
+comply with the papal wishes.
+
+Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people
+were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV
+(known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just
+conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of
+Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was
+obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman
+tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of
+Trondhjem.
+
+And so it went.
+
+The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of
+war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who
+therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep
+interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly
+asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England,
+certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master
+were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it
+had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for
+having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta.
+
+From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person
+who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers
+and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.
+
+And yet, some there were found who had the courage to do this very thing
+as we shall now see.
+
+The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.
+
+Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have small gift for
+publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets they write to explain
+their ideas and to defend themselves against their enemies fall an easy
+prey to the ever watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to
+be in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed. Hence
+we depend for our knowledge of most heresies upon such information as we
+are able to glean from the records of their trials and upon such articles
+as have been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the
+express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan” to the truly
+faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized and warned against
+doing likewise.
+
+As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired
+individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty cellar somewhere in
+the lowest part of the slums, who refuses to touch decent Christian food
+but subsists entirely upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who
+keeps away from the company of women and mumbles strange prophecies about
+the second coming of the Messiah, who reproves the clergy for their
+worldliness and wickedness and generally disgusts his more respectable
+neighbors by his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.
+
+Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in making a nuisance of
+themselves, for that seems to be the fate of people who take themselves
+too seriously.
+
+Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost unholy zeal
+for a holy life, were dirty, looked like the devil and did not smell
+pleasantly and generally upset the quiet routine of their home town by
+their strange ideas anent a truly Christian existence.
+
+But let us give them credit for their courage and their honesty.
+
+They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.
+
+As a rule, they lost it.
+
+Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized. Eventually
+even those who believe in no organization at all must form a Society
+for the Promotion of Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish
+anything. And the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and
+wallowed in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct
+of self-preservation made them flock together and their feeling of
+insecurity forced them to surround their sacred doctrines by a double
+barrier of mystic rites and esoteric ceremonials.
+
+But of course the masses of the people, who remained faithful to the
+Church, were unable to make any distinction between these different
+groups and sects. And they bunched them all together and called them
+dirty Manichaeans or some other unflattering name and felt that that
+solved the problem.
+
+In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists of the Middle
+Ages. Of course I do not use the latter name as indicating membership in
+a certain well-defined political party which a few years ago established
+itself as the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer to a
+vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays bestow upon all
+their personal enemies from the landlord who comes to collect the rent
+down to the elevator boy who neglects to stop at the right floor.
+
+A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a most objectionable
+person. But as he could not very well try him upon any positive charges,
+he condemned him upon hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable
+advantages over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure
+followed by the regular courts of law but which sometimes suffers from a
+lack of accuracy and is responsible for a great many judicial murders.
+
+What made this all the more reprehensible in the case of the poor
+Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of the original sect, a Persian
+by the name of Mani, had been the very incarnation of benevolence and
+charity. He was an historical figure and was born during the first
+quarter of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his father,
+Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.
+
+He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and spent the years
+of his youth in a community as international, as polyglot, as pious, as
+godless, as material and as idealistically-spiritual as the New York of
+our own day. Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of
+east and west and south and north had its followers among the crowds that
+visited the great commercial centers of Mesopotamia. Mani listened to
+all the different preachers and prophets and then distilled a philosophy
+of his own which was a _mixtum-compositum_ of Buddhism, Christianity,
+Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a dozen old
+Babylonian superstitions.
+
+Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his followers
+sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated that Mani merely
+revived the old Persian myth of the Good God and the Evil God who are
+eternally fighting for the soul of man and that he associated the ancient
+God of Evil with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became his
+Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that Heavenly Father whom we
+find revealed within the pages of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that
+is where Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that the
+body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing; that all people
+should try to rid themselves of their worldly ambitions by the constant
+mortification of the flesh and should obey the strictest rules of diet
+and behavior lest they fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil)
+and burn in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos about
+things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed for his followers a
+menu composed exclusively of cold water, dried vegetables and dead fish.
+This latter ordinance may surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea,
+being cold-blooded animals, have always been regarded as less harmful to
+man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren of the dry land,
+and the self-same people who would rather suffer death than eat a veal
+chop cheerfully consume quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of
+conscience.
+
+Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for women. He forbade
+his disciples to marry and advocated the slow extinction of the human
+race.
+
+As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally by the
+Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been the exponent, Mani
+regarded them all with horror and instead of being submerged in water,
+his candidates for holy orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.
+
+At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to explain his
+ideas unto all mankind. First he visited India and China where he was
+fairly successful. Then he turned homeward to bring the blessings of his
+creed to his own neighbors.
+
+But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived of much
+secret revenue by the success of these unworldly doctrines turned against
+him and asked that he be killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the
+protection of the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded
+by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious questions,
+Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They took him to the walls
+of the town and crucified him and flayed his corpse and publicly exposed
+his skin before the city gate as an example to all those who might feel
+inclined to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.
+
+By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean church
+itself was broken up. But little bits of the prophet’s ideas, like so
+many spiritual meteors, were showered far and wide upon the landscape of
+Europe and Asia and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc
+among the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them up, had
+examined them and had found them singularly to their taste.
+
+Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I do not know.
+
+Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Danube.
+Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed immense popularity in Germany
+and France. There the followers of the new creed called themselves by the
+Oriental name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,” and
+so widespread was the affliction that all over western Europe the word
+“Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the same as “heretic.”
+
+But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a definite religious
+denomination. No effort was made to establish a new sect. The Manichaean
+ideas exercised great influence upon a large number of people who would
+have stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout sons of the
+Church. And that made this particular form of heresy so dangerous and so
+difficult of detection.
+
+It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose a disease
+caused by microbes of such gigantic structure that their presence can be
+detected by the microscope of a provincial board-of-health.
+
+But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who can maintain their
+incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet illumination, for they shall
+inherit the earth.
+
+Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was therefore the most
+dangerous expression of all social epidemics and it filled the higher
+authorities of that organization with a terror not felt before the more
+common varieties of spiritual afflictions.
+
+It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of the staunchest
+supporters of the early Christian faith had shown unmistakable symptoms
+of the disease. Yea, great Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and
+indefatigable warrior of the Cross, who had done more than any one else
+to destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have been at
+heart considerable of a Manichaean.
+
+Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the stake in the year
+385 and who gained the distinction of being the first victim of the law
+against heretics, was accused of Manichaean tendencies.
+
+Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have fallen under the
+spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.
+
+They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading the Old Testament
+and finally, during the twelfth century, promulgated that famous order by
+which all clergymen were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not
+to forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of abstinence
+were soon to make upon one of the greatest leaders of spiritual reform,
+causing that most lovable of men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish
+a new monastic order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly
+earned him the title of the Buddha of the West.
+
+But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty and humility
+of soul began to filter down to the common people, at the very moment
+when the world was filled with the din of yet another war between emperor
+and pope, when foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross
+and the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable bits of
+territory along the Mediterranean shores, when hordes of Crusaders were
+rushing home with the ill-gotten plunder they had taken from friend and
+enemy alike, when abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a
+staff of courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass that
+they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed something very
+unpleasant was bound to happen, and it did.
+
+Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent with the state
+of the Church made themselves felt in that part of France where the old
+Roman tradition of culture had survived longest and where civilization
+had never been quite absorbed by barbarism.
+
+You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of
+a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the
+Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is
+its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns
+and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an
+abundance of sunshine and rain.
+
+While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds
+of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had
+already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give
+birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations
+of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and
+Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications
+in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the
+northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.
+
+In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to
+make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.
+
+But there had not been anything which, however remotely, could be
+construed into open rebellion. Here and there in certain small villages
+certain people were beginning to hint that their priests might live as
+simply and as unostentatiously as their parishioners; who refused (oh,
+memory of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went forth to
+war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they might read and study the
+Gospels for themselves; who let it be known that they did not approve
+of capital punishment; who denied the existence of that Purgatory which
+six centuries after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed as
+part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important detail) refused
+to surrender a tenth of their income to the Church.
+
+Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions against clerical
+authority were sought out and sometimes, if they were deaf to persuasion,
+they were discreetly put out of the way.
+
+But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed necessary to
+call together a meeting of all the bishops of the Provence to discuss
+what measures should be taken to put a stop to this very dangerous and
+highly seditious agitation. They duly convened and continued their
+debates until the year 1056.
+
+By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary forms of
+punishment and excommunication did not produce any noticeable results.
+The simple country folk who desired to lead a “pure life” were delighted
+whenever they were given a chance to demonstrate their principles of
+Christian charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail and
+if perchance they were condemned to death, they marched to the stake with
+the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the
+place left vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a dozen
+fresh candidates for holiness.
+
+Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between the papal
+delegates who insisted upon more severe persecutions and the local
+nobility and clergy who (knowing the true nature of their subjects)
+refused to comply with the orders from Rome and protested that violence
+only encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the voice of
+reason and therefore was a waste both of time and energy.
+
+And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement received a fresh
+impetus from the north.
+
+In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way of the Rhone,
+there lived a merchant by the name of Peter Waldo. A very serious man,
+a good man, a most generous man, almost fanatically obsessed by his
+eagerness to follow the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that
+it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
+a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Thirty generations of
+Christians had tried to explain just what Jesus had actually meant when
+he uttered these words. Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He
+divided whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and refused
+to accumulate fresh wealth.
+
+John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”
+
+Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and had carefully
+stipulated under what conditions it might perhaps be desirable for the
+laity to study the holy books directly and without the assistance of a
+priest.
+
+Peter Waldo did not see it that way.
+
+John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”
+
+Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.
+
+And when he discovered that the things he found did not tally with the
+conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated the New Testament into his own
+language and spread copies of his manuscript throughout the good land of
+Provence.
+
+At first his activities did not attract much attention. His enthusiasm
+for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most likely he could be persuaded to
+found some new and very ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those
+who wished to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the
+existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.
+
+Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets for those
+people whose excess of faith might make them troublesome.
+
+But all things must be done according to rule and precedent. And in that
+respect the “pure men” of the Provence and the “poor men” of Lyons were
+terrible failures. Not only did they neglect to inform their bishops
+of what they were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed
+the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good Christian
+without the assistance of a professional member of the priesthood and
+that the Bishop of Rome had no more right to tell people outside of
+his jurisdiction what to do and what to believe than the Grand Duke of
+Tartary or the Caliph of Bagdad.
+
+The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and truth compels me
+to state that she waited a long time before she finally decided to
+exterminate this heresy by force.
+
+But an organization based upon the principle that there is only one
+right way of thinking and living and that all other ways are infamous
+and damnable is bound to take drastic measures whenever its authority is
+being openly questioned.
+
+If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive and this
+consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite action and devise
+a series of punishments that should put terror into the hearts of all
+future dissenters.
+
+The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of Albi which was
+a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the Waldenses (who bore the name of
+their founder, Peter Waldo) living in countries without great political
+value and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected as
+the first of her victims.
+
+The murder of a papal delegate who for several years had ruled the
+Provence as if it were so much conquered territory, gave Innocent III an
+excuse to interfere.
+
+He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses and the
+Waldenses.
+
+Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition against
+the heretics would be excused from paying interest on their debts; they
+would be absolved from all past and future sins and for the time being
+they would be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of
+law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the people of
+northern Europe.
+
+Why should they bother about going all the way to Palestine when a
+campaign against the rich cities of the Provence offered the same
+spiritual and economic rewards as a trip to the Orient and when a man
+could gain an equal amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term
+of service?
+
+For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and the worst elements
+among the nobility and gentry of northern France and southern England,
+of Austria, Saxony and Poland came rushing southward to escape the local
+sheriff and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense of
+the prosperous Provençals.
+
+The number of men, women and children hanged, burned, drowned,
+decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders is variously given.
+I have not any idea how many thousands perished. Here and there, whenever
+a formal execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete
+figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty thousand,
+according to the size of each town.
+
+After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers were in a
+quandary how to know who were heretics and who were not. They placed
+their problem before the papal delegate, who followed the army as a sort
+of spiritual adviser.
+
+“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and kill them all. The
+Lord will know his own people.”
+
+But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de Montfort, a veteran of
+the real crusades, who distinguished himself most of all by the novelty
+and the ingenuity of his cruelties. In return for his valuable services,
+he afterwards received large tracts of land in the country which he had
+just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.
+
+As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more
+inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their
+own until the days of the Reformation.
+
+The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and
+hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition.
+But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines
+were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin
+Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly
+which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.
+
+All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As
+far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle
+of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous
+command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished
+to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall
+and that several of the guests had remained away, had said unto his
+servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once
+more been fulfilled.
+
+“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.
+
+The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was
+not solved until many years later.
+
+Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special
+courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the
+Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of
+Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they
+came to be known simply as the Inquisition.
+
+Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the
+mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have
+visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of
+rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow
+hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an
+endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.
+
+Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth
+century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of
+sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the
+phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant
+prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those
+who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should
+never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.
+
+Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight
+ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages,
+and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the
+most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space.
+For there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an
+International Court of Arbitration.
+
+There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries and
+created for all sorts of purposes.
+
+The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of Spain and the Holy
+Inquisition of Rome. The former was a local affair which watched over the
+heretics in the Iberian peninsula and in the American colonies.
+
+The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and burned Joan of Arc
+in the northern part of the continent as it burned Giordano Bruno in the
+southern.
+
+It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never killed any one.
+
+After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical judges, the convicted
+heretic was surrendered to the secular authorities. These could then do
+with him what they thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death
+penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience and
+might even find themselves excommunicated or deprived of their support
+at the papal court. If, as sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped
+this fate and was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only
+increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement for the rest
+of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial prisons.
+
+As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror of going insane
+in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many prisoners confessed all sorts
+of crimes of which they were totally innocent that they might be found
+guilty of heresy and thus be put out of their misery.
+
+It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing to be
+hopelessly biased.
+
+It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds of
+thousands of harmless people in all parts of the world were overnight
+lifted from their beds at the mere whispered hearsay of some loquacious
+neighbors; that they were held for months or for years in filthy
+cells awaiting an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and
+qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never informed of the
+nature of the accusation that was brought against them; that they were
+not allowed to know the names of those who had acted as witnesses against
+them; that they were not permitted to communicate with their relatives
+or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest their innocence,
+they could be tortured until all the limbs of their body were broken;
+that other heretics could testify against them but were not listened to
+if they offered to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally
+that they could be sent to their death without the haziest notion as to
+the cause of their terrible fate.
+
+It seems even more incredible that men and women who had been buried for
+fifty or sixty years could be dug out of their graves, could be found
+guilty “in absentia” and that the heirs of people who were condemned
+in this fashion could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a
+century after the death of the offending parties.
+
+But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended for their
+maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods that were confiscated,
+absurdities of this sort were by no means an uncommon occurrence
+and frequently the grandchildren were driven to beggary on account
+of something which their grandfather was supposed to have done two
+generations before.
+
+Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago when Czarist
+Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember the agent provocateur. As
+a rule the agent provocateur was a former burglar or a retired gambler
+with a winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly known
+that his sorrow had made him join the revolution and in this way he often
+gained the confidence of those who were genuinely opposed to the imperial
+government. But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new friends,
+he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward and went to the next
+city, there to repeat his vile practices.
+
+During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, southern and
+western Europe was overrun by this nefarious tribe of private spies.
+
+They made a living denouncing those who were supposed to have criticized
+the Church or who had expressed doubts upon certain points of doctrine.
+
+If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the business of
+such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.
+
+As he could rest assured that torture would make his victims confess, no
+matter how innocent they might be, he ran no risks and could continue his
+trade ad infinitum.
+
+In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced by this
+system of allowing anonymous people to denounce those whom they suspected
+of spiritual deficiencies. At last, no one dared trust his nearest and
+dearest friends. Members of the same family were forced to be on their
+guard against each other.
+
+The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the inquisitorial work
+made excellent use of the panic which their methods created and for
+almost two centuries they lived on the fat of the land.
+
+Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying causes of the
+Reformation was the disgust which a large number of people felt for those
+arrogant beggars who under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the
+homes of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable beds,
+who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they be treated as
+honored guests and who were able to maintain themselves in comfort by the
+mere threat that they would denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition
+if ever they were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had come
+to regard as their just due.
+
+The Church of course could answer to all this that the Inquisition merely
+acted as a spiritual health officer whose sworn duty it was to prevent
+contagious errors from spreading among the masses. It could point to the
+leniency shown to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could
+not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even claim that few
+people ever suffered the penalty of death unless they were apostates and
+were caught in a new offense after having forsworn their former errors.
+
+But what of it?
+
+The same trick by which an innocent man was changed into a desperate
+criminal could afterwards be used to place him in an apparent position of
+recantation.
+
+The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been close friends.
+
+And what are a few faked documents between spies?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE CURIOUS ONES
+
+
+Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; the
+intolerance of laziness, the intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance
+of self-interest.
+
+The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in
+every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in
+small villages and old-established towns, and it is not restricted to
+human beings.
+
+Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his
+placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn
+of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley
+Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows
+that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles
+through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape.
+
+Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time learning the defunct
+dialects of Polynesian islands that the language of dogs and cats and
+horses and donkeys has been sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude
+says to his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an outburst
+of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For Dude is no longer young
+and therefore is “set” in his ways. His horsey habits were all formed
+years and years ago and therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and
+habits seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners and
+habits will be declared wrong until the end of his days.
+
+It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes parents shake
+their heads over the foolish behavior of their children, which has caused
+the absurd myth of “the good old days”; which makes savages and civilized
+creatures wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a great
+deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all people with a new
+idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.
+
+Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively harmless.
+
+We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later. In ages past it
+has caused millions of people to leave home, and in this way it has been
+responsible for the permanent settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited
+land which otherwise would still be a wilderness.
+
+The second variety is much more serious.
+
+An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance, a very dangerous
+person.
+
+But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack of mental
+faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then he erects within his soul a
+granite bulwark of self-righteousness and from the high pinnacle of this
+formidable fortress, he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not
+share his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed to
+live.
+
+People suffering from this particular affliction are both uncharitable
+and mean. Because they live constantly in a state of fear, they easily
+turn to cruelty and love to torture those against whom they have a
+grievance. It was among people of this ilk that the strange notion
+of a predilected group of a “chosen people” first took its origin.
+Furthermore, the victims of this delusion are forever trying to bolster
+up their own courage by an imaginary relationship which exists between
+themselves and the invisible Gods. This, of course, in order to give a
+flavor of spiritual approbation to their intolerance.
+
+For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging Danny Deever
+because we consider him a menace to our own happiness, because we hate
+him with a thousand hates and because we just love to hang him.” Oh,
+no! They get together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and
+for days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever. When finally
+sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps committed some petty sort
+of larceny, stands solemnly convicted as a most terrible person who has
+dared to offend the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect
+who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution therefore
+becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit upon the judges who have the
+courage to convict such an ally of Satan.
+
+That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people are quite as apt to
+fall under the spell of this most fatal delusion as their more brutal and
+blood-thirsty neighbors is a commonplace both of history and psychology.
+
+The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of a thousand poor
+martyrs were most assuredly not composed of criminals. They were decent,
+pious folk and they felt sure that they were doing something very
+creditable and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.
+
+Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have rejected the idea as
+an ignoble confession of Moral weakness. Perhaps they were intolerant,
+but in that case they were proud of the fact and with good right. For
+there, out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny Deever,
+clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of pantaloons adorned with
+little devils, and he was going, going slowly but surely, to be hanged in
+the Market Place. While they themselves, as soon as the show was over,
+would return to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and
+beans.
+
+Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting and thinking
+correctly?
+
+Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would not the rôles be
+reversed?
+
+A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one and hard to answer
+when people feel sincerely convinced that their own ideas are the ideas
+of God and are unable to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.
+
+There remains as a third category the intolerance caused by
+self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of jealousy and as
+common as the measles.
+
+When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the favor of Almighty
+God could not be bought by the killing of a dozen oxen or goats, all
+those who made a living from the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple
+decried him as a dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed
+before he could do any lasting damage to their main source of income.
+
+When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus and there preached
+a new creed which threatened to interfere with the prosperity of the
+jewelers who derived great profit from the sale of little images of the
+local Goddess Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the
+unwelcome intruder.
+
+And ever since there has been open warfare between those who depend for
+their livelihood upon some established form of worship and those whose
+ideas threaten to take the crowd away from one temple in favor of another.
+
+When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle Ages, we must
+constantly remember that we have to deal with a very complicated problem.
+Only upon very rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only
+one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance. Most
+frequently we can discover traces of all three varieties in the cases of
+persecution which are brought to our attention.
+
+That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering thousands
+of square miles of land and owning hundreds of thousands of serfs,
+should have turned the full vigor of its anger against a group of
+peasants who had undertaken to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious
+Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth was entirely natural.
+
+And in that case, the extermination of heretics became a matter
+of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the intolerance of
+self-interest.
+
+But when we begin to consider another group of men who were to feel
+the heavy hand of official disapprobation, the scientists, the problem
+becomes infinitely more complicated.
+
+And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the Church
+authorities towards those who tried to reveal the secrets of nature, we
+must go back a good many centuries and study what had actually happened
+in Europe during the first six centuries of our era.
+
+The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the continent with the
+ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here and there a few pieces of the old
+Roman fabric of state had remained standing erect amidst the wastes of
+the turbulent waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these
+walls had perished. Their books had been carried away by the waves. Their
+art lay forgotten in the deep mud of a new ignorance. Their collections,
+their museums, their laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of
+scientific facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of
+uncouth savages from the heart of Asia.
+
+We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth century. Of
+Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople, then almost as far
+removed from central Europe as the Melbourne of today) the people of the
+west possessed hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely
+disappeared. A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters from the
+works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar of that time could find
+when he wanted to familiarize himself with the thoughts of the ancients.
+If he desired to learn their language, there was no one to teach it to
+him, unless a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of
+Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced them to find a
+temporary asylum in France or Italy.
+
+Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of those dated from
+the fourth and fifth centuries. The few manuscripts of the classics
+that survived had been copied so often and so indifferently that their
+contents were no longer understandable to any one who had not made a life
+study of paleography.
+
+As for books of science, with the possible exception of some of the
+simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer to be found in any of
+the available libraries and what was much more regrettable, they were no
+longer wanted.
+
+For the people who now ruled the world regarded science with a hostile
+eye and discouraged all independent labor in the field of mathematics,
+biology and zoology, not to mention medicine and astronomy, which had
+descended to such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of the
+slightest practical value.
+
+It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand such a state
+of affairs.
+
+We men and women of the twentieth century, whether rightly or wrongly,
+profoundly believe in the idea of progress. Whether we ever shall be able
+to make this world perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to
+be our most sacred duty to try.
+
+Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of progress seems to
+have become the national religion of our entire country.
+
+But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could not share such a view.
+
+The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and interesting things
+had lasted such a lamentably short time! It had been so rudely disturbed
+by the political cataclysm that had overtaken the unfortunate country
+that most Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed
+pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy fatherland,
+had become abject believers in the doctrine of the ultimate futility of
+all worldly endeavor.
+
+The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw their conclusions
+from almost a thousand years of consecutive history, had discovered a
+certain upward trend in the development of the human race and their
+philosophers, notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task
+of educating the younger generation for a happier and better future.
+
+Then came Christianity.
+
+The center of interest was moved from this world to the other. Almost
+immediately people fell back into a deep and dark abyss of hopeless
+resignation.
+
+Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference. He was conceived
+in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he died repenting of his sins.
+
+But there was a difference between the old despair and the new.
+
+The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so) that they were more
+intelligent and better educated than their neighbors and they felt rather
+sorry for those unfortunate barbarians. But they never quite reached the
+point at which they began to consider themselves as a race that had been
+set apart from all others because it was the chosen people of Zeus.
+
+Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape from its own
+antecedents. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as one of the
+Holy Books of their own faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish
+doctrine that their race was “different” from all others and that only
+those who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines
+could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed to perdition.
+
+This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to those who
+were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to believe themselves
+predilected favorites among millions and millions of their fellow
+creatures. During many highly critical years it had turned the Christians
+into a closely-knit, self-contained little community which floated
+unconcernedly upon a vast ocean of paganism.
+
+What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide
+towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject
+of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any
+of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas
+of their Church into the concrete form of written books. Eventually
+they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God.
+Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve
+was none of their concern.
+
+Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the
+origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians
+and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about
+these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely
+convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of
+Christ.
+
+There was for example the problem of our earth.
+
+The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of
+other stars.
+
+The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk
+on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe.
+
+It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular
+group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been
+brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first
+chapter of Genesis.
+
+When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of
+predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little
+more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity,
+of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But
+these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of
+existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to
+establish a fixed date for the beginning of time.
+
+In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun
+at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, and would end at
+another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed
+for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a
+universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians
+and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only
+cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and
+unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space.
+
+True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they
+were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No
+man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the
+faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books.
+
+One book was enough.
+
+That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every
+semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were
+divinely inspired.
+
+A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly amused if he
+had been told of a supposedly holy volume which contained scraps of
+ill-digested national history, doubtful love poems, the inarticulate
+visions of half-demented prophets and whole chapters devoted to the
+foulest denunciation of those who for some reason or another were
+supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s many tribal
+deities.
+
+But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble respect for
+the “written word” which to him was one of the great mysteries of
+civilization, and when this particular book, by successive councils of
+his Church, was recommended to him as being without error, flaw or slip,
+he willingly enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum total
+of everything that man had ever known, or ever could hope to know, and
+joined in the denunciation and persecution of those who defied Heaven
+by extending their researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and
+Isaiah.
+
+The number of people willing to die for their principles has always been
+necessarily limited.
+
+At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part of certain people
+is so irrepressible that some outlet must be found for their pent up
+energy. As a result of this conflict between curiosity and repression
+there grew up that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to
+be known as Scholasticism.
+
+It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was then that
+Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, gave birth to a son
+who has better claims to be considered the patron saint of the French
+nation than that good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of
+eight hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded his subjects’
+loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their own.
+
+When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus, as you may
+see this very day at the bottom of many an ancient charter. The signature
+is a little clumsy. But Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As
+a boy he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took up writing,
+his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent fighting the Russians and
+the Moors that he had to give up the attempt and hired the best scribes
+of his day to act as his secretaries and do his writing for him.
+
+For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the fact that only
+twice within fifty years had he worn “city clothes” (the toga of a Roman
+nobleman), had a most genuine appreciation of the value of learning, and
+turned his court into a private university for the benefit of his own
+children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.
+
+There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time, the new imperator
+of the west loved to spend his hours of leisure. And so great was his
+respect for academic democracy that he dropped all etiquette and as
+simple Brother David took an active share in the conversation and allowed
+himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.
+
+But when we come to examine the problems that interested this goodly
+company and the questions they discussed, we are reminded of the list of
+subjects chosen by the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.
+
+They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was true in the
+year 800 held equally good for 1400. This was not the fault of the
+medieval scholar, whose brain was undoubtedly quite as good as that of
+his successors of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the
+position of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete liberty
+of investigation, provided he does not say or do anything at variance
+with the chemical and medical information contained in the volumes of
+the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when
+chemistry was practically an unknown subject and surgery was closely akin
+to butchery.
+
+As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the medieval scientist
+with his tremendous brain capacity and his very limited field of
+experimentation reminds one somewhat of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon
+the chassis of a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with
+a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove his strange
+contraption according to the rules and regulations of the road he became
+slightly ridiculous and wasted a terrible lot of energy without getting
+anywhere in particular.
+
+Of course the best among these men were desperate at the rate of speed
+which they were forced to observe.
+
+They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting
+observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote ponderous volumes,
+trying to prove the exact opposite of what they held to be true, in order
+that they might give a hint of the things that were uppermost in their
+minds.
+
+They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus pocus; they wore
+strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles hanging from their
+ceilings; they displayed shelves full of bottled monsters and threw evil
+smelling herbs in the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors
+away from their front door and at the same time establish a reputation
+of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could be allowed to say
+whatever they liked without being held too closely responsible for their
+ideas. And gradually they developed such a thorough system of scientific
+camouflage that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they
+actually meant.
+
+That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves quite as
+intolerant towards science and literature as the Church of the Middle
+Ages had done is quite true, but it is beside the point.
+
+The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to their hearts’
+content, but they were rarely able to turn their threats into positive
+acts of repression.
+
+The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed the power to crush
+its enemies but it made use of it, whenever the occasion presented itself.
+
+The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like to indulge
+in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values of tolerance and
+intolerance.
+
+But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were placed
+before the choice of a public recantation or an equally public flogging.
+
+And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what they held to be
+true, and preferred to waste their time on cross-word puzzles made up
+exclusively from the names of the animals mentioned in the Book of
+Revelations, let us not be too hard on them.
+
+I am quite certain that I never would have written the present volume,
+six hundred years ago.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD
+
+
+I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man
+who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five
+is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of
+the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort
+of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. I was
+taught to look upon all events of the past in the light of a definitely
+established order of things; a universe more or less competently managed
+by emperors and kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by
+congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury. Furthermore, in
+the days of my youth, the good Lord was still tacitly recognized as the
+ex-officio head of everything, and a personage who had to be treated with
+great respect and decorum.
+
+Then came the war.
+
+The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were
+abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret
+committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed
+by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially
+proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times.
+
+Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several
+centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.
+
+Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy.
+
+Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land,
+some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign
+papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known
+technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a
+careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.
+
+The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as an insufferable
+survival of the Dark Ages and we of the great republic of the west saved
+copies of the American comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks
+at home what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually were.
+
+Then came the great Russian revolution.
+
+For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist had howled that
+he was a poor, persecuted creature who enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as
+evidence thereof he had pointed to the strict supervision of all journals
+devoted to the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog
+turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the victorious friends of
+freedom abolish censorship of the press? By no means. They padlocked all
+papers and magazines which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the
+new masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia or Archangel
+(not much to choose) and in general showed themselves a hundred times
+more intolerant than the much maligned ministers and police sergeants of
+the Little White Father.
+
+It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community, which
+heartily believed in the motto of Milton that the “liberty to know, to
+utter and to argue freely according to our own conscience, is the highest
+form of liberty.”
+
+“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see the day when the
+Sermon on the Mount was declared to be a dangerous pro-German document
+which must not be allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million
+sovereign citizens and the publication of which would expose the editors
+and the printers to fines and imprisonment.
+
+In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to drop the further
+study of history and to take up short story writing or real estate.
+
+But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall stick to my job,
+trying to remember that in a well regulated state, every decent citizen
+is supposed to have the right to say and think and utter whatever he
+feels to be true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and
+comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners of polite
+society or break one of the rules of the local police.
+
+This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all official
+censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought to watch out for
+certain magazines and papers which are being printed for the purpose of
+turning pornography into private gain. But for the rest, I would let
+every one print whatever he liked.
+
+I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical person
+who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with the history of the last
+five hundred years. That period shows clearly that violent methods
+of suppression of the printed or spoken word have never yet done the
+slightest good.
+
+Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is contained in a
+small and hermetically closed space and subjected to a violent impact
+from without. A poor devil, full of half-baked economic notions, when
+left to himself will attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and
+as a rule will be laughed at for his pains.
+
+The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate sheriff, dragged
+to jail and condemned to thirty-five years of solitary confinement,
+will become an object of great pity and in the end will be regarded and
+honored as a martyr.
+
+But it will be well to remember one thing.
+
+There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as martyrs for good
+causes. They are tricky people and one never can tell what they will do
+next.
+
+Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If they have
+anything to say that is good, we ought to know it, and if not, they will
+soon be forgotten. The Greeks seem to have felt that way, and the Romans
+did until the days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief
+of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine personage, a
+second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand miles removed from all ordinary
+mortals, this was changed.
+
+The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of “offering insult
+to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a purely political misdemeanor and
+from the time of Augustus until the days of Justinian, many people were
+sent to prison because they had been a little too outspoken in their
+opinions about their rulers. But if one let the person of the emperor
+alone, there was practically no other subject of conversation which the
+Roman must avoid.
+
+This happy condition came to an end when the world was brought under
+the domination of the Church. The line between good and bad, between
+orthodox and heretical, was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead
+more than a few years. During the second half of the first century, the
+apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood of Ephesus in
+Asia Minor, a place famous for its amulets and charms. He went about
+preaching and casting out devils, and with such great success that he
+convinced many people of the error of their heathenish ways. As a token
+of repentance they came together one fine day with all their books of
+magic and burned more than ten thousand dollars worth of secret formulae,
+as you may read in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.
+
+This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part of a group of
+repentant sinners and it is not stated that Paul made an attempt to
+forbid the other Ephesians from reading or owning similar books.
+
+Such a step was not taken until a century later.
+
+Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this same city of
+Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul was condemned and the
+faithful were admonished not to read it.
+
+During the next two hundred years, there was very little censorship.
+There also were very few books.
+
+But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian Church had
+become the official church of the Empire, the supervision of the written
+word became part of the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were
+absolutely forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the people
+were warned that they must read them at their own risk. Until authors
+found it more convenient to assure themselves of the approval of the
+authorities before they published their works and made it a rule to send
+their manuscripts to the local bishops for their approbation.
+
+Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his works would be
+allowed to exist. A book which one Pope had pronounced harmless might be
+denounced as blasphemous and indecent by his successor.
+
+On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes quite
+effectively against the risk of being burned together with their
+parchment offspring and the system worked well enough as long as books
+were copied by hand and it took five whole years to get out an edition of
+three volumes.
+
+All this of course was changed by the famous invention of Johann
+Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.
+
+After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising publisher was
+able to produce as many as four or five hundred copies in less than two
+weeks’ time and in the short period between 1453 and 1500 the people
+of western and southern Europe were presented with not less than forty
+thousand different editions of books that had thus far been obtainable
+only in some of the better stocked libraries.
+
+The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the number of available
+books with very serious misgivings. It was difficult enough to catch a
+single heretic with a single home made copy of the Gospels. What then of
+twenty million heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited
+volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority and it was
+deemed necessary to appoint a special tribunal to inspect all forthcoming
+publications at their source and say which could be published and which
+must never see the light of day.
+
+Out of the different lists of books which from time to time were
+published by this committee as containing “forbidden knowledge” grew that
+famous Index which came to enjoy almost as nefarious a reputation as the
+Inquisition.
+
+But it would be unfair to create the impression that such a supervision
+of the printing-press was something peculiar to the Catholic Church.
+Many states, frightened by the sudden avalanche of printed material that
+threatened to upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their
+local publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and had
+forbidden them to print anything that did not bear the official mark of
+approbation.
+
+But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today.
+And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the
+sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously
+that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called
+Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed
+works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of
+rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form
+of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however
+diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less
+than a couple of thousand years.
+
+But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly
+this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon
+their unfortunate subjects.
+
+Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had
+declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing
+which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any
+public attention.”
+
+The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the
+Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted
+to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves
+thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than
+that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany
+and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business
+it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon
+as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who
+raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the valuable
+information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible
+loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to
+work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold
+at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by
+an army of professional book-leggers.
+
+But the number of copies that could be carried across the frontier
+remained necessarily very small and in such countries as Italy and Spain
+and Portugal, where the Index was actually enforced until a short time
+ago, the results of this policy of repression became very noticeable.
+
+If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for progress, the
+reason was not difficult to find. Not only were the students in their
+universities deprived of all foreign text-books, but they were forced to
+use a domestic product of very inferior quality.
+
+And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from occupying themselves
+seriously with literature or science. For no man in his senses would
+undertake to write a book when he ran the risk of seeing his work
+“corrected” to pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond
+recognition by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial Board of
+Investigators.
+
+Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes in a
+wine-shop.
+
+Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his people, he wrote
+the story of Don Quixote.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR
+
+
+In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to
+those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of
+warning in many of the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his
+more timid friends.
+
+“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the Lutheran
+controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very careful how you handle
+it, because you might easily offend the Pope, who wishes you well.”
+
+Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge tells me that
+you are about to publish a book of short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do
+not incur the displeasure of the Emperor, who might be in a position to
+do you great harm.”
+
+Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty
+of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who
+must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived
+of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the
+clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.
+
+Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to
+the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these
+hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted
+to literature and the word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where
+historians come together.
+
+But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write
+a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and
+advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell.
+
+“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes
+the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most
+regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.”
+
+Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott
+a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say
+something about this in your story of tolerance.”
+
+And so on.
+
+No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether
+reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a
+volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a
+lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official
+form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the
+Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part
+of all good citizens.
+
+History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt.
+It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which
+are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and
+unseen.
+
+Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the modern spirit of
+intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled in our news sheets, it is
+possible to discern signs of a more hopeful future.
+
+For nowadays many things which previous generations would have accepted
+as self-evident and which would have been passed by with the remark that
+“it has always been that way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often
+our neighbors rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded
+as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our fathers and our
+grandfathers and not infrequently they are successful in their warfare
+upon some particularly obnoxious demonstration of the mob spirit.
+
+This book must be kept very short.
+
+I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful pawn-brokers,
+the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic supremacy, the dark ignorance of
+backwoods evangelists, the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis.
+These good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.
+
+But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the State,
+they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized countries, such a
+possibility is entirely precluded.
+
+Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more discomfort in any
+given community than the combined efforts of measles, small-pox and a
+gossiping woman. But private intolerance does not possess executioners of
+its own. If, as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes
+the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law and becomes a
+proper subject for police supervision.
+
+Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot prescribe to an
+entire nation what it shall think and say and eat and drink. If it tries
+to do this, it creates such a terrific resentment among all decent folk,
+that the new ordinance becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out
+even in the District of Columbia.
+
+In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the indifference of
+the majority of the citizens of a free country will allow it to go, and
+no further. Whereas official intolerance is practically almighty.
+
+It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.
+
+It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims of its meddlesome
+fury. It will listen to no argument. And ever again it backs up its
+decisions by an appeal to the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain
+the will of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were an
+exclusive possession of those who had been successful at the most recent
+elections.
+
+If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used in the sense
+of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention to the private
+variety, have patience with me.
+
+I can only do one thing at a time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+RENAISSANCE
+
+
+There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking
+himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles
+and boiled shirts and door-mats think of this world?
+
+But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the
+men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war
+a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there
+ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?
+
+All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.
+
+A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had
+hit the gas factory or not.
+
+The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by
+the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful.
+
+The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that
+by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least
+holding his own.
+
+Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object,
+could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a
+dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing
+signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different
+angle.
+
+But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world
+of their own. Even with the assistance of a couple of full-fledged
+professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited
+those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells
+might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might
+land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But
+then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might
+bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing
+any harm whatsoever.
+
+Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They
+too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a
+revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often
+they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are
+used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot.
+
+Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was
+consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the
+Renaissance.
+
+Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor
+Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton
+plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention
+the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the
+Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of
+their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary,
+images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three
+centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating,
+listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral
+ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios
+illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most
+ponderous of wood-cuts.
+
+This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for the Frobens and
+the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other new firms of printers who were
+making a fortune out of the invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but
+otherwise the literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly
+affect the state of that world in which the authors of the fifteenth
+and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves. The distinction of
+having contributed something new was restricted to only a very few heroes
+of the quill and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely
+discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had been successful
+and how much damage their writings had actually done. But first and last
+they managed to demolish a great many of the obstacles which stood in
+the way of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude for the
+thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of rubbish which otherwise
+would continue to clutter our intellectual front yard.
+
+Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily a
+forward-looking movement. It turned its back in disgust upon the recent
+past, called the works of its immediate predecessors “barbaric” (or
+“Gothic” in the language of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the
+same reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest upon
+those arts which seem to be pervaded with that curious substance known as
+the “classical spirit.”
+
+If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow for the liberty
+of conscience and for tolerance and for a better world in general, it
+was done in spite of the men who were considered the leaders of the new
+movement.
+
+Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there had been people
+who had questioned the rights of a Roman bishop to dictate to Bohemian
+peasants and to English yeomen in what language they should say their
+prayers, in what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much
+they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should read and how
+they should bring up their children. And all of them had been crushed by
+the strength of that super-state, the power of which they had undertaken
+to defy. Even when they had acted as champions and representatives of a
+national cause, they had failed.
+
+The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously into the
+river Rhine, were a warning to all the world that the Papal Monarchy
+still ruled supreme.
+
+The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner, told the humble
+peasants of Leicestershire that councils and Popes could reach beyond the
+grave.
+
+Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.
+
+The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully during
+fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could not be taken by assault.
+The scandals which had taken place within these hallowed enclosures;
+the wars between three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate
+and exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption of
+the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws were made for the purpose
+of being broken by those who were willing to pay for such favors; the
+utter demoralization of monastic life; the venality of those who used
+the recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to blackmail
+poor parents into paying large sums of money for the benefit of their
+dead children; all these things, although widely known, never really
+threatened the safety of the Church.
+
+But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and women who were
+not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters, who had no particular
+grievance against either pope or bishop, these caused the damage which
+finally made the old edifice collapse.
+
+What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish with his
+high ideals of Christian virtue was brought about by a motley crowd
+of private citizens who had no other ambition than to live and die
+(preferably at a ripe old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of
+this world and faithful sons of the Mother Church.
+
+They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They represented every
+sort of profession and they would have been very angry, had an historian
+told them what they were doing.
+
+For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.
+
+We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen such wondrous sights
+that his neighbors, accustomed to the smaller scale of their western
+cities, called him “Million Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he
+told them of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls that
+would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
+
+All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle
+in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the
+prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A
+gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar
+with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill.
+Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes
+of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the
+tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened
+to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way
+the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had
+never known before. For although Polo was a simple-minded fellow who
+firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had
+been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the
+heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories
+about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were
+so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical
+theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the
+previous twelve hundred years.
+
+Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He
+would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his
+near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out
+scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of
+enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.
+
+And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.
+
+For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when
+he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which
+threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every
+citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world
+was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the
+Old Testament had never even suspected.
+
+I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that
+rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the
+world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever
+the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and
+straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the
+travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring
+about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of
+the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which
+only a few years before would have brought them into contact with the
+agents of the Inquisition.
+
+Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on
+the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious
+systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But
+if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how
+could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be
+proven nor contradicted?
+
+Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla.
+He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman
+Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly
+proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces
+of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to
+Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their
+claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but
+a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the
+Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.
+
+Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians,
+carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that
+a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was
+both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be
+able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to
+exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this
+doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies
+and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side
+of this planet?
+
+What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world
+was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was the center of the universe, what
+were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage
+around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to
+contain some rather serious errors?
+
+I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of
+conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a
+most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three
+hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment.
+Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines
+of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same
+rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew
+something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue,
+like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the
+bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of
+the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste.
+
+But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business
+of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent
+with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the
+development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.
+
+Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus, there is an interval
+of almost two centuries. During these two centuries, the copyist and the
+printer never enjoyed an idle moment. And outside of the books published
+by the Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important piece
+of work which did not contain some indirect reference to the sad plight
+into which the world had fallen when the ancient civilizations of Greece
+and Rome had been superseded by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders
+and western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant monks.
+
+The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’ Medici were not
+particularly interested in ethics. They were practical men who made the
+best of a practical world. Outwardly they remained at peace with the
+Church because it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which was
+capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously took part
+in any of the several attempts at reform or questioned the institutions
+under which they lived.
+
+But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their continual
+search after new emotions, the very instability of their restless minds,
+caused a world which had been brought up in the conviction “We know” to
+ask the question “Do we really know?”
+
+And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future generations
+than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the assembled works of Raffael.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE REFORMATION
+
+
+Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves.
+One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single
+motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university or refuse
+a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we proclaim that the true life of
+intellectual freedom can only be lived abroad or vow that we will never
+again leave the shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black
+white or white black, there are always a number of divergent reasons
+which have caused us to make our decision, and way down deep in our
+hearts we know this to be true. But as we would cut a sorry figure with
+the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with
+ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable
+and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public
+consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason
+why we did so and so.”
+
+But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible
+to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered
+a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a
+few minutes.
+
+We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing truth and therefore
+ever since the beginning of civilization people have tacitly agreed with
+each other that this should never under any circumstances be referred to
+in public.
+
+What we think in private, that is our own business. As long as we
+maintain an outward air of respectability, we are perfectly satisfied
+with ourselves and merrily act upon the principle “You believe my fibs
+and I will believe yours.”
+
+Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception to this generous
+rule of conduct. As a result, nature is rarely allowed to enter the
+sacred portals of civilized society. And as history thus far has been
+a pastime of the few, the poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull
+life, especially when we compare it to the career of many of her less
+respectable sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing and have been
+invited to every party ever since the beginning of time. This of course
+has been a source of great annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her
+own subtle way she has managed to get her revenge.
+
+A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one and ofttimes very
+expensive in the matter of human lives and property.
+
+For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying,
+continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with
+the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once
+enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry
+begin to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers
+commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And ere all these people
+have been safely returned to their respective homes or cemeteries, whole
+countries have been laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been
+drained down to the last kopek.
+
+Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn upon the
+members of our guild that history is a science as well as an art and is
+therefore subject to certain of the immutable laws of nature which thus
+far have only been respected in chemical laboratories and astronomical
+observatories. And as a result we are now doing some very useful
+scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit to all
+coming generations.
+
+Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the head of this
+chapter, to wit: the Reformation.
+
+Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions regarding this
+great social and spiritual upheaval. It was either wholly good or wholly
+bad.
+
+According to the adherents of the former opinion it had been the result
+of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on the part of a number of noble
+theologians who, profoundly shocked by the wickedness and the venality
+of the papal super-state, had established a separate church of their own
+where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those who were
+seriously trying to be true Christians.
+
+Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.
+
+The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond the Alps, was the
+result of a damnable and most reprehensible conspiracy on the part of a
+number of despicable princes who wanted to get unmarried and who besides
+hoped to acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their
+Holy Mother the Church.
+
+As usual, both sides were right and both sides were wrong.
+
+The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with all sorts of
+motives. And it is only within very recent times that we have begun to
+realize how religious discontent played only a minor rôle in this great
+upheaval and that it was really an unavoidable social and economic
+revolution with a slightly theological background.
+
+Of course it is much easier to teach our children that good Prince
+Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took a profound personal interest
+in the reformed doctrines, than to explain to them the complicated
+machinations of an unscrupulous politician who willingly accepted the
+help of the infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In
+consequence whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years made a
+magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave who hoped to see
+the house of Hesse play the rôle thus far played by the rival house of
+Hapsburg.
+
+On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope Clement into a
+loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants of his declining strength
+trying to prevent his flocks from following false leaders, than to
+depict him as a typical prince of the house of Medici who regarded
+the Reformation as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks and used
+the power of the Church to further the interests of his own Italian
+fatherland, that we need feel no surprise if such a fabulous figure
+smiles at us from the pages of most Catholic text-books.
+
+But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe, we fortunate
+settlers in a new world are under no obligation to persist in the errors
+of our continental ancestors and are at liberty to draw a few conclusions
+of our own.
+
+Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter of Luther,
+was a man dominated by an enormous political ambition, it does not
+necessarily follow that he was insincere in his religious convictions.
+
+By no means.
+
+When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the year 1529, he knew
+as well as his fellow signers that they were about to “expose themselves
+to the violence of a terrible storm,” and might end their lives on the
+scaffold. If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he would
+never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually played.
+
+But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is exceedingly
+difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an historical character (or
+for that matter, any of our immediate neighbors) without a profound
+knowledge of all the many motives which have inspired him to do what he
+has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted to do.
+
+The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive
+everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an
+amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand
+everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who
+ages ago reserved that right to himself.
+
+Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more
+than enough for our limited human ability.
+
+And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this
+slight detour.
+
+As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation
+of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and
+political development of the last three centuries and which came to be
+known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that
+foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced
+during the course of the last five centuries.
+
+Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never
+have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and
+Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party,
+strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had
+been held for such a long time.
+
+If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements had not been
+temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their
+own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have
+succeeded.
+
+It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily
+suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic
+inquisitors.
+
+The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would
+have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had
+been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored
+another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those
+guilty of a “breach of discipline.”
+
+Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of
+all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the
+menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been
+removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number
+of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat
+all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of
+their power.
+
+A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise
+fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.
+
+To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this
+era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the
+sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the
+scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be
+realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure
+citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the
+utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more
+liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most
+severe test.
+
+For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world
+many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great
+many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of
+making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made
+it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much
+the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the
+mental habits of most people.
+
+They refuse to be hurried.
+
+They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.
+
+They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the
+bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do
+so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral
+furniture as they can possibly carry.
+
+As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new
+relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was
+to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone
+era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its
+trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and
+soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment
+which it held in such great abhorrence.
+
+For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could
+not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its
+adherents.
+
+And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not
+progress as much as might have been expected.
+
+Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the Reformation gave
+the world a book which was held to be infallible.
+
+Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and
+one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule
+supreme.
+
+Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the
+ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless
+little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense
+hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of
+establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early
+Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched
+behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter
+warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established
+doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.
+
+All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.
+
+But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development of the sixteenth
+and seventeenth centuries.
+
+To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists
+only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”
+
+A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college
+somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns
+a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a
+church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a
+fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such
+men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world
+can offer no adequate comparison.
+
+That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters, friends with a
+purpose of their own and supporters who hoped to fish successfully in
+troubled waters, all this is neither here nor there.
+
+When these men began to gamble with their lives for the sake of their
+conscience, they could not foresee that this would happen and that most
+of the nations of the north would eventually enlist under their banners.
+
+But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of their own making,
+they were obliged to go whither the current carried them.
+
+Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water took all of
+their strength. In far away Rome the Pope had at last learned that this
+contemptible disturbance was something more serious than a personal
+quarrel between a few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue
+on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great joy of his many
+creditors, he temporarily ceased building his pet cathedral and called
+together a council of war. The papal bulls and excommunications flew fast
+and furiously. Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the
+rebellion, with their backs against the wall, were forced to stand and
+fight.
+
+It was not the first time in history that great men in the midst of a
+desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion. The same Luther who at
+one time proclaims that it is “against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,”
+a few years later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of the
+wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have a leaning towards the
+ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems to have lost his reason.
+
+The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must
+not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an
+opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.
+
+The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow.
+
+And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last
+followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of
+the Middle Ages as long as they lived.
+
+Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light
+of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing
+to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use
+it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this
+trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant
+junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had
+been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected,
+until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk
+full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the
+rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from
+those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth
+century.
+
+And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of
+tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the
+gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were
+all on the side of progress.
+
+In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church
+had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had
+it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at
+last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the
+holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw
+his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake.
+
+Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and fear which we
+feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred
+years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants
+believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass
+to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the
+“inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than
+to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not
+because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant
+pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and
+the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very
+serious, not to say disastrous.
+
+Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was
+really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders
+was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had
+never foreseen.
+
+If they had, I am certain they would have shared the Church’s dislike
+of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept the scriptures carefully out of
+the hands of the uninitiated. For in the end, an increasing number of
+serious students began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly
+interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales
+of cruelty, greed and murder that it could not possibly have been
+inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of
+a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism.
+
+After that, of course, it was impossible for many people to regard the
+Bible as the only font of all true wisdom. And once this obstacle to free
+speculation had been removed, the current of scientific investigation,
+dammed up for almost a thousand years, began to flow in its natural
+channel and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman
+philosophers were picked up where they had been left off twenty centuries
+before.
+
+And in the second place, and this is even more important from the point
+of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered northern and western
+Europe from the dictatorship of a power which under the guise of a
+religious organization had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and
+highly despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.
+
+With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly agree. But
+they too have reason to be grateful to a movement which was not only
+unavoidable, but which was to render a most salutary service to their
+own faith. For, thrown upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic
+effort to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once sacred name
+a byword for rapacity and tyranny.
+
+And she succeeded most brilliantly.
+
+After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias were tolerated
+in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before continued to be Italians. A
+deflection from this rule was practically impossible, as the Roman
+proletariat would have turned the city upside down if the cardinals
+entrusted with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German or a
+Frenchman or any other foreigner.
+
+The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care and only
+candidates of the highest character could hope to be considered. And
+these new masters, faithfully aided by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries,
+began a thorough house-cleaning.
+
+The sale of indulgences came to an end.
+
+Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth to obey) the rules
+laid down by their founders.
+
+Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized cities.
+
+And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance was replaced by
+an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent in good deeds and in humble
+service towards those unfortunate people who were not strong enough to
+carry the burden of existence by themselves.
+
+Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never
+regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half
+of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.
+
+But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language
+of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more
+clearly revealed.
+
+During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and
+intellectual prison-house.
+
+The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of
+the available material it had constructed a jail of its own.
+
+After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved
+exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants.
+
+At least that had been the original plan.
+
+But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of
+training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make
+their lockup dissenter-proof.
+
+Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the
+unruly inmates escaped.
+
+Ere long the entire building was a wreck.
+
+At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and
+beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little
+fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of
+that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory the
+Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength.
+
+No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of
+rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale
+walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now
+called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline
+(excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were
+absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand
+by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their
+own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened
+to suit their temporary convictions.
+
+This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of
+spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls
+could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they
+pleased without hindrance or molestation.
+
+And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause
+of tolerance.
+
+It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+ERASMUS
+
+
+In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes
+during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make
+itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book
+without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There
+probably is something the matter with it.
+
+The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have
+now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of
+tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all
+the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light
+of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make
+a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use
+the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.
+
+How to explain this?
+
+There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable
+feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with
+his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second
+place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest
+practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present
+volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant
+fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their
+own bad causes.
+
+But apart from these arguments (which hold good for most serious books)
+there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of
+“system.”
+
+A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This
+book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?
+
+What I mean is this.
+
+I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of
+righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.
+
+I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance
+was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.
+
+I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one
+accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”
+
+But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly
+desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake
+to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to
+ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday
+I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the
+institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small
+gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in
+forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”
+
+And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets,
+refuses to be of any use in this emergency.
+
+Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free
+trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic
+architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and
+Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of
+all other material we could at least study the lives of the men and
+women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital
+punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them.
+And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached
+their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their
+preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches
+they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which
+they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.
+
+But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those
+who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their
+tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They
+were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans.
+In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making
+steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance,
+but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers.
+They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing
+chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted
+group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and
+Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that
+common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those
+who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or
+delivering the world from sin.
+
+In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere
+in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this
+particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even
+old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from
+memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just
+enough religion to hate their neighbors but not quite enough to love
+them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present
+difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as
+any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as
+cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally
+devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all
+the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.
+
+No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation
+(but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I
+suspect to be the truth.
+
+The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had
+all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt;
+they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they
+never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute
+conviction.
+
+In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring
+for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to
+point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional
+aversion to any such ideal of standardization.
+
+Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die
+because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent
+pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called
+steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure
+gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven
+different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a
+hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!
+
+In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I
+see no reason why faith should be an exception. Unless the base of our
+“certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith
+will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a
+trombone made of brass.
+
+It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of
+tolerance apart from the rest of the world.
+
+As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish
+devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men
+could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would
+go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died
+in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar
+trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies
+of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of
+elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.
+
+But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.
+
+They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the
+problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses
+would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray
+that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a
+safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only
+right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting
+by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil
+thoroughfares leading to damnation.
+
+All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our
+catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue
+of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps
+so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning
+at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity cannot be said
+to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I
+don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might
+try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant
+guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If
+that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of
+our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a
+society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community
+less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been
+gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.
+
+And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go
+back to my history.
+
+When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the
+best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time
+before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security
+that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been
+characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely
+return to this earth.
+
+That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.
+
+The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the
+poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class
+of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow
+those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity.
+And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of
+those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of
+experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the
+old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who
+regarded their interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as
+a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.
+
+Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of
+pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book,
+few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known
+as Erasmus.
+
+For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal
+encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror
+of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly
+of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.
+
+Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were
+shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very
+dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There
+was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an
+amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them
+home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to
+get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that
+four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the
+effects of the drug.
+
+It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest
+towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the
+North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet
+attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth.
+They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere
+on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring,
+their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it
+was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal
+shores.
+
+But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant
+surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of
+activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the
+best known men of his time.
+
+From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an
+illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate
+and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal
+more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such
+things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the
+rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature
+in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making.
+The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in
+so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly
+muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and
+leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or
+scoundrels.
+
+These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two
+little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a
+home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in
+Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the
+Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which
+Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a
+very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and
+the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate
+supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of
+the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If
+that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four
+centuries later, I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make
+matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his
+money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were
+strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed
+him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was
+secure.”
+
+The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible
+experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of
+the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in
+the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics
+who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully
+half of all monasteries.
+
+Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend
+most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had
+collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those
+volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical
+learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the
+move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not
+necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten
+gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed
+to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate
+what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century.
+
+Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People
+like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own
+circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material.
+
+And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching restlessly
+after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of
+admiring friends.
+
+But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of
+his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did
+he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the
+highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and
+Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.
+
+These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat
+them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name
+of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his
+appearance.
+
+He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger
+and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried
+(quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold
+of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much
+of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the
+University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice
+and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those
+of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome
+made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe
+could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal
+pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was
+opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished
+to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with
+his occasional presence.
+
+But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to
+contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he
+wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he
+preferred amusing companions to dull ones, he knew the difference
+between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red
+ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and
+this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”
+
+The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an
+intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the
+horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant
+rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors
+see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of
+that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.
+
+That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our
+history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics
+while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the
+Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been
+most often condemned.
+
+Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it
+applies to the ancestors.
+
+“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance
+together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems
+to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent
+citizens.
+
+The answer is, “Why should he?”
+
+It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded
+himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense
+of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who
+undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought
+about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the
+old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters.
+Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of repairs. The drainage
+was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds
+and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all
+this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises
+and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond
+that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies
+sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more)
+than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where
+only one had been before.
+
+Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that
+the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over
+the individual man and you have made over the entire world!
+
+Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal
+to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.
+
+In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them
+to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and
+to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and
+self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him
+and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.
+
+In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which
+had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense.
+For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts
+to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons
+why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a
+real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the
+fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of
+trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute
+like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts
+of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with
+those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that
+they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the
+beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a
+Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority
+of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a
+book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto
+evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.
+
+Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of
+this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an
+existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to
+leave the city in which they had found an asylum.
+
+In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in
+the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and
+the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current
+events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a
+separate pamphlet.
+
+But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely
+different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his
+famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought
+together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the
+classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with
+clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were
+by no means what one had the right to expect of a man who enjoyed the
+friendship of the Pope.
+
+And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which
+are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived
+for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great
+literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done.
+It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to
+be written.
+
+It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet
+written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an
+attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name
+appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the
+world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich
+von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet
+laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the
+production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud
+of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous
+champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he
+wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.
+
+Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his
+orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters
+who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier
+for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house
+that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless
+bumpers of sour beer.
+
+But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus
+answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon
+the virtues of his London friend and depicted so charming a scene of
+domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve
+as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this
+letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts,
+had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely
+it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable
+Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and
+birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of
+amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece
+of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.
+
+In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which
+for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children.
+Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their
+dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The
+hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other
+actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account
+of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful
+audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were
+thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.
+
+In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully
+taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and
+favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole
+of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of
+course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with
+all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile
+pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never
+forgotten and never forgiven.
+
+But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to
+the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee,
+were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.
+
+The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than
+the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little
+book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel
+of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.
+
+It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the
+spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons
+in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance
+of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government
+which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against
+Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who
+“slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of
+a clever little book.
+
+This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any
+effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the
+age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word
+from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking
+at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected
+nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well
+the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was
+allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.
+
+And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that
+famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem
+the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.
+
+Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will
+and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the
+Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed
+away.
+
+But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon
+the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those
+irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of
+dykes that will actually hold.
+
+Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.
+
+His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his
+publisher.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+RABELAIS
+
+
+Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows.
+
+The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable book intended for the
+entire family. But to mention Rabelais in public is considered little
+short of a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this fellow
+that laws have been passed in our country to keep his wicked works out of
+the hands of our innocent children and that in many states copies of his
+books can only be obtained from the more intrepid among our book-leggers.
+
+This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have been forced
+upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy.
+
+In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average citizen of the
+twentieth century are about as dull reading as “Tom Jones” or “The House
+of the Seven Gables.” Few people ever get beyond the first interminable
+chapter.
+
+And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally suggestive in
+what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary of his time. That does
+not happen to be the common vernacular of our own day. But in the era of
+the bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived close to
+the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs were not “lady-dogs.”
+
+No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished surgeon go
+much deeper than a mere disapproval of his rich but somewhat outspoken
+collection of idioms. They are caused by the horror which many excellent
+people experience when they come face to face with the point of view of a
+man who point blank refuses to be defeated by life.
+
+The human race, as far as I can make out, is divided into two sorts of
+people; those who say “yes” unto life and those who say “no.” The former
+accept it and courageously they endeavor to make the best of whatever
+bargain fate has handed out to them.
+
+The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?) but they hold
+the gift in great contempt and fret about it like children who have been
+given a new little brother when they really wanted a puppy or a railroad
+train.
+
+But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing to accept their
+morose neighbors at their own valuation and tolerate them, and do not
+hinder them when they fill the landscape with their lamentations and the
+hideous monuments to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely
+extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.
+
+Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would immediately purge this
+planet of the “yeas.”
+
+As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands of their
+jealous souls by the incessant persecution of those who claim that the
+world belongs to the living and not to the dead.
+
+Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his patients or
+his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery. This, no doubt, was very
+regrettable, but we cannot all be grave-diggers. There have to be a
+few Poloniuses and a world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a
+terrible place of abode.
+
+As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very mysterious
+about it. The few details which are omitted in the books written by his
+friends are found in the works of his enemies and as a result we can
+follow his career with a fair degree of accuracy.
+
+Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately upon
+Erasmus but he was born into a world still largely dominated by monks,
+nuns, deacons, and a thousand and one varieties of mendicant friars.
+He was born in Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer
+in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth century)
+and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send his son to a good
+school. There young François was thrown into the company of the scions
+of a famous local family called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their
+father, had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion they could
+fight well. They were men of the world in the good sense of that oft
+misunderstood expression. They were faithful servitors of their master
+the king, held endless public offices, became bishops and cardinals and
+ambassadors, translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill
+and ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services
+that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when a title condemned a
+man to a life of few pleasures and many duties and responsibilities.
+
+The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed upon Rabelais
+shows that he must have been something more than an amusing table
+companion. During the many ups and downs of his life he could always
+count upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates.
+Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors he found the door
+of their castle wide open and if perchance the soil of France became
+a little too hot for this blunt young moralist, there was always a du
+Bellay, conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in need
+of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician besides being a
+polished Latin scholar.
+
+This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed that the career
+of our learned doctor was about to come to an abrupt and painful end,
+the influence of his old friends saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne
+or from the anger of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted
+upon him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when he
+pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as mercilessly as
+he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of his erstwhile colleagues in
+Fontenay and Maillezais.
+
+Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the more dangerous.
+Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content, but outside of the narrow
+boundaries of a small Swiss canton, his lightning was as harmless as a
+fire-cracker.
+
+The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with the University of
+Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and the Old Learning, knew of no mercy
+when her authority was questioned and could always count upon the hearty
+coöperation of the king of France and his hangman.
+
+And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked man. Not
+because he liked to drink good wine and told funny stories about his
+fellow-monks. He had done much worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the
+wicked Greek tongue.
+
+When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his cloister, it
+was decided to search his cell. It was found to be full of literary
+contraband, a copy of Homer, one of the New Testament, one of Herodotus.
+
+This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great deal of
+wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends to get him out of
+this scrape.
+
+It was a curious period in the development of the Church.
+
+Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been advance posts
+of civilization and both friars and nuns had rendered inestimable service
+in promoting the interest of the Church. More than one Pope, however, had
+foreseen the danger that might come from a too powerful development of
+the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just because every
+one knew that something ought to be done about these cloisters, nothing
+was ever done.
+
+Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that the Catholic Church
+is a placid institution which is run silently and almost automatically
+by a small body of haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those
+inner upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization
+composed of ordinary mortals.
+
+Nothing is further from the truth.
+
+Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been caused by the
+misinterpretation of a single word.
+
+A world addicted to democratic ideals is easily horrified at the idea of
+an “infallible” human being.
+
+“It must be easy,” so the popular argument runs, “to administer this big
+institution when it is enough for one man to say that a thing is so to
+have all the others fall upon their knees and shout amen and obey him.”
+
+It is extremely difficult for one brought up in Protestant countries to
+get a correct and fair view of this rather intricate subject. But if I am
+not mistaken, the “infallible” utterances of the supreme pontiff are as
+rare as constitutional amendments in the United States.
+
+Furthermore, such important decisions are never reached until the subject
+has been thoroughly discussed and the debates which precede the final
+verdict often rock the very body of the Church. Such pronunciamentos
+are therefore “infallible” in the sense that our own constitutional
+amendments are infallible, because they are “final” and because all
+further argument is supposed to come to an end as soon as they have been
+definitely incorporated into the highest law of the land.
+
+If any one were to proclaim that it is an easy job to govern these United
+States because in case of an emergency all the people are found to stand
+firmly behind the Constitution, he would be just as much in error as
+if he were to state that all Catholics who in supreme matters of faith
+recognize the absolute authority of their pope are docile sheep and have
+surrendered every right to an opinion of their own.
+
+If this were true, the occupants of the Lateran and the Vatican palaces
+would have had an easy life. But even the most superficial study of
+the last fifteen hundred years will show the exact opposite. And those
+champions of the reformed faith who sometimes write as if the Roman
+authorities had been ignorant of the many evils which Luther and Calvin
+and Zwingli denounced with such great vehemence are either ignorant of
+the facts or are not quite fair in their zeal for the good cause.
+
+Such men as Adrian VI and Clement VII knew perfectly well that something
+very serious was wrong with their Church. But it is one thing to express
+the opinion that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is
+quite a different matter to correct the evil, as even poor Hamlet was to
+learn.
+
+Nor was that unfortunate prince the last victim of the pleasant delusion
+that hundreds of years of misgovernment can be undone overnight by the
+unselfish efforts of an honest man.
+
+Many intelligent Russians knew that the old official structure which
+dominated their empire was corrupt, inefficient and a menace to the
+safety of the nation.
+
+They made Herculean efforts to bring about reforms and they failed.
+
+How many of our citizens who have ever given the matter an hour’s thought
+fail to see that a democratic instead of a representative form of
+government (as intended by the founders of the Republic) must eventually
+lead to systematized anarchy?
+
+And yet, what can they do about it?
+
+Such problems, by the time they have begun to attract public attention,
+have become so hopelessly complicated that they are rarely solved except
+by a social cataclysm. And social cataclysms are terrible things from
+which most men shy away. Rather than run to such extremes, they try to
+patch up the old, decrepit machinery and meanwhile they pray that some
+miracle will occur which will make it work.
+
+An insolent religious and social dictatorship, set up and maintained by
+a number of religious orders, was one of the most flagrant evils of the
+out-going Middle Ages.
+
+For the so-many-eth time in history, the army was about to run away with
+the commander-in-chief. In plain words, the situation had grown entirely
+beyond the control of the popes. All they could do was to sit still,
+improve their own party organization, and meanwhile try to mitigate the
+fate of those who had incurred the displeasure of their common enemies,
+the friars.
+
+Erasmus was one of the many scholars who had frequently enjoyed the
+protection of the Pope. Let Louvain storm and the Dominicans rave, Rome
+would stand firm and woe unto him who disregarded her command, “Leave the
+old man alone!”
+
+And after these few introductory remarks, it will be no matter of
+surprise that Rabelais, a mutinous soul but a brilliant mind withal,
+could often count upon the support of the Holy See when the superiors
+of his own order wished to punish him and that he readily obtained
+permission to leave his cloister when constant interference with his
+studies began to make his life unbearable.
+
+And so with a sigh of relief, he shook the dust of Maillezais off his
+feet and went to Montpellier and to Lyons to follow a course in medicine.
+
+Surely here was a man of extraordinary talents! Within less than two
+years the former Benedictine monk had become chief physician of the city
+hospital of Lyons. But as soon as he had achieved these new honors, his
+restless soul began to look for pastures new. He did not give up his
+powders and pills but in addition to his anatomical studies (a novelty
+almost as dangerous as the study of Greek) he took up literature.
+
+Lyons, situated in the center of the valley of the Rhone, was an ideal
+city for a man who cared for belles lettres. Italy was nearby. A few days
+easy travel carried the traveler to the Provence and although the ancient
+paradise of the Troubadours had suffered dreadfully at the hands of the
+Inquisition, the grand old literary tradition had not yet been entirely
+lost. Furthermore, the printing-presses of Lyons were famous for the
+excellence of their product and her book stores were well stocked with
+all the latest publications.
+
+When one of the master printers, Sebastian Gryphius by name, looked for
+some one to edit his collection of medieval classics, it was natural
+that he should bethink himself of the new doctor who was also known as
+a scholar. He hired Rabelais and set him to work. In rapid succession
+almanachs and chap-books followed upon the learned treatises of Galen
+and Hippocrates. And out of these inconspicuous beginnings grew that
+strange tome which was to make its author one of the most popular writers
+of his time.
+
+The same talent for novelty which had turned Rabelais into a successful
+medical practitioner brought him his success as a novelist. He did what
+few people had dared to do before him. He began to write in the language
+of his own people. He broke with a thousand-year-old tradition which
+insisted that the books of a learned man must be in a tongue unknown
+to the vulgar multitude. He used French and, furthermore, he used the
+unadorned vernacular of the year 1532.
+
+I gladly leave it to the professors of literature to decide where and
+how and when Rabelais discovered his two pet heroes, Gargantua and
+Pantagruel. Maybe they were old heathenish Gods who, after the nature
+of their species, had managed to live through fifteen hundred years of
+Christian persecution and neglect.
+
+Then again, he may have invented them in an outburst of gigantic hilarity.
+
+However that be, Rabelais contributed enormously to the gayety of nations
+and greater praise no author can gain than that he has added something
+to the sum total of human laughter. But at the same time, his works were
+not funny books in the terrible modern sense of the word. They had their
+serious side and struck a bold blow for the cause of tolerance by their
+caricature of the people who were responsible for that clerical reign of
+terror which caused such untold misery during the first fifty years of
+the sixteenth century.
+
+Rabelais, a skillfully trained theologian, was able to avoid all such
+direct statements as might have got him into trouble, and acting upon the
+principle that one cheerful humorist out of jail is better than a dozen
+gloomy reformers behind the bars, refrained from a too brazen exposition
+of his highly unorthodox opinions.
+
+But his enemies knew perfectly well what he was trying to do. The
+Sorbonne condemned his books in unmistakable terms and the Parliament
+of Paris put him on their index and confiscated and burned all such
+copies of his works as could be found within their jurisdiction. But
+notwithstanding the activities of the hangman (who in those days was also
+the official book destroyer) the “Lives and Heroic Deeds and Sayings
+of Gargantua and his Sonne Pantagruel” remained a popular classic. For
+almost four centuries it has continued to edify those who can derive
+pleasure from a clever mixture of good-natured laughter and bantering
+wisdom and it will never cease to irritate those others who firmly
+believe that the Goddess of Truth, caught with a smile on her lips,
+cannot possibly be a good woman.
+
+As for the author himself, he was and is a “man of one book.” His
+friends, the du Bellays, remained faithful to him until the end, but most
+of his life Rabelais practiced the virtue of discretion and kept himself
+at a polite distance from the residence of that Majesty by whose supposed
+“privilege” he published his nefarious works.
+
+He ventured however upon a visit to Rome and met with no difficulties,
+but on the contrary was received with every manifestation of a cordial
+welcome. In the year 1550 he returned to France and went to live in
+Meudon. Three years later he died.
+
+It is of course quite impossible to measure the exact and positive
+influence exercised by such a man. After all, he was a human being and
+not an electric current or a barrel of gasoline.
+
+It has been said that he was merely destructive.
+
+Perhaps so.
+
+But he was destructive in an age when there was a great and crying need
+for a social wrecking crew, headed by just such people as Erasmus and
+Rabelais.
+
+That many of the new buildings were going to be just as uncomfortable and
+ugly as the old ones which they were supposed to replace was something
+which no one was able to foresee.
+
+And, anyway, that was the fault of the next generation.
+
+They are the people we ought to blame.
+
+They were given a chance such as few people ever enjoyed to make a fresh
+start.
+
+May the Lord have mercy upon their souls for the way in which they
+neglected their opportunities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD
+
+
+The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large ocean upon which
+sailed many ships. Whenever these little vessels bumped against each
+other, they made a “wonderful music” which people call history.
+
+I would like to borrow Heine’s ocean, but for a purpose and a simile
+of my own. When we were children it was fun to drop pebbles into a
+pond. They made a nice splash and then the pretty little ripples caused
+a series of ever widening circles and that was very nice. If bricks
+were handy (which sometimes was the case) one could make an Armada of
+nutshells and matches and submit this flimsy fleet to a nice artificial
+storm, provided the heavy projectile did not create that fatal loss of
+equilibrium which sometimes overtakes small children who play too near
+the water’s edge and sends them to bed without their supper.
+
+In that special universe reserved for grown-ups, the same pastime is not
+entirely unknown, but the results are apt to be far more disastrous.
+
+Everything is placid and the sun is shining and the water-wigglers are
+skating merrily, and then suddenly a bold, bad boy comes along with a
+piece of mill-stone (Heaven only knows where he found it!) and before any
+one can stop him he has heaved it right into the middle of the old duck
+pond and then there is a great ado about who did it and how he ought to
+be spanked and some say, “Oh, let him go,” and others, out of sheer envy
+of the kid who is attracting all the attention, pick up any old thing
+that happens to lie around and they dump it into the water and everybody
+gets splashed and one thing leading to another, the usual result is a
+free-for-all fight and a few million broken heads.
+
+Alexander was such a bold, bad boy.
+
+And Helen of Troy, in her own charming way, was such a bad, bold girl,
+and history is just full of them.
+
+But by far the worst offenders are those wicked citizens who play this
+game with ideas and use the stagnant pool of man’s spiritual indifference
+as their playground. And I for one don’t wonder that they are hated by
+all right-thinking citizens and are punished with great severity if ever
+they are unfortunate enough to let themselves be caught.
+
+Think of the damage they have done these last four hundred years.
+
+There were the leaders of the rebirth of the ancient world. The stately
+moats of the Middle Ages reflected the image of a society that was
+harmonious in both color and texture. It was not perfect. But people
+liked it. They loved to see the blending of the brick-red walls of their
+little homes with the somber gray of those high cathedral towers that
+watched over their souls.
+
+Came the terrible splash of the Renaissance and overnight everything was
+changed. But it was only a beginning. For just when the poor burghers had
+almost recovered from the shock, that dreadful German monk appeared with
+a whole cartload of specially prepared bricks and dumped them right into
+the heart of the pontifical lagoon. Really, that was too much. And no
+wonder that it took the world three centuries to recover from the shock.
+
+The older historians who studied this period often fell into a slight
+error. They saw the commotion and decided that the ripples had been
+started by a common cause, which they alternately called the Renaissance
+and the Reformation.
+
+Today we know better.
+
+The Renaissance and the Reformation were movements which professed to be
+striving after a common purpose. But the means by which they hoped to
+accomplish their ultimate object were so utterly different that Humanist
+and Protestant not infrequently came to regard each other with bitter
+hostility.
+
+They both believed in the supreme rights of man. During the Middle Ages
+the individual had been completely merged in the community. He did not
+exist as John Doe, a bright citizen who came and went at will, who sold
+and bought as he liked, who went to any one of a dozen churches (or to
+none at all, as suited his tastes and his prejudices). His life from the
+time of his birth to the hour of his death was lived according to a rigid
+handbook of economic and spiritual etiquette. This taught him that his
+body was a shoddy garment, casually borrowed from Mother Nature and of no
+value except as a temporary receptacle for his immortal soul.
+
+It trained him to believe that this world was a halfway house to future
+glory and should be regarded with that profound contempt which travelers
+destined for New York bestow upon Queenstown and Halifax.
+
+And now unto the excellent John, living happily in the best of all
+possible worlds (since it was the only world he knew), came the two
+fairy god-mothers, Renaissance and Reformation, and said: “Arise, noble
+citizen, from now on thou art to be free.”
+
+But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers greatly differed.
+
+“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance replied.
+
+“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished him.
+
+“Free to search the records of the past when the world was truly the
+realm of men. Free to realize those ideals which once filled the hearts
+of poets and painters and sculptors and architects. Free to turn the
+universe into thine eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her
+secrets,” was the promise of the Renaissance.
+
+“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find salvation for thy
+soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was the warning of the Reformation.
+
+And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe in the possession
+of a new freedom which was infinitely more embarrassing than the
+thralldom of his former days.
+
+Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made her peace with
+the established order of things. The successors of Phidias and Horace
+discovered that a belief in the established Deity and outward conformity
+to the rules of the Church were two very different things and that one
+could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets with complete
+impunity if one took the precaution to call Hercules, John the Baptist,
+and Hera, the Virgin Mary.
+
+They were like tourists who go to India and who obey certain laws which
+mean nothing to them at all in order that they may gain entrance to the
+temples and travel freely without disturbing the peace of the land.
+
+But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most trifling
+of details at once assumed enormous importance. An erroneous comma
+in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As for a misplaced full stop in the
+Apocalypse, it called for instant death.
+
+To people like these who took what they considered their religious
+convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise of the
+Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.
+
+As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company, never to meet
+again.
+
+Whereupon the Reformation, alone against all the world, buckled on the
+armor of righteousness and made ready to defend her holiest possessions.
+
+In the beginning, the army of revolt was composed almost exclusively of
+Germans. They fought and suffered with extreme bravery, but that mutual
+jealousy which is the bane and the curse of all northern nations soon
+lamed their efforts and forced them to accept a truce. The strategy which
+led to the ultimate victory was provided by a very different sort of
+genius. Luther stepped aside to make room for Calvin.
+
+It was high time.
+
+In that same French college where Erasmus had spent so many of his
+unhappy Parisian days, a black-bearded young Spaniard with a limp (the
+result of a Gallic gunshot) was dreaming of the day when he should march
+at the head of a new army of the Lord to rid the world of the last of the
+heretics.
+
+It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic.
+
+And only a man of granite, like Calvin, would have been able to defeat
+the plans of Loyola.
+
+Personally, I am glad that I was not obliged to live in Geneva in the
+sixteenth century. At the same time I am profoundly grateful that the
+Geneva of the sixteenth century existed.
+
+Without it, the world of the twentieth century would have been a great
+deal more uncomfortable and I for one would probably be in jail.
+
+The hero of this glorious fight, the famous Magister Joannes Calvinus (or
+Jean Calvini or John Calvin) was a few years younger than Luther. Date
+of birth: July 10, 1509. Place of birth: the city of Noyon in northern
+France. Background: French middle class. Father: a small clerical
+official. Mother: the daughter of an inn-keeper. Family: five sons and
+two daughters. Characteristic qualities of early education: thrift,
+simplicity, and a tendency to do all things in an orderly manner, not
+stingily, but with minute and efficient care.
+
+John, the second son, was meant for the priesthood. The father had
+influential friends, and could eventually get him into a good parish.
+Before he was thirteen years old, he already held a small office in the
+cathedral of his home city. This gave him a small but steady income. It
+was used to send him to a good school in Paris. A remarkable boy. Every
+one who came in contact with him said, “Watch out for that youngster!”
+
+The French educational system of the sixteenth century was well able to
+take care of such a child and make the best of his many gifts. At the age
+of nineteen, John was allowed to preach. His future as a duly established
+deacon seemed assured.
+
+But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement in the Church
+was slow. The law offered better opportunities. Besides, it was a time
+of great religious excitement and the future was uncertain. A distant
+relative, a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible into
+French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time with his cousin. It
+would never do to have two heretics in one family. John was packed off
+to Orleans and was apprenticed to an old lawyer that he might learn the
+business of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.
+
+Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the end of the year,
+the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching his less industrious
+fellow-students in the principles of jurisprudence. And soon he knew all
+there was to know and was ready to start upon that course which, so his
+father fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those famous
+avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single opinion and who drove
+in a coach and four when they were called upon to see the king in distant
+Compiègne.
+
+But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never practiced law.
+
+Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests and his
+pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of theological works and
+started in all seriousness upon that task which was to make him one of
+the most important historical figures of the last twenty centuries.
+
+The years, however, which he had spent studying the principles of Roman
+law put their stamp upon all his further activities. It was impossible
+for him to approach a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things
+and he felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers who
+had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had been condemned to be
+roasted to death over slow burning coal fires. In their helpless agony
+they are as fine a bit of writing as anything of which we have a record.
+And they show such a delicate understanding of human psychology that
+the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of the man whose
+teaching had brought them into their predicament.
+
+No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said, a man without a
+heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.
+
+And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself and with his
+God that he must first reduce every question to certain fundamental
+principles of faith and doctrine before he dared to expose it to the
+touchstone of human sentiment.
+
+When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked, “The power of that
+heretic lay in the fact that he was indifferent to money.” If His
+Holiness meant to pay his enemy the compliment of absolute personal
+disinterestedness, he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and
+refused to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness had made it
+impossible for him to earn that money as he should have done.”
+
+But his strength lay elsewhere.
+
+He was a man of one idea, his life centered around one all-overpowering
+impulse; the desire to find the truth of God as revealed in the
+Scriptures. When he finally had reached a conclusion that seemed proof
+against every possible form of argument and objection, then at last he
+incorporated it into his own code of life. And thereafter he went his way
+with such utter disregard for the consequences of his decision that he
+became both invincible and irresistible.
+
+This quality, however, was not to make itself manifest until many years
+later. During the first decade after his conversion he was obliged to
+direct all his energies toward the very commonplace problem of keeping
+alive.
+
+A short triumph of the “new learning” in the University of Paris, an
+orgy of Greek declensions, Hebrew irregular verbs and other forbidden
+intellectual fruit had been followed by the usual reaction. When it
+appeared that even the rector of that famous seat of learning had been
+contaminated with the pernicious new German doctrines, steps were taken
+to purge the institution of all those who in terms of our modern medical
+science might be considered “idea carriers.” Calvin, who, ’twas said,
+had given the rector the material for several of his most objectionable
+speeches, was among those whose names appeared at the top of the list of
+suspects. His rooms were searched. His papers were confiscated and an
+order was issued for his arrest.
+
+He heard of it and hid himself in the house of a friend.
+
+But storms in an academic tea-pot never last very long. All the same, a
+career in the Church of Rome had become an impossibility. The moment had
+arrived for a definite choice.
+
+In the year 1534 Calvin broke away from the old faith. Almost at the same
+moment, on the hills of Montmartre, high above the French capital, Loyola
+and a handful of his fellow students were taking that solemn vow which
+shortly afterwards was to be incorporated into the constitution of the
+Society of Jesus.
+
+Thereupon they both left Paris.
+
+Ignatius set his face towards the east, but remembering the unfortunate
+outcome of his first assault upon the Holy Land, he retraced his steps,
+went to Rome and there began those activities which were to carry his
+fame (or otherwise) to every nook and corner of our planet.
+
+John was of a different caliber. His Kingdom of God was bound to neither
+time nor place and he wandered forth that he might find a quiet spot
+and devote the rest of his days to reading, to contemplation and to the
+peaceful expounding of his ideas.
+
+He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the outbreak of a war
+between Charles V and Francis I forced him to make a detour through
+western Switzerland. In Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one
+of the stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary
+from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons. Farel welcomed
+him with open arms, spoke to him of the wondrous things that might be
+accomplished in this little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin
+asked time to consider. Then he stayed.
+
+In this way did the chances of war decree that the New Zion should be
+built at the foot of the Alps.
+
+It is a strange world.
+
+Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles upon a new
+continent.
+
+Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend the rest of his
+days in study and holy meditation, wanders into a third-rate Swiss town
+and makes it the spiritual capital of those who soon afterwards turn
+the domains of their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant
+empire.
+
+Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves all purposes?
+
+I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has been preserved.
+But if it still exists, the volume will show considerable wear on that
+particular page which contains the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel.
+The French reformer was a modest man, but often he must have found
+consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of the living
+God who also had been cast into a den of lions and whose innocence had
+saved him from a gruesome and untimely death.
+
+Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city inhabited by
+respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took life seriously, but not quite
+so seriously as that new master who was now holding forth in the pulpit
+of their Saint Peter.
+
+And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the form of a Duke of
+Savoy. It was during one of their interminable quarrels with the house
+of Savoy that the descendants of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make
+common cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation.
+The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg was a marriage of
+convenience, an engagement based upon common interests rather than common
+affection.
+
+But no sooner had the news spread abroad that “Geneva had gone
+Protestant,” than all the eager apostles of half a hundred new and crazy
+creeds flocked to the shores of Lake Leman. With tremendous energy they
+began to preach some of the queerest doctrines ever conceived by mortal
+man.
+
+Calvin detested these amateur prophets with all his heart. He fully
+appreciated what a menace they would prove to the cause of which they
+were such ardent but ill-guided champions. And the first thing he did
+as soon as he had enjoyed a few months leisure was to write down as
+precisely and briefly as he could what he expected his new parishioners
+to hold true and what he expected them to hold false. And that no man
+might claim the ancient and time-worn excuse, “I did not know the law,”
+he, together with his friend Farel, personally examined all Genevans in
+batches of ten and allowed only those to the full rights of citizenship
+who swore the oath of allegiance to this strange religious constitution.
+
+Next he composed a formidable catechism for the benefit of the younger
+generation.
+
+Next he prevailed upon the Town Council to expel all those who still
+clung to their old erroneous opinions.
+
+Then, having cleared the ground for further action, he set about to found
+him a state along the lines laid down by the political economists of the
+books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. For Calvin, like so many other of the
+great reformers, was really much more of an ancient Jew than a modern
+Christian. His lips did homage to the God of Jesus, but his heart went
+out to the Jehovah of Moses.
+
+This, of course, is a phenomenon often observed during periods of great
+emotional stress. The opinions of the humble Nazarene carpenter upon the
+subject of hatred and strife are so definite and so clear cut that no
+compromise has ever been found possible between them and those violent
+methods by which nations and individuals have, during the last two
+thousand years, tried to accomplish their ends.
+
+Hence, as soon as a war breaks out, by silent consent of all concerned,
+we temporarily close the pages of the Gospels and cheerfully wallow
+in the blood and thunder and the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the Old
+Testament.
+
+And as the Reformation was really a war and a very atrocious one, in
+which no quarter was asked and very little quarter was given, it need
+not surprise us that the state of Calvin was in reality an armed camp in
+which all semblance of personal liberty was gradually suppressed.
+
+Of course, all this was not accomplished without tremendous opposition,
+and in the year 1538 the attitude of the more liberal elements in the
+community became so threatening that Calvin was forced to leave the city.
+But in 1541 his adherents returned to power. Amidst the ringing of many
+bells and the loud hosannas of the deacons, Magister Joannes returned to
+his citadel on the river Rhone. Thereafter he was the uncrowned King of
+Geneva and the next twenty-three years he devoted to the establishment
+and the perfection of a theocratic form of government, the like of which
+the world had not seen since the days of Ezekiel and Ezra.
+
+The word “discipline” according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, means
+“to bring under control, to train to obedience and order, to drill.” It
+expresses best the spirit which permeated the entire political-clerical
+structure of Calvin’s dreams.
+
+Luther, after the nature of most Germans, had been a good deal of a
+sentimentalist. The Word of God alone, so it seemed to him, would show a
+man the way to the life everlasting.
+
+This was much too indefinite to suit the taste of the great French
+reformer. The Word of God might be a beacon light of hope, but the road
+was long and dark and many were the temptations that made people forget
+their true destination.
+
+The minister, however, could not go astray. He was a man set apart.
+He knew all pitfalls. He was incorruptible. And if perchance he felt
+inclined to wander from the straight path, the weekly meetings of the
+clergy, at which these worthy gentlemen were invited to criticize each
+other freely, would speedily bring him back to a realization of his
+duties. Hence he was the ideal held before all those who truly aspired
+after salvation.
+
+Those of us who have ever climbed mountains know that professional guides
+can upon occasion be veritable tyrants. They know the perils of a pile
+of rocks, the hidden dangers of an innocent-looking snowfield. Wherefore
+they assume complete command of the party that has entrusted itself to
+their care and profanity raineth richly upon the head of the foolish
+tourist who dares to disobey their orders.
+
+The ministers of Calvin’s ideal state had a similar conception of their
+duties. They were ever delighted to extend a helping hand to those
+who stumbled and asked that they be supported. But when willful people
+purposely left the beaten track and wandered away from the flock, then
+that hand was withdrawn and became a fist which meted out punishment that
+was both quick and terrible.
+
+In many other communities the dominies would have been delighted to
+exercise a similar power. But the civil authorities, jealous of their
+own prerogatives, rarely allowed the clergy to compete with the courts
+and the executioners. Calvin knew this and within his own bailiwick he
+established a form of church discipline which practically superseded the
+laws of the land.
+
+Among the curious historical misconceptions which have gained such
+popularity since the days of the great war, none is more surprising than
+the belief that the French people (in contrast to their Teuton neighbors)
+are a liberty-loving race and detest all regimentation. The French have
+for centuries submitted to the rule of a bureaucracy quite as complicated
+and infinitely less efficient than the one which existed in Prussia in
+the pre-war days. The officials are a little less punctual about their
+office hours and the spotlessness of their collars and they are given to
+sucking a particularly vile sort of cigarette. Otherwise they are quite
+as meddlesome and as obnoxious as those in the eastern republic, and the
+public accepts their rudeness with a meekness that is astonishing in a
+race so addicted to rebellion.
+
+Calvin was the ideal Frenchman in his love for centralization. In some
+details he almost approached the perfection for detail which was the
+secret of Napoleon’s success. But unlike the great emperor, he was
+utterly devoid of all personal ambition. He was just a dreadfully serious
+man with a weak stomach and no sense of humor.
+
+He ransacked the Old Testament to discover what would be agreeable
+to his particular Jehovah. And then the people of Geneva were asked
+to accept this interpretation of the Jewish chronicles as a direct
+revelation of the divine will.
+
+Almost over night the merry city on the Rhone became a community of
+rueful sinners. A civic inquisition composed of six ministers and twelve
+elders watched night and day over the private opinions of all citizens.
+Whosoever was suspected of an inclination towards “forbidden heresies”
+was cited to appear before an ecclesiastic tribunal that he might be
+examined upon all points of doctrine and explain where, how and in what
+way he had obtained the books which had given him the pernicious ideas
+which had led him astray. If the culprit showed a repentant spirit, he
+might escape with a sentence of enforced attendance at Sunday School.
+But in case he showed himself obstinate, he must leave the city within
+twenty-four hours and never again show himself within the jurisdiction of
+the Genevan commonwealth.
+
+But a proper lack of orthodox sentiment was not the only thing that could
+get a man into trouble with the so-called Consistorium. An afternoon
+spent at a bowling-alley in a nearby village, if properly reported
+(as such things invariably are), could be reason enough for a severe
+admonition. Jokes, both practical and otherwise, were considered the
+height of bad form. An attempt at wit during a wedding ceremony was
+sufficient cause for a jail sentence.
+
+Gradually the New Zion was so encumbered with laws, edicts, regulations,
+rescripts and decrees that life became a highly complicated affair and
+lost a great deal of its old flavor.
+
+Dancing was not allowed. Singing was not allowed. Card playing was not
+allowed. Gambling, of course, was not allowed. Birthday parties were
+not allowed. County fairs were not allowed. Silks and satins and all
+manifestations of external splendor were not allowed. What was allowed
+was going to church and going to school. For Calvin was a man of positive
+ideas.
+
+The verboten sign could keep out sin, but it could not force a man to
+love virtue. That had to come through an inner persuasion. Hence the
+establishment of excellent schools and a first-rate university and
+the encouragement of all learning. And the establishment of a rather
+interesting form of communal life which absorbed a good deal of the
+surplus energy of the community and which made the average man forget the
+many hardships and restrictions to which he was submitted. If it had been
+entirely lacking in human qualities, the system of Calvin could never
+have survived and it certainly would not have played such a very decisive
+rôle in the history of the last three hundred years. All of which however
+belongs in a book devoted to the development of political ideas. This
+time we are interested in the question of what Geneva did for tolerance
+and we come to the conclusion that the Protestant Rome was not a whit
+better than its Catholic namesake.
+
+The extenuating circumstances I have enumerated a few pages back. In a
+world which was forced to stand by and witness such bestial occurrences
+as the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the wholesale extermination of
+scores of Dutch cities, it was unreasonable to expect that one side (the
+weaker one at that) should practice a virtue which was equivalent to a
+self-imposed sentence of death.
+
+This, however, does not absolve Calvin from the crime of having aided and
+abetted in the legal murder of Gruet and Servetus.
+
+In the case of the former, Calvin might have put up the excuse that
+Jacques Gruet was seriously suspected of having incited his fellow
+citizens to riot and that he belonged to a political party which was
+trying to bring about the downfall of the Calvinists. But Servetus could
+hardly be called a menace to the safety of the community, as far as
+Geneva was concerned.
+
+He was what the modern passport regulations call a “transient.” Another
+twenty-four hours and he would have been gone. But he missed his boat.
+And so he came to lose his life, and it is a pretty terrible story.
+
+Miguel Serveto, better known as Michael Servetus, was a Spaniard. His
+father was a respectable notary-public (a semi-legal position in Europe
+and not just a young man with a stamping machine who charges you a
+quarter for witnessing your signature) and Miguel was also destined for
+the law. He was sent to the University of Toulouse, for in those happy
+days when all lecturing was done in Latin learning was international and
+the wisdom of the entire world was open to those who had mastered five
+declensions and a few dozen irregular verbs.
+
+At the French university Servetus made the acquaintance of one Juan de
+Quintana who shortly afterwards became the confessor of the Emperor
+Charles V.
+
+During the Middle Ages, an imperial coronation was a good deal like a
+modern international exhibition. When Charles was crowned in Bologna in
+the year 1530, Quintana took his friend Michael with him as his secretary
+and the bright young Spaniard saw all there was to be seen. Like so many
+men of his time, he was of an insatiable curiosity and he spent the
+next ten years dabbling in an infinite variety of subjects, medicine,
+astronomy, astrology, Hebrew, Greek, and, most fatal of all, theology.
+He was a very competent doctor and in the pursuit of his theological
+studies he hit upon the idea of the circulation of the blood. It is to be
+found in the fifteenth chapter of the first one of his books against the
+doctrine of the Trinity. It shows the one-sidedness of the theological
+mind of the sixteenth century that none of those who examined the works
+of Servetus ever discovered that this man had made one of the greatest
+discoveries of all ages.
+
+If only Servetus had stuck to his medical practice! He might have died
+peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age.
+
+But he simply could not keep away from the burning questions of his day,
+and having access to the printing shops of Lyons, he began to give vent
+to his opinions upon sundry subjects.
+
+Nowadays a generous millionaire can persuade a college to change its name
+from Trinity College to that of a popular brand of tobacco and nothing
+happens. The press says, “Isn’t it good of Mr. Dingus to be so generous
+with his money!” and the public at large shouts “Amen!”
+
+In a world which seems to have lost all capacity for being shocked by
+such a thing as blasphemy, it is not easy to write of a time when the
+mere suspicion that one of its fellow citizens had spoken disrespectfully
+of the Trinity would throw an entire community into a state of panic.
+But unless we fully appreciate this fact, we shall never be able to
+understand the horror in which Servetus was held by all good Christians
+of the first half of the sixteenth century.
+
+And yet he was by no means a radical.
+
+He was what today we would call a liberal.
+
+He rejected the old belief in the Trinity as held both by the Protestants
+and the Catholics, but he believed so sincerely (one feels inclined
+to say, so naïvely) in the correctness of his own views, that he
+committed the grave error of writing letters to Calvin suggesting that
+he be allowed to visit Geneva for a personal interview and a thorough
+discussion of the entire problem.
+
+He was not invited.
+
+And, anyway, it would have been impossible for him to accept. The
+Inquisitor General of Lyons had already taken a hand in the affair and
+Servetus was in jail. This inquisitor (curious readers will find a
+description of him in the works of Rabelais who refers to him as Doribus,
+a pun upon his name, which was Ory) had got wind of the Spaniard’s
+blasphemies through a letter which a private citizen of Geneva, with the
+connivance of Calvin, had sent to his cousin in Lyons.
+
+Soon the case against him was further strengthened by several samples of
+Servetus’ handwriting, also surreptitiously supplied by Calvin. It really
+looked as if Calvin did not care who hanged the poor fellow as long as he
+got hung, but the inquisitors were negligent in their sacred duties and
+Servetus was able to escape.
+
+First he seems to have tried to reach the Spanish frontier. But the long
+journey through southern France would have been very dangerous to a man
+who was so well known and so he decided to follow the rather round-about
+route via Geneva, Milan, Naples and the Mediterranean Sea.
+
+Late one Saturday afternoon in August of the year 1553 he reached Geneva.
+He tried to find a boat to cross to the other side of the lake, but boats
+were not supposed to sail so shortly before the Sabbath day and he was
+told to wait until Monday.
+
+The next day was Sunday. As it was a misdemeanor for both natives and
+strangers to stay away from divine service, Servetus went to church. He
+was recognized and arrested. By what right he was put into jail was never
+explained. Servetus was a Spanish subject and was not accused of any
+crime against the laws of Geneva. But he was a liberal in the matter of
+doctrine, a blasphemous and profane person who dared to have opinions of
+his own upon the subject of the Trinity. It was absurd that such a person
+should invoke the protection of the law. A common criminal might do so. A
+heretic, never! And without further ado he was locked up in a filthy and
+damp hole, his money and his personal belongings were confiscated and two
+days later he was taken to court and was asked to answer a questionnaire
+containing thirty-eight different points.
+
+The trial lasted two months and twelve days.
+
+In the end he was found guilty of “heresies against the foundations
+of the Christian religion.” The answers which he had given during the
+discussions of his opinions had exasperated his judges. The usual
+punishment for cases of his sort, especially if the accused were a
+foreigner, was perpetual banishment from the territory of the city of
+Geneva. In the case of Servetus an exception was made. He was condemned
+to be burned alive.
+
+In the meantime the French tribunal had re-opened the case of the
+fugitive and the officials of the Inquisition had come to the same
+conclusion as their Protestant colleagues. They too had condemned
+Servetus to death and had dispatched their sheriff to Geneva with the
+request that the culprit be surrendered to him and be brought back to
+France.
+
+This request was refused.
+
+Calvin was able to do his own burning.
+
+As for that terrible walk to the place of execution, with a delegation
+of arguing ministers surrounding the heretic upon his last journey, the
+agony which lasted for more than half an hour and did not really come to
+an end until the crowd, in their pity for the poor martyr, had thrown
+a fresh supply of fagots upon the flames, all this makes interesting
+reading for those who care for that sort of thing, but it had better be
+omitted. One execution more or less, what difference did it make during a
+period of unbridled religious fanaticism?
+
+But the case of Servetus really stands by itself. Its consequences were
+terrible. For now it was shown, and shown with brutal clearness, that
+those Protestants who had clamored so loudly and persistently for “the
+right to their own opinions” were merely Catholics in disguise, that
+they were just as narrow-minded and cruel to those who did not share
+their own views as their enemies and that they were only waiting for the
+opportunity to establish a reign of terror of their own.
+
+This accusation is a very serious one. It cannot be dismissed by a mere
+shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, what would you expect?”
+
+We possess a great deal of information upon the trial and know in detail
+what the rest of the world thought of this execution. It makes ghastly
+reading. It is true that Calvin, in an outburst of generosity, suggested
+that Servetus be decapitated instead of burned. Servetus thanked him for
+his kindness, but offered still another solution. He wanted to be set
+free. Yea, he insisted (and the logic was all on his side) that the court
+had no jurisdiction over him, that he was merely an honest man in search
+for the truth and that therefore he had the right to be heard in open
+debate with his opponent, Dr. Calvin.
+
+But of this Calvin would not hear.
+
+He had sworn that this heretic, once he fell into his hands, should never
+be allowed to escape with his life, and he was going to be as good as
+his word. That he could not get a conviction without the coöperation
+of his arch-enemy, the Inquisition, made no difference to him. He
+would have made common cause with the pope if His Holiness had been
+in the possession of some documents that would further incriminate the
+unfortunate Spaniard.
+
+But worse was to follow.
+
+On the morning of his death, Servetus asked to see Calvin and the latter
+came to the dark and filthy dungeon that had served his enemy as a prison.
+
+Upon this occasion at least he might have been generous; more, he might
+have been human.
+
+He was neither.
+
+He stood in the presence of a man who within another hour would be able
+to plead his case before the throne of God and he argued. He debated
+and sputtered, grew green and lost his temper. But not a word of pity,
+of charity, or kindliness. Not a word. Only bitterness and hatred, the
+feeling of “Serve you right, you obstinate scoundrel. Burn and be damned!”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this happened many, many years ago.
+
+Servetus is dead.
+
+All our statues and memorial tablets will not bring him back to life
+again.
+
+Calvin is dead.
+
+A thousand volumes of abuse will not disturb the ashes of his unknown
+grave.
+
+They are all of them dead, those ardent reformers who during the trial
+had shuddered with fear lest the blasphemous scoundrel be allowed to
+escape, those staunch pillars of the Church who after the execution broke
+forth into paeans of praise and wrote each other, “All hail to Geneva!
+The deed is done.”
+
+They are all of them dead, and perhaps it were best they were forgotten
+too.
+
+Only let us have a care.
+
+Tolerance is like liberty.
+
+No one ever gets it merely by asking for it. No one keeps it except by
+the exercise of eternal care and vigilance.
+
+For the sake of some future Servetus among our own children, we shall do
+well to remember this.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE ANABAPTISTS
+
+
+Every generation has a bogey-man all its own.
+
+We have our “Reds.”
+
+Our fathers had their Socialists.
+
+Our grandfathers had their Molly Maguires.
+
+Our great-great-grandfathers had their Jacobins.
+
+And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not a bit better off.
+
+They had their Anabaptists.
+
+The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth century was a
+certain “World Book” or chronicle, which Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler,
+prohibitionist and author, living in the good city of Ulm, published in
+the year 1534.
+
+Sebastian knew the Anabaptists. He had married into an Anabaptist family.
+He did not share their views, for he was a confirmed free-thinker. But
+this is what he wrote about them: “that they taught nothing but love and
+faith and the crucifixion of the flesh, that they manifested patience and
+humility under all suffering, assisted one another with true helpfulness,
+called each other brother and believed in having all things in common.”
+
+It is surely a curious thing that people of whom all those nice things
+could be truthfully said should for almost a hundred years have been
+hunted down like wild animals, and should have been exposed to all the
+most cruel punishments of the most bloodthirsty of centuries.
+
+But there was a reason and in order to appreciate it you must remember
+certain facts about the Reformation.
+
+The Reformation really settled nothing.
+
+It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book infallible in
+the place of a man and established (or rather, tried to establish) a rule
+by black garbed ministers instead of white garbed priests.
+
+Such meager results after half a century of struggle and sacrifice had
+filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate disappointment.
+They had expected a millennium of social and religious righteousness
+and they were not at all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and
+economic slavery.
+
+They had been ready for a great adventure. Then something had happened.
+They had slipped between the wall and the ship. And they had been obliged
+to strike out for themselves and keep above water as best they could.
+
+They were in a terrible position. They had left the old church. Their
+conscience did not allow them to join the new faith. Officially they had,
+therefore, ceased to exist. And yet they lived. They breathed. They were
+sure that they were God’s beloved children. As such it was their duty to
+keep on living and breathing, that they might save a wicked world from
+its own folly.
+
+Eventually they survived, but do not ask how!
+
+Deprived of their old associations, they were forced to form groups of
+their own, to look for a new leadership.
+
+But what man in his senses would take up with these poor fanatics?
+
+As a result, shoemakers with second sight and hysterical midwives with
+visions and hallucinations assumed the rôle of prophets and prophetesses
+and they prayed and preached and raved until the rafters of their
+dingy meeting places shook with the hosannas of the faithful and the
+tip-staffs of the village were forced to take notice of the unseemly
+disturbance.
+
+Then half a dozen men and women were sent to jail and their High and
+Mightinesses, the town councilors, began what was good-naturedly called
+“an investigation.”
+
+These people did not go to the Catholic Church. They did not worship in
+the Protestant kirk. Then would they please explain who they were and
+what they believed?
+
+To give the poor councilors their due, they were in a difficult
+predicament. For their prisoners were the most uncomfortable of all
+heretics, people who took their religious convictions absolutely
+seriously. Many of the most respectable reformers were of this earth
+earthy and willingly made such small compromises as were absolutely
+necessary, if one hoped to lead an agreeable and respectable existence.
+
+Your true Anabaptist was of a different caliber. He frowned upon all
+half-way measures. Jesus had told his followers to turn the other cheek
+when smitten by an enemy, and had taught that all those who take the
+sword shall perish by the sword. To the Anabaptists this meant a positive
+ordinance to use no violence. They did not care to dilly-dally with
+words and murmur that circumstances alter cases, that, of course, they
+were against war, but that this was a different kind of a war and that
+therefore they felt that for this once God would not mind if they threw a
+few bombs or fired an occasional torpedo.
+
+A divine ordinance was a divine ordinance, and that was all there was to
+it.
+
+And so they refused to enlist and refused to carry arms and in case they
+were arrested for their pacifism (for that is what their enemies called
+this sort of applied Christianity) they went willingly forth to meet
+their fate and recited Matthew xxvi: 52 until death made an end to their
+suffering.
+
+But anti-militarism was only a small detail in their program of
+queerness. Jesus had preached that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom
+of Caesar were two entirely different entities and could not and should
+not be reconciled. Very well. These words were clear. Henceforth all
+good Anabaptists carefully abstained from taking part in their country’s
+government, refused to hold public office and spent the time which other
+people wasted upon politics, reading and studying the holy scriptures.
+
+Jesus had cautioned his disciples against unseemly quarrels and the
+Anabaptists would rather lose their rightful possessions than submit a
+difference of opinion to a law court.
+
+There were several other points which set these peculiar people apart
+from the rest of the world, but these few examples of their odd behavior
+will explain the suspicion and detestation in which they were held by
+their fat and happy neighbors who invariably mixed their piety with a
+dose of that comfortable doctrine which bids us live and let live.
+
+Even so, the Anabaptists, like the Baptists and many other dissenters,
+might in the end have discovered a way to placate the authorities, if
+only they had been able to protect themselves from their own friends.
+
+Undoubtedly there are many honest Bolshevists who dearly love their
+fellow proletarians and who spend their waking hours trying to make this
+world a better and happier place. But when the average person hears
+the word “Bolshevik,” he thinks of Moscow and of a reign of terror
+established by a handful of scholarly cut-throats, of jails full of
+innocent people and firing squads jeering at the victims they are about
+to shoot. This picture may be slightly unfair, but it is no more than
+natural that it should be part of the popular myth after the unspeakable
+things which have happened in Russia during the last seven years.
+
+The really good and peaceful Anabaptists of the sixteenth century
+suffered from a similar disadvantage. As a sect they were suspected of
+many strange crimes, and with good reason. In the first place, they were
+inveterate Bible readers. This, of course, is not a crime at all, but let
+me finish my sentence. The Anabaptists studied the scriptures without any
+discrimination and that is a very dangerous thing when one has a strong
+predilection for the Book of Revelation.
+
+This strange work which even as late as the fifth century was rejected
+as a bit of “spurious writing” was just the sort of thing to appeal to
+people who lived during a period of intense emotional passions. The exile
+of Patmos spoke a language which these poor, hunted creatures understood.
+When his impotent rage drove him into hysterical prophecies anent the
+modern Babylon, all the Anabaptists shouted amen and prayed for the
+speedy coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth.
+
+It was not the first time that weak minds gave way under the stress of
+a great excitement. And almost every persecution of the Anabaptists was
+followed by violent outbursts of religious insanity. Men and women would
+rush naked through the streets, announcing the end of the world, trying
+to indulge in weird sacrifices that the fury of God might be appeased.
+Old hags would enter the divine services of some other sect and break up
+the meeting, stridently shrieking nonsense about the coming of the Dragon.
+
+Of course, this sort of affliction (in a mild degree) is always with us.
+Read the daily papers and you will see how in some remote hamlet of Ohio
+or Iowa or Florida a woman has butchered her husband with a meat cleaver
+because “she was told to do so” by the voice of an angel; or how an
+otherwise reasonable father has just killed his wife and eight children
+in anticipation of the sounding of the Seven Trumpets. Such cases,
+however, are rare exceptions. They can be easily handled by the local
+police and they really do not have great influence upon the life or the
+safety of the Republic.
+
+But what had happened in the year 1534 in the good town of Münster was
+something very different. There the New Zion, upon strictly Anabaptist
+principles, had actually been proclaimed.
+
+And people all over northern Europe shuddered when they thought of that
+terrible winter and spring.
+
+The villain in the case was a good-looking young tailor by the name of
+Jan Beukelszoon. History knows him as John of Leiden, for Jan was a
+native of that industrious little city and had spent his childhood along
+the banks of the sluggish old Rhine. Like all other apprentices of that
+day, he had traveled extensively and had wandered far and wide to learn
+the secrets of his trade.
+
+He could read and write just enough to produce an occasional play, but
+he had no real education. Neither was he possessed of that humility of
+spirit which we so often find in people who are conscious of their social
+disadvantages and their lack of knowledge. But he was a very good-looking
+young man, endowed with unlimited cheek and as vain as a peacock.
+
+After a long absence in England and Germany, he went back to his native
+land and set up in the cloak and suit business. At the same time he went
+in for religion and that was the beginning of his extraordinary career.
+For he became a disciple of Thomas Münzer.
+
+This man Münzer, a baker by profession, was a famous character. He was
+one of the three Anabaptist prophets who, in the year 1521, had suddenly
+made their appearance in Wittenberg that they might show Luther how to
+find the true road to salvation. Although they had acted with the best
+of intentions, their efforts had not been appreciated and they had been
+chased out of the Protestant stronghold with the request that never again
+they show their unwelcome selves within the jurisdiction of the Dukes of
+Saxony.
+
+Came the year 1534 and the Anabaptists had suffered so many defeats that
+they decided to risk everything on one big, bold stroke.
+
+That they selected the town of Münster in Westphalia as the spot
+for their final experiment surprised no one. Franz von Waldeck, the
+prince-bishop of that city, was a drunken bounder who for years had lived
+openly with a score of women and who ever since his sixteenth year had
+offended all decent people by the outrageous bad taste of his private
+conduct. When the town went Protestant, he compromised. But being known
+far and wide for a liar and a cheat, his treaty of peace did not give
+his Protestant subjects that feeling of personal security without which
+life is indeed a very uncomfortable experience. In consequence whereof
+the inhabitants of Münster remained in a state of high agitation until
+the next elections. These brought a surprise. The city government fell
+into the hands of the Anabaptists. The chairman became one Bernard
+Knipperdollinck, a cloth merchant by day and a prophet after dark.
+
+The bishop took one look at his new councilors and fled.
+
+It was then that John of Leiden appeared upon the scene. He had come to
+Münster as the apostle of a certain Jan Matthysz, a Haarlem baker who had
+started a new sect of his own and was regarded as a very holy man. And
+when he heard of the great blow that had been struck for the good cause,
+he remained to help celebrate the victory and purge the bishopric of all
+popish contamination. The Anabaptists were nothing if not thorough. They
+turned the churches into stone quarries. They confiscated the convents
+for the benefit of the homeless. All books except the Bible were publicly
+burned. And as a fitting climax, those who refused to be re-baptized
+after the Anabaptist fashion were driven into the camp of the Bishop, who
+decapitated them or drowned them on the general principle that they were
+heretics and small loss to the community.
+
+That was the prologue.
+
+The play itself was no less terrible.
+
+From far and wide the high priests of half a hundred new creeds hastened
+to the New Jerusalem. There they were joined by all those who believed
+themselves possessed of a call for the great uplift, honest and sincere
+citizens, but as innocent as babes when it came to politics or statecraft.
+
+The siege of Münster lasted five months and during that time, every
+scheme, system and program of social and spiritual regeneration was tried
+out; every new-fangled prophet had his day in court.
+
+But, of course, a little town chuck full of fugitives, pestilence and
+hunger, was not a fit place for a sociological laboratory and the
+dissensions and quarrels between the different factions lamed all the
+efforts of the military leaders. During that crisis John the tailor
+stepped forward.
+
+The short hour of his glory had come.
+
+In that community of starving men and suffering children, all things
+were possible. John began his régime by introducing an exact replica of
+that old theocratic form of government of which he had read in his Old
+Testament. The burghers of Münster were divided into the twelve tribes
+of Israel and John himself was chosen to be their king. He had already
+married the daughter of one prophet, Knipperdollinck. Now he married the
+widow of another, the wife of his former master, John Matthysz. Next he
+remembered Solomon and added a couple of concubines. And then the ghastly
+farce began.
+
+All day long John sat on the throne of David in the market place and all
+day long the people stood by while the royal court chaplain read the
+latest batch of ordinances. These came fast and furiously, for the fate
+of the city was daily growing more desperate and the people were in dire
+need.
+
+John, however, was an optimist and thoroughly believed in the omnipotence
+of paper decrees.
+
+The people complained that they were hungry. John promised that he would
+tend to it. And forthwith a royal ukase, duly signed by His Majesty,
+ordained that all wealth in the city be divided equally among the rich
+and the poor, that the streets be broken up and used as vegetable
+gardens, that all meals be eaten in common.
+
+So far so good. But there were those who said that some of the rich
+people had hidden part of their treasures. John bade his subjects not to
+worry. A second decree proclaimed that all those who broke a single law
+of the community would be immediately decapitated. And, mind you, such
+a warning was no idle threat. For this royal tailor was as handy with
+his sword as with his scissors and frequently undertook to be his own
+executioner.
+
+Then came the period of hallucinations when the populace suffered from a
+diversity of religious manias; when the market place was crowded day and
+night with thousands of men and women, awaiting the trumpet blasts of
+the angel Gabriel.
+
+Then came the period of terror, when the prophet kept up the courage of
+his flock by a constant orgy of blood and cut the throat of one of his
+own queens.
+
+And then came the terrible day of retribution when two citizens in their
+despair opened the gates to the soldiers of the bishop and when the
+prophet, locked in an iron cage, was shown at all the Westphalian country
+fairs and was finally tortured to death.
+
+A weird episode, but of terrible consequence to many a God-fearing and
+simple soul.
+
+From that moment on, all Anabaptists were outlawed. Such leaders as
+had escaped the carnage of Münster were hunted down like rabbits and
+were killed wherever found. From every pulpit, ministers and priests
+fulminated against the Anabaptists and with many curses and anathemas
+they denounced them as communists and traitors and rebels, who wanted to
+upset the existing order of things and deserved less mercy than wolves or
+mad dogs.
+
+Rarely has a heresy hunt been so successful. As a sect, the Anabaptists
+ceased to exist. But a strange thing happened. Many of their ideas
+continued to live, were picked up by other denominations, were
+incorporated into all sorts of religious and philosophic systems, became
+respectable, and are today part and parcel of everybody’s spiritual and
+intellectual inheritance.
+
+It is a simple thing to state such a fact. To explain how it actually
+came about, that is quite a different story.
+
+Almost without exception the Anabaptists belonged to that class of
+society which regards an inkstand as an unnecessary luxury.
+
+Anabaptist history, therefore, was writ by those who regarded the sect
+as a particularly venomous land of denominational radicalism. Only now,
+after a century of study, are we beginning to understand the great
+rôle the ideas of these humble peasants and artisans have played in
+the further development of a more rational and more tolerant form of
+Christianity.
+
+But ideas are like lightning. One never knows where they will strike
+next. And what is the use of lightning rods in Münster, when the storm
+breaks loose over Sienna?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE SOZZINI FAMILY
+
+
+In Italy the Reformation had never been successful. It could not be. In
+the first place, the people of the south did not take their religion
+seriously enough to fight about it and in the second place, the close
+proximity of Rome, the center of a particularly well equipped office of
+the Inquisition, made indulgence in private opinions a dangerous and
+costly pastime.
+
+But, of course, among all the thousands of humanists who populated the
+peninsula, there were bound to be a few black sheep who cared a great
+deal more for the good opinion of Aristotle than for that of Saint
+Chrysostom. Those good people, however, were given many opportunities
+to get rid of their surplus spiritual energy. There were clubs and
+coffee-houses and discreet salons where men and women could give vent to
+their intellectual enthusiasm without upsetting empires. All of which was
+very pleasant and restful. And besides, wasn’t all life a compromise?
+Hadn’t it always been a compromise? Would it not in all likelihood be a
+compromise until the end of time?
+
+Why get excited about such a small detail as one’s faith?
+
+After these few introductory remarks, the reader will surely not expect
+to hear a loud fanfaronade or the firing of guns when our next two heroes
+make their appearance. For they are soft-spoken gentlemen, and go about
+their business in a dignified and pleasant way.
+
+In the end, they are to do more to upset the dogmatic tyranny under
+which the world had suffered for such a long time than a whole army of
+noisy reformers. But that is one of those curious things which no one
+can foresee. They happen. We are grateful. But how it comes about, that,
+alas, is something which we do not fully understand.
+
+The name of these two quiet workmen in the vineyard of reason was Sozzini.
+
+They were uncle and nephew.
+
+For some unknown reason, the older man, Lelio Francesco, spelled his name
+with one “z” and the younger, Fausto Paolo, spelled his with two “zs.”
+But as they are both of them much better known by the Latinized form of
+their name, Socinius, than by the Italian Sozzini, we can leave that
+detail to the grammarians and etymologists.
+
+As far as their influence was concerned, the uncle was much less
+important than the nephew. We shall, therefore, deal with him first and
+speak of the nephew afterwards.
+
+Lelio Sozini was a Siennese, the descendant of a race of bankers and
+judges and himself destined for a career at the bar, via the University
+of Bologna. But like so many of his contemporaries, he allowed himself
+to slip into theology, stopped reading law, played with Greek and Hebrew
+and Arabic and ended (as so often happens with people of his type) as a
+rationalistic mystic—a man who was at once very much of this world and
+yet never quite of it. This sounds complicated. But those who understand
+what I mean will understand without any further explanation, and the
+others would not understand, no matter what I said.
+
+His father, however, seems to have had a suspicion that the son might
+amount to something in the world of letters. He gave his boy a check and
+bade him go forth and see whatever there was to be seen. And so Lelio
+left Sienna and during the next ten years, he traveled from Venice to
+Geneva and from Geneva to Zürich and from Zürich to Wittenberg and then
+to London and then to Prague and then to Vienna and then to Cracow,
+spending a few months or years in every town and hamlet where he hoped
+to find interesting company and might be able to learn something new
+and interesting. It was an age when people talked religion just as
+incessantly as today they talk business. Lelio must have collected a
+strange assortment of ideas and by keeping his ears open he was soon
+familiar with every heresy between the Mediterranean and the Baltic.
+
+When, however, he carried himself and his intellectual luggage to
+Geneva, he was received politely but none too cordially. The pale eyes
+of Calvin looked upon this Italian visitor with grave suspicion. He was
+a distinguished young man of excellent family and not a poor, friendless
+wanderer like Servetus. It was said, however, that he had Servetian
+inclinations. And that was most disturbing. The case for or against the
+Trinity, so Calvin thought, had been definitely settled when the Spanish
+heretic was burned. On the contrary! The fate of Servetus had become a
+subject of conversation from Madrid to Stockholm, and serious-minded
+people all over the world were beginning to take the side of the
+anti-trinitarian. But that was not all. They were using Gutenberg’s
+devilish invention to spread their views broadcast and being at a safe
+distance from Geneva they were often far from complimentary in their
+remarks.
+
+Only a short while before a very learned tract had appeared which
+contained everything the fathers of the Church had ever said or written
+upon the subject of persecuting and punishing heretics. It had an
+instantaneous and enormous sale among those who “hated God,” as Calvin
+said, or who “hated Calvin,” as they themselves protested. Calvin had
+let it be known that he would like to have a personal interview with the
+author of this precious booklet. But the author, anticipating such a
+request, had wisely omitted his name from the title-page.
+
+It was said that he was called Sebastian Castellio, that he had been a
+teacher in one of the Geneva high schools and that his moderate views
+upon diverse theological enormities had gained him the hatred of Calvin
+and the approbation of Montaigne. No one, however, could prove this. It
+was mere hearsay. But where one had gone before, others might follow.
+
+Calvin, therefore, was distantly polite to Sozzini, but suggested that
+the mild air of Basel would suit his Siennese friend much better than the
+damp climate of Savoy and heartily bade him Godspeed when he started on
+his way to the famous old Erasmian stronghold.
+
+Fortunately for Calvin, the Sozzini family soon afterwards fell under the
+suspicion of the Inquisition, Lelio was deprived of his funds and falling
+ill of a fever, he died in Zürich at the age of only thirty-seven.
+
+Whatever joy his untimely demise may have caused in Geneva, it was
+short-lived.
+
+For Lelio, besides a widow and several trunks of notes, left a nephew,
+who not only fell heir to his uncle’s unpublished manuscripts but soon
+gained for himself the reputation of being even more of a Servetus
+enthusiast than his uncle had been.
+
+During his younger years, Faustus Socinius had traveled almost as
+extensively as the older Lelio. His grandfather had left him a small
+estate and as he did not marry until he was nearly fifty, he was able to
+devote all his time to his favorite subject, theology.
+
+For a short while he seems to have been in business in Lyons.
+
+What sort of a salesman he made, I do not know, but his experience in
+buying and selling and dealing in concrete commodities rather than
+spiritual values seems to have strengthened him in his conviction that
+very little is ever gained by killing a competitor or losing one’s temper
+if the other man has the better of a deal. And as long as he lived,
+he showed himself possessed of that sober common sense which is often
+found in a counting-house but is very rarely part of the curriculum of a
+religious seminary.
+
+In the year 1563 Faustus returned to Italy. On his way home he visited
+Geneva. It does not appear that he ever paid his respects to the local
+patriarch. Besides, Calvin was a very sick man at that time. The visit
+from a member of the Sozzini family would only have disturbed him.
+
+The next dozen years, young Socinius spent in the service of Isabella de’
+Medici. But in the year 1576 this lady, after a few days of matrimonial
+bliss, was murdered by her husband, Paolo Orsini. Thereupon Socinius
+resigned, left Italy for good and went to Basel to translate the Psalms
+into colloquial Italian and write a book on Jesus.
+
+Faustus, so it appeared from his writings, was a careful man. In the
+first place, he was very deaf and such people are by nature cautious.
+
+In the second place, he derived his income from certain estates situated
+on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan authorities had given him
+a hint that it might be just as well for one suspected of “Lutheran
+leanings” not to be too bold while dealing with subjects which were held
+in disfavor by the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms
+and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by a number of
+friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.
+
+Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the Index. It also
+happened that a copy of his life of Jesus was carried all the way to
+Transylvania and there fell into the hands of another liberal-minded
+Italian, the private physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine
+ladies who had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.
+
+Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe. A wilderness
+until the early part of the twelfth century, it had been used as a
+convenient home for the surplus population of Germany. The hard working
+Saxon peasants had turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well
+regulated little country with cities and schools and an occasional
+university. But it remained a country far removed from the main roads of
+travel and trade. Hence it had always been a favorite place of residence
+for those who for one reason or another preferred to keep a few miles of
+marsh and mountain between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.
+
+As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many centuries been
+associated with the general idea of reaction and jingoism that it will
+come as an agreeable surprise to many of my readers when I tell them that
+during the first half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum
+for all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account of their
+religious convictions.
+
+This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about in a typically
+Polish fashion.
+
+That the Republic for quite a long time had been the most scandalously
+mismanaged country of the entire continent was even then a generally
+known fact. The extent, however, to which the higher clergy had neglected
+their duties was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when
+dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common affliction
+of all western nations.
+
+But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was noticed that
+the number of Polish students in the different German universities was
+beginning to increase at a rate of speed which caused great concern
+among the authorities of Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask
+questions. And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of
+Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed to fall into
+such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders were forced to go
+abroad for their education or do without. A little later, when the Teuton
+universities fell under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young
+men from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally followed suit.
+
+And when they returned to their home towns, they did so as full-fledged
+Lutherans.
+
+At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been quite easy for
+the king and the nobility and the clergy to stamp out this epidemic of
+erroneous opinions. But such a step would have obliged the rulers of the
+republic to unite upon a definite and common policy and that of course
+was directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of this
+strange country where a single dissenting vote could upset a law which
+had the support of all the other members of the diet.
+
+And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared that the religion
+of the famous Wittenberg professor carried with it a by-product of an
+economic nature, consisting of the confiscation of all Church property,
+the Boleslauses and the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts,
+barons, princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between the
+Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning towards a faith
+which meant money in their pockets.
+
+The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed upon the
+discovery caused one of those famous “interims” with which the Poles,
+since time immemorial, have tried to stave off the day of reckoning.
+During such periods all authority came to a standstill and the
+Protestants made such a good use of their opportunity that in less than
+a year they had established churches of their own in every part of the
+kingdom.
+
+Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling of the new
+ministers drove the peasants back into the arms of the Church and Poland
+once more became one of the strongholds of a most uncompromising form
+of Catholicism. But during the latter half of the sixteenth century,
+the country enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics and
+Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination upon the
+Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion that the survivors should flee
+eastward and should eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula
+and it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’ book on Jesus
+and expressed a wish to make the author’s acquaintance.
+
+Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man of parts. He
+had graduated at the University of Montpellier and had been remarkably
+successful as a woman’s specialist. First and last he was a good deal of
+a scoundrel, but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think of
+Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as a neurologist
+and frequently played one rôle out against the other. For example, he
+cured the Queen Dowager of Poland, Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund),
+so successfully of the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were
+wrong, that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed those
+who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.
+
+The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her lovers) but two
+of her daughters had married local noblemen and as their medical adviser,
+Blandrata exercised a great deal of influence upon the politics of his
+adopted land. He knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that
+it would happen very soon unless something be done to make an end to the
+everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to work to bring about
+a truce between the different opposing sects. But for this purpose he
+needed some one more skilled in the intricacies of a religious debate
+than he was himself. Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life
+of Jesus was his man.
+
+He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.
+
+Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the private life of
+Blandrata had just led to so grave a public scandal that the Italian had
+been forced to resign and leave for parts unknown. Socinius, however,
+remained in this far away land, married a Polish girl and died in his
+adopted country in the year 1604.
+
+These last two decades of his life proved to be the most interesting
+period of his career. For it was then that he gave a concrete expression
+to his ideas upon the subject of tolerance.
+
+They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of Rakow,” a document
+which Socinius composed as a sort of common constitution for all those
+who meant well by this world and wished to make an end to future
+sectarian strife.
+
+The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of catechism,
+confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People were writing them
+in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and in Holland and in
+Denmark. But everywhere these carelessly printed little booklets gave
+expression to the ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained
+the real Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty of
+all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to uphold this one
+particular form of Truth with a great big capital T to punish with the
+sword and the gallows and the stake those who willfully remained faithful
+to a different sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and
+therefore was of an inferior quality).
+
+The Socinian confession of faith breathed an entirely different spirit.
+It began by the flat statement that it was not the intention of those who
+had signed this document to quarrel with anybody else.
+
+“With good reason,” it continued, “many pious people complain that the
+various confessions and catechisms which have hitherto been published and
+which the different churches are now publishing are apples of discord
+among the Christians because they all try to impose certain principles
+upon people’s conscience and to consider those who disagree with them as
+heretics.”
+
+Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was the intention of
+the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any one else on account of his
+religious convictions and turning to humanity in general, it made the
+following appeal:
+
+“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for this is the rule
+set forth by the New Testament and by the example of the earliest church.
+Who are we, miserable people, that we would smother and extinguish in
+others the fire of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have
+any of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures? Why do
+we not remember that our only master is Jesus Christ and that we are
+all brothers and that to no one has been given power over the souls of
+others? It may be that one of our brothers is more learned than the
+others, yet in regard to liberty and the relationship with Christ we are
+all equal.”
+
+All this was very fine and very wonderful, but it was said three hundred
+years ahead of the times. Neither the Socinians nor any of the other
+Protestant sects could in the long run hope to hold their own in this
+turbulent part of the world. The counter-reformation had begun in all
+seriousness. Veritable hordes of Jesuit fathers were beginning to be
+turned loose upon the lost provinces. While they worked, the Protestants
+quarreled. Soon the people of the eastern frontier were back within
+the fold of Rome. Today the traveler who visits these distant parts of
+civilized Europe would hardly guess that, once upon a time, they were
+a stronghold of the most advanced and liberal thought of the age. Nor
+would he suspect that somewhere among those dreary Lithuanian hills there
+lies a village where the world was for the first time presented with a
+definite program for a practical system of tolerance.
+
+Driven by idle curiosity, I took a morning off recently and went to the
+library and read through the index of all our most popular text-books
+out of which the youth of our country learns the story of the past. Not
+a single one mentioned Socinianism or the Sozzinis. They all jumped from
+Social Democrats to Sophia of Hanover and from Sobieski to Saracens. The
+usual leaders of the great religious revolution were there, including
+Oecolampadius and the lesser lights.
+
+One volume only contained a reference to the two great Siennese humanists
+but they appeared as a vague appendix to something Luther or Calvin had
+said or done.
+
+It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion that in the
+popular histories of three hundred years hence, all this will have been
+changed and that the Sozzinis shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter
+of their own and that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be
+relegated to the bottom of the page.
+
+They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing in footnotes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+MONTAIGNE
+
+
+In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made for freedom.
+
+That was true.
+
+A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely at baron and
+priest.
+
+A little later, when conditions upon the European continent had improved
+so much that international commerce was once more becoming a possibility,
+another historical phenomenon began to make itself manifest.
+
+Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes for
+tolerance.”
+
+You can verify this statement any day of the week and most of all on
+Sunday in any part of our country.
+
+Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux Klan, but New York
+cannot. If the people of New York should ever start a movement for the
+exclusion of all Jews and all Catholics and all foreigners in general,
+there would be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the
+labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the hope of repair.
+
+The same held true during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Moscow, the
+seat of a small grand ducal count, might rage against the pagans, but
+Novgorod, the international trading post, must be careful lest she offend
+the Swedes and Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants who
+visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.
+
+A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its peasantry with
+a series of festive autos da fé. But if the Venetians or the Genoese
+or the people of Bruges had started a pogrom among the heathen within
+their walls, there would have been an immediate exodus of all those who
+represented foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of
+capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.
+
+A few countries which were constitutionally unable to learn from
+experience (like Spain and the papal dominions and certain possessions
+of the Habsburgs), actuated by a sentiment which they proudly called
+“loyalty to their convictions,” ruthlessly expelled the enemies of
+the true faith. As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or
+dwindled down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.
+
+Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed by men
+who have a profound respect for established facts, who know on which
+side their bread is buttered, and who therefore maintain such a state of
+spiritual neutrality that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and
+Chinese customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful to
+their own particular religion.
+
+For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass a law against
+the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was careful to explain to their
+gendarmes that this decree must not be taken too seriously and that
+unless the heretics actually tried to get hold of San Marco and convert
+it into a meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must be
+allowed to worship as they saw fit.
+
+Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every Sunday their
+ministers fulminated against the sins of the “Scarlet Woman.” But in
+the next block the terrible Papists were quietly saying mass in some
+inconspicuous looking house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police
+stood watch lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to
+break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable French and
+Italian visitors away.
+
+This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people in Venice or
+Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their respective churches. They
+were as good Catholics or Protestants as they had ever been. But they
+remembered that the good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg
+or Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of a dozen shabby
+clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted accordingly.
+
+It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened and liberal
+opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne with the fact that
+his father and grandfather had been in the herring business and that
+his mother was of Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these
+commercial antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s general
+point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism and bigotry
+which characterized his entire career as a soldier and statesman had
+originated in a little fish-shop somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.
+
+Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had been able to make
+this statement to his face. For when he was born, all vestiges of mere
+“trade” had been carefully wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.
+
+His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne and had spent
+money lavishly that his son might be brought up as a gentleman. Before
+he was fairly able to walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little
+head full of Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to
+high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And before he was
+twenty he was a full-fledged member of the Bordeaux town council.
+
+Then followed a career in the army and a period at court, until at the
+age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father, he retired from all
+active business and spent the last twenty-one years of his life, (with
+the exception of a few unwilling excursions into politics), among his
+horses and his dogs and his books and learned as much from the one as he
+did from the other.
+
+Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered from several
+weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain affections and
+mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s grandson, believed to be a part of
+true gentility. Until the end of his days he protested that he was not
+really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled
+away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon
+subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If
+ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and
+everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the
+immortal d’Artagnan.
+
+And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these vices were
+the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices of an essentially
+generous, well-bred and agreeable person, the sum total of Montaigne’s
+works has become something more than literature. It has developed into
+a definite philosophy of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary
+practical variety of decency.
+
+Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic, and in his younger
+years he was an active member of that League of Catholic Noblemen which
+was formed among the French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.
+
+But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572 when news reached
+him of the joy with which Pope Gregory XIII had celebrated the murder of
+thirty thousand French Protestants, he turned away from the Church for
+good. He never went so far as to join the other side. He continued to go
+through certain formalities that he might keep his neighbors’ tongues
+from wagging, but those of his chapters written after the night of Saint
+Bartholomew might just as well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or
+Epictetus or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And in
+one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,” he spoke
+as if he had been a contemporary of Pericles rather than a servant of
+Her Majesty Catherine de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the
+Apostate as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might hope to
+accomplish.
+
+It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and you will find
+it in part nineteen of the second book.
+
+Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy of both
+Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of absolute freedom, which
+(under the existing circumstances) could only provoke a new outbreak
+of civil war. But when circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and
+Catholics no longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath
+their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep away as much
+as possible from interfering with other people’s consciences and should
+permit all of its subjects to love God as best suited the happiness of
+their own particular souls.
+
+Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman who had hit upon
+this idea or had dared to express it in public. As early as the year
+1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici
+and a graduate of half a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally
+suspected of being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that
+heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He had based his
+somewhat startling opinion upon the ground that conscience being what it
+was, it could not possibly be changed by force, and two years later he
+had been instrumental in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration
+which had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their own,
+to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and in general to
+behave as if they were a free and independent denomination and not merely
+a tolerated little sect.
+
+Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen (the man who
+had defended the rights of private property against the communistic
+tendencies expressed in Thomas More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar
+vein when he denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving
+their subjects to this or that church.
+
+But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political
+philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read
+and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in
+the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be
+read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years.
+
+His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun
+of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of
+people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book
+that was officially classified under “philosophy.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+ARMINIUS
+
+
+The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between
+“organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group”
+ahead of all other considerations and those private citizens of unusual
+intelligence or energy who hold that such improvement as the world has
+thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts of the individual
+and not due to the efforts of the mass (which by its very nature is
+distrustful of all innovations) and that therefore the rights of the
+individual are far more important than those of the mass.
+
+If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows that the amount
+of tolerance in any given country must be in direct proportion to the
+degree of individual liberty enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants.
+
+Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally
+enlightened ruler spake unto his children and said, “I firmly believe in
+the principle of live and let live. I expect all my beloved subjects to
+practice tolerance towards their neighbors or bear the consequences.”
+
+In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in a supply of
+the official buttons bearing the proud inscription, “Tolerance first.”
+
+But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His Majesty’s hangman,
+were rarely of a lasting nature and only bore fruit if the sovereign
+accompanied his threat by an intelligent system of gradual education
+along the lines of practical every day politics.
+
+Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred in the Dutch
+Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
+
+In the first place the country consisted of several thousand
+semi-independent towns and villages and these for the greater part were
+inhabited by fishermen, sailors and traders, three classes of people who
+are accustomed to a certain amount of independence of action and who are
+forced by the nature of their trade to make quick decisions and to judge
+the casual occurrences of the day’s work upon their own merits.
+
+I would not for a moment claim that, man for man, they were a whit more
+intelligent or broadminded than their neighbors in other parts of the
+world. But hard work and tenacity of purpose had made them the grain
+and fish carriers of all northern and western Europe. They knew that
+the money of a Catholic was just as good as that of a Protestant and
+they preferred a Turk who paid cash to a Presbyterian who asked for six
+months’ credit. An ideal country therefore to start a little experiment
+in tolerance and furthermore the right man was in the right place and
+what is infinitely more important the right man was in the right place at
+the right moment.
+
+William the Silent was a shining example of the old maxim that “those
+who wish to rule the world must know the world.” He began life as a very
+fashionable and rich young man, enjoying a most enviable social position
+as the confidential secretary of the greatest monarch of his time. He
+wasted scandalous sums of money upon dinners and dances, married several
+of the better known heiresses of his day and lived gayly without a care
+for the day of tomorrow. He was not a particularly studious person and
+racing charts interested him infinitely more than religious tracts.
+
+The social unrest which followed in the wake of the Reformation did not
+at first impress him as anything more serious than still another quarrel
+between capital and labor, the sort of thing that could be settled by the
+use of a little tact and the display of a few brawny police constables.
+
+But once he had grasped the true nature of the issue that had arisen
+between the sovereign and his subjects, this amiable grand seigneur was
+suddenly transformed into the exceedingly able leader of what, to all
+intents and purposes, was the prime lost cause of the age. The palaces
+and horses, the gold plate and the country estates were sold at short
+notice (or confiscated at no notice at all) and the sporting young man
+from Brussels became the most tenacious and successful enemy of the house
+of Habsburg.
+
+This change of fortune, however, did not affect his private character.
+William had been a philosopher in the days of plenty. He remained a
+philosopher when he lived in a couple of furnished rooms and did not know
+how to pay for Saturday’s clean wash. And just as in the olden days he
+had worked hard to frustrate the plans of a cardinal who had expressed
+the intention of building a sufficient number of gallows to accommodate
+all Protestants, he now made it a point to bridle the energy of those
+ardent Calvinists who wished to hang all Catholics.
+
+His task was wellnigh hopeless.
+
+Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already been killed, the
+prisons of the Inquisition were full of new candidates for martyrdom and
+in far off Spain new armies were being recruited to smash the rebellion
+before it should spread to other parts of the Empire.
+
+To tell people who were fighting for their lives that they must love
+those who had just hanged their sons and brothers and uncles and
+grandfathers was out of the question. But by his personal example, by his
+conciliatory attitude towards those who opposed him, William was able to
+show his followers how a man of character can invariably rise superior to
+the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
+
+In this campaign for public decency he enjoyed the support of a very
+remarkable man. In the church of Gouda you may this very day read a
+curious monosyllabic epitaph which enumerates the virtues of one Dirck
+Coornhert, who lies buried there. This Coornhert was an interesting
+fellow. He was the son of well-to-do people and had spent many years
+of his youth traveling in foreign lands and getting some first hand
+information about Germany, Spain and France. As soon as he had returned
+home from this trip he fell in love with a girl who did not have a
+cent. His careful Dutch father had forbidden the marriage. When his son
+married the girl just the same, he did what those ancestral patriarchs
+were supposed to do under the circumstances; he talked about filial
+ingratitude and disinherited the boy.
+
+This was inconvenient, in so far as young Coornhert was now obliged to go
+to work for a living. But he was a young man of parts, learned a trade
+and set up as a copper-engraver.
+
+Alas! once a Dutchman, always a dominie. When evening came, he hastily
+dropped the burin, picked up the goose-quill and wrote articles upon the
+events of the day. His style was not exactly what one would nowadays
+call “amusing.” But his books contained a great deal of that amiable
+common sense which had distinguished the work of Erasmus and they made
+him many friends and brought him into contact with William the Silent
+who thought so highly of his abilities that he employed him as one of his
+confidential advisers.
+
+Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate. King Philip, aided
+and abetted by the Pope, was trying to rid the world of the enemy of
+the human race (to wit, his own enemy, William) by a standing offer
+of twenty-five thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and
+forgiveness of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder the
+arch-heretic. William, who had already lived through five attempts upon
+his life, felt it his duty to refute the arguments of good King Philip in
+a series of pamphlets and Coornhert assisted him.
+
+That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments were intended,
+should thereby be converted to tolerance was of course an idle hope. But
+as all the world was watching the duel between William and Philip, those
+little pamphlets were translated and read everywhere and they caused a
+healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never before dared to
+mention above a whisper.
+
+Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the ninth of July of
+the year 1584 a young French Catholic gained that reward of twenty-five
+thousand ducats and six years later Coornhert died before he had been
+able to finish the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch
+vernacular.
+
+As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the noise of battle
+that even the fulminations of the different theologians went unheard.
+And when finally the enemy had been driven from the territory of the
+new republic, there was no William to take hold of internal affairs and
+three score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary
+but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large number of Spanish
+mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats.
+
+Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel but who ever
+heard of a theologian without a grievance?
+
+In the University of Leiden there were two professors who disagreed. That
+was nothing either new or unusual. But these two professors disagreed
+upon the question of the freedom of the will and that was a very serious
+matter. At once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion and
+within less than a month the entire country was divided into two hostile
+camps.
+
+On the one side, the friends of Arminius.
+
+On the other, the followers of Gomarus.
+
+The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all his life in
+Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton system of pedagogy.
+He possessed immense learning combined with a total absence of ordinary
+horse-sense. His mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but
+his heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.
+
+His opponent, Arminius, was a very different sort of man. He was born
+in Oudewater, a little city not far away from that cloister Steyn where
+Erasmus had spent the unhappy years of his early manhood. As a child
+he had won the friendship of a neighbor, a famous mathematician and
+professor of astronomy in the University of Marburg. This man, Rudolf
+Snellius, had taken Arminius back with him to Germany that he might be
+properly educated. But when the boy went home for his first vacation he
+found that his native town had been sacked by the Spaniards and that all
+his relatives had been murdered.
+
+That seemed to end his career but fortunately some rich people with kind
+hearts heard of the sad plight of the young orphan and they put up a
+purse and sent him to Leiden to study theology. He worked hard and after
+half a dozen years he had learned all there was to be learned and looked
+for fresh intellectual grazing grounds.
+
+In those days, brilliant students could always find a patron willing
+to invest a few dollars in their future. Soon Arminius, provided with
+a letter of credit issued by certain guilds of Amsterdam, was merrily
+trotting southward in search of future educational opportunities.
+
+As behooved a respectable candidate of theology, he went first of all to
+Geneva. Calvin was dead, but his man Friday, the learned Theodore Beza,
+had succeeded him as shepherd of the seraphic flock. The fine nose of
+this old heresy hunter at once detected a slight odor of Ramism in the
+doctrines of the young Dutchman and the visit of Arminius was cut short.
+
+The word Ramism means nothing to modern readers. But three hundred years
+ago it was considered a most dangerous religious novelty, as those who
+are familiar with the assembled works of Milton will know. It had been
+invented or originated (or what you please) by a Frenchman, a certain
+Pierre de la Ramée. As a student, de la Ramée had been so utterly
+exasperated by the antiquated methods of his professors that he had
+chosen as subject for his doctor’s dissertation the somewhat startling
+text, “Everything ever taught by Aristotle is absolutely wrong.”
+
+Needless to say this subject did not gain him the good will of his
+teachers. When a few years afterwards he elaborated his idea in a number
+of learned volumes, his death was a foregone conclusion. He fell as one
+of the first victims of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
+
+But his books, those pesky books which refuse to be assassinated together
+with their authors, had survived and Ramée’s curious system of logic had
+gained great popularity throughout northern and western Europe. Truly
+pious people however believed that Ramism was the password to Hades
+and Arminius was advised to go to Basel where “libertines” (a sixteenth
+century colloquialism meaning “liberals”) had been considered good form
+ever since that unfortunate city had fallen under the spell of the
+quizzical Erasmus.
+
+Arminius, thus forewarned, traveled northward and then decided upon
+something quite unusual. He boldly invaded the enemy’s territory, studied
+for a few semesters in the University of Padua and paid a visit to Rome.
+This made him a dangerous person in the eyes of his fellow countrymen
+when he returned to his native country in the year 1587. But as he
+seemed to develop neither horns nor a tail, he was gradually taken back
+into their good favor and was allowed to accept a call as minister to
+Amsterdam.
+
+There he made himself not only useful but he gained quite a reputation
+as a hero during one of the many outbreaks of the plague. Soon he was
+held in such genuine esteem that he was entrusted with the task of
+reorganizing the public school system of that big city and when in
+the year 1603 he was called to Leiden as a full-fledged professor of
+theology, he left the capital amidst the sincere regrets of the entire
+population.
+
+If he had known beforehand what was awaiting him in Leiden, I am sure
+he would never have gone. He arrived just when the battle between the
+Infralapsarians and the Supralapsarians was at its height.
+
+Arminius was both by nature and education an Infralapsarian. He tried
+to be fair to his colleague, the Supralapsarian Gomarus. But alas, the
+differences between the Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians were such
+as allowed of no compromise. And Arminius was forced to declare himself
+an out and out Infralapsarian.
+
+Of course, you will ask me what Supra- and Infralapsarians were. I
+don’t know, and I seem unable to learn such things. But as far as I can
+make out, it was the age-old quarrel between those who believed (as did
+Arminius) that man is to a certain extent possessed of a free will and
+able to shape his own destinies and those who like Sophocles and Calvin
+and Gomarus taught that everything in our lives has been pre-ordained
+ages before we were born and that our fate therefore depends upon a throw
+of the divine dice at the hour of creation.
+
+In the year 1600 by far the greater number of the people of northern
+Europe were Supralapsarians. They loved to listen to sermons which
+doomed the majority of their neighbors to eternal perdition and those
+few ministers who dared to preach a gospel of good will and charity
+were at once suspected of criminal weakness, fit rivals of those tender
+hearted doctors who fail to prescribe malodorous medicines and kill their
+patients by their kindness.
+
+As soon as the gossiping old women of Leiden had discovered that Arminius
+was an Infralapsarian, his usefulness had come to an end. The poor man
+died under the torrent of abuse that was let loose upon him by his former
+friends and supporters. And then, as seemed unavoidable during the
+seventeenth century, Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism made their
+entrance into the field of politics and the Supralapsarians won at the
+polls and the Infralapsarians were declared enemies of the public order
+and traitors to their country.
+
+Before this absurd quarrel had come to an end, Oldenbarnevelt, the man
+who next to William the Silent had been responsible for the foundation
+of the Republic, lay dead with his head between his feet; Grotius, whose
+moderation had made him the first great advocate of an equitable system
+of international law, was eating the bread of charity at the court of
+the Queen of Sweden; and the work of William the Silent seemed entirely
+undone.
+
+But Calvinism did not gain the triumph it had hoped.
+
+The Dutch Republic was a republic only in name. It was really a sort
+of merchants’ and bankers’ club, ruled by a few hundred influential
+families. These gentlemen were not at all interested in equality and
+fraternity, but they did believe in law and order. They recognized and
+supported the established church. On Sundays with a great display of
+unction they proceeded to the large white-washed sepulchers which in
+former days had been Catholic Cathedrals and which now were Protestant
+lecture halls. But on Monday, when the clergy paid its respects to the
+Honorable Burgomaster and Town Councilor, with a long list of grievances
+against this and that and the other person, their lordships were “in
+conference” and unable to receive the reverend gentlemen. If the reverend
+gentlemen insisted, and induced (as frequently happened) a few thousand
+of their loyal parishioners to “demonstrate” in front of the town hall,
+then their lordships would graciously deign to accept a neatly written
+copy of the reverend gentlemen’s complaints and suggestions. But as
+soon as the door had been closed upon the last of the darkly garbed
+petitioners, their lordships would use the document to light their pipes.
+
+For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of “once is enough
+and too many” and they were so horrified by what had happened during
+the terrible years of the great Supralapsarian civil war that they
+uncompromisingly suppressed all further forms of religious frenzy.
+
+Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of the ledger.
+Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their private property and did
+not always differentiate with sufficient nicety between the interests
+of their fatherland and those of their own firm. They lacked that
+broad vision which goes with empire and almost invariably they were
+penny-wise and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves our
+hearty commendation. They turned their country into an international
+clearing-house where all sorts of people with all sorts of ideas were
+given the widest degree of liberty to say, think, write and print
+whatever pleased them.
+
+I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there, under a threat
+of ministerial disapprobation, the Town Councilors were sometimes obliged
+to suppress a secret society of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets
+printed by a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as long
+as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the market place
+to denounce the doctrine of predestination or carry a big rosary into
+a public dining-hall or deny the existence of God in the South Side
+Methodist Church of Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity
+which for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable haven
+of rest for all those who in other parts of the world were persecuted for
+the sake of their opinions.
+
+Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad. And during the
+next two hundred years, the print shops and the coffee-houses of Holland
+were filled with a motley crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a
+strange new army of spiritual liberation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+BRUNO
+
+
+It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that the Great War was
+a war of non-commissioned officers.
+
+While the generals and the colonels and the three-star strategists sat in
+solitary splendor in the halls of some deserted château and contemplated
+miles of maps until they could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to
+give them half a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand
+men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals, aided and
+abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did the so-called “dirty
+work” and eventually brought about the collapse of the German line of
+defense.
+
+The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought along similar
+lines.
+
+There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half a million
+soldiers.
+
+There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s gunners with an
+easy and agreeable target.
+
+I might go even further and say that the vast majority of the people
+never knew that there was any fighting at all. Now and then, curiosity
+may have compelled them to ask who was being burned that morning or who
+was going to be hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered
+that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain
+principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants disapproved
+most heartily. But I doubt whether such information affected them beyond
+the point of mild regret and the comment that it must be very sad for
+their poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible end.
+
+It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually accomplish for
+the cause for which they give their lives cannot possibly be reduced to
+mathematical formulae or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.
+
+Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may read carefully through
+the assembled works of Giordano Bruno and by the patient collection of
+all sentences containing such sentiments as “the state has no right to
+tell people what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword
+those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he may be able to
+write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano Bruno (1549-1600) and the
+principles of religious freedom.”
+
+But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters must approach
+the subject from a different angle.
+
+There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number of devout men who
+were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism of their day, by the yoke
+under which the people of all countries were forced to exist, that they
+rose in revolt. They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the
+cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a place to
+sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up and down the land they
+traveled, talking and writing, drawing the learned professors of learned
+academies into learned disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country
+folk in humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good will,
+of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and down the land they
+traveled in their shabby clothes with their little bundles of books and
+pamphlets until they died of pneumonia in some miserable village in the
+hinterland of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a Scotch
+hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial borough of France.
+
+And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not mean to imply that
+he was the only one of his kind. But his life, his ideas, his restless
+zeal for what he held to be true and desirable, were so typical of that
+entire group of pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.
+
+The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an average Italian
+boy of no particular promise, followed the usual course and went into a
+monastery. Later he became a Dominican monk. He had no business in that
+order for the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms of
+persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their contemporaries
+called them. And they were clever. It was not necessary for a heretic
+to have his ideas put into print to be nosed out by one of those eager
+detectives. A single glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the
+shoulders were often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into
+contact with the Inquisition.
+
+How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning obedience,
+turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures for the works of Zeno and
+Anaxagoras, I do not know. But before this strange novice had finished
+his course of prescribed studies, he was expelled from the Dominican
+order and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.
+
+He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before him had braved the
+dangers of those ancient mountain passes that they might find freedom in
+the mighty fortress which the new faith had erected at the junction of
+the Rhone and the Arve!
+
+And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted when they discovered
+that here as there it was the inner spirit which guided the hearts of
+men and that a change of creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart
+and mind.
+
+Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months. The town was
+full of Italian refugees. These brought their fellow-countryman a new
+suit of clothes and found him a job as proof-reader. In the evenings he
+read and wrote. He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at
+last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed too that the
+world could not progress until the tyranny of the medieval text-books
+was broken. Bruno did not go as far as his famous French teacher and did
+not believe that everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But
+why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by words and
+sentences that were written in the fourth century before the birth of
+Christ? Why indeed?
+
+“Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of the orthodox
+faith answered him.
+
+“What have we to do with our grandfathers and what have they to do with
+us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the young iconoclast answered.
+
+And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and suggested that
+he had better pack his satchels and try his luck elsewhere.
+
+Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in search of
+a place where he might live and work in some degree of liberty and
+security. He never found it. From Geneva he went to Lyons and then to
+Toulouse. By that time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had
+become an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a dangerous step
+in an age when all the contemporary Bryans brayed, “The world turning
+around the sun! The world a commonplace little planet turning around the
+sun! Ho-ho and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?”
+
+Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France, walking to Paris. And
+next to England as private secretary to a French ambassador. But there
+another disappointment awaited him. The English theologians were no
+better than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps. In
+Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when he committed an
+error against the teachings of Aristotle. They fined him ten shillings.
+
+Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly dangerous bits of
+prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political nature in which the
+entire existing order of things was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a
+minute but none too flattering examination.
+
+And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject, astronomy.
+
+But college authorities rarely smile upon professors who please the
+hearts of their students. Bruno once more found himself invited to
+leave. And so back again to France and then to Marburg, where not so
+long before Luther and Zwingli had debated upon the true nature of the
+transubstantiation in the castle of pious Elisabeth of Hungary.
+
+Alas! his reputation as a “Libertine” had preceded him. He was not
+even allowed to lecture. Wittenberg proved more hospitable. That old
+stronghold of the Lutheran faith, however, was beginning to be overrun by
+the disciples of Dr. Calvin. After that there was no further room for a
+man of Bruno’s liberal tendencies.
+
+Southward he wended his way to try his luck in the land of John Huss.
+Further disappointment awaited him. Prague had become a Habsburg capital
+and where the Habsburg entered, freedom went out by the city gates. Back
+to the road and a long, long walk to Zürich.
+
+There he received a letter from an Italian youth, Giovanni Mocenigo,
+who asked him to come to Venice. What made Bruno accept, I do not know.
+Perhaps the Italian peasant in him was impressed by the luster of an old
+patrician name and felt flattered by the invitation.
+
+Giovanni Mocenigo, however, was not made of the stuff which had enabled
+his ancestors to defy both Sultan and Pope. He was a weakling and a
+coward and did not move a finger when officers of the Inquisition
+appeared at his house and took his guest to Rome.
+
+As a rule, the government of Venice was terribly jealous of its rights.
+If Bruno had been a German merchant or a Dutch skipper, they would have
+protested violently and they might even have gone to war when a foreign
+power dared to arrest some one within their own jurisdiction. But why
+incur the hostility of the pope on account of a vagabond who had brought
+nothing to their city but his ideas?
+
+It was true he called himself a scholar. The Republic was highly
+flattered, but she had scholars enough of her own.
+
+And so farewell to Bruno and may San Marco have mercy upon his soul.
+
+Seven long years Bruno was kept in the prison of the Inquisition.
+
+On the seventeenth of February of the year 1600 he was burned at the
+stake and his ashes were blown to the winds.
+
+He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who know Italian may
+therein find inspiration for a pretty little allegory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+SPINOZA
+
+
+There are certain things in history which I have never been able to
+understand and one of these is the amount of work done by some of the
+artists and literary men of bygone ages.
+
+The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters and dictaphones
+and secretaries and fountain pens, can turn out between three and four
+thousand words a day. How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs
+to distract his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill,
+manage to write thirty-seven plays?
+
+Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible Armada and a busy man
+all his life, find the necessary ink and paper for eighteen hundred
+comedies and five hundred essays?
+
+What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister, Johann Sebastian
+Bach, who in a little house filled with the noise of twenty children
+found time to compose five oratorios, one hundred and ninety church
+cantatas, three wedding cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses,
+three fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would
+have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano and orchestra,
+three concertos for two pianos, two concertos for three pianos, thirty
+orchestral scores and enough pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the
+organ, the bull-fiddle and the French horn to keep the average student of
+music busy for the rest of his days.
+
+Or again, by what process of industry and application could painters
+like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture or an etching at the rate
+of almost four a month during more than thirty years? How could an
+humble citizen like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty
+fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?
+
+I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising all these plots,
+hearing all these melodies, seeing all those diversified combinations
+of color and line, choosing all this wood. I am just wondering at the
+physical part of it. How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed?
+Didn’t they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards? Were
+they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?
+
+Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full of that sort of
+people. They defied all the laws of hygiene, ate and drank everything
+that was bad for them, were totally unconscious of their high destinies
+as members of the glorious human race, but they had an awfully good time
+and their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific.
+
+And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally true of such
+finicky subjects as theology.
+
+Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred years and you
+will find their cellars and attics filled with tracts and homilies and
+discussions and refutations and digests and commentaries in duodecimo
+and octodecimo and octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in
+paper, all of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception
+containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.
+
+The subjects of which they treated and many of the words they used have
+lost all meaning to our modern ears. But somehow or other these moldy
+compilations served a very useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing
+else, they at least cleared the air. For they either settled the
+questions they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned,
+or they convinced their readers that those particular problems could
+not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic and argument and might
+therefore just as well be dropped right then and there.
+
+This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I hope that critics of
+the thirtieth century shall be just as charitable when they wade through
+the remains of our own literary and scientific achievements.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow the fashion
+of his time in the matter of quantity. His assembled works consist of
+three or four small volumes and a few bundles of letters.
+
+But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical solution
+of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy would have staggered
+any normally healthy man. It killed the poor consumptive who had
+undertaken to reach God by way of the table of multiplication.
+
+Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered the
+indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had settled down in the
+Spanish peninsula when that part of the world was a Moorish province.
+After the reconquest and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for
+the Spaniard” which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy, the
+Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They had sailed for
+the Netherlands, had bought a small house in Amsterdam, had worked hard,
+had saved their money and soon were known as one of the most respectable
+families of the “Portuguese colony.”
+
+If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewish origin,
+this was due more to the training he received in his Talmud school than
+to the gibes of his little neighbors. For the Dutch Republic was so
+chock full of class prejudice that there was little room left for mere
+race prejudice and therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all
+the alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the North
+and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic bits of
+Dutch life which contemporary travelers never failed to omit from their
+“Souvenirs de Voyage” and with good reason.
+
+In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the relation
+between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from satisfactory. What made the
+quarrel between the two races so hopeless was the fact that both sides
+were equally right and equally wrong and that both sides could justly
+claim to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice.
+In the light of the theory put forward in this book that intolerance
+is merely a form of self-protection of the mob, it becomes clear that
+as long as they were faithful to their own respective religions, the
+Christian and the Jew must have conceded each other as enemies. In the
+first place, they both of them maintained that their God was the only
+true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations were false.
+In the second place, they were each other’s most dangerous commercial
+rival. The Jews had come to western Europe as they had originally come
+to Palestine, as immigrants in search of a new home. The labor unions
+of that day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take up a
+trade. They had therefore been obliged to content themselves with such
+economic makeshifts as pawnbroking and banking. In the Middle Ages these
+two professions, which closely resembled each other, were not thought
+fit occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until the days
+of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards money (except
+in the form of taxes) and should have regarded the taking of interest
+as a crime, is hard to understand. Usury, of course, was something
+no government could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty
+centuries before, had passed drastic laws against the money changers who
+tried to make a profit out of other people’s money. In several chapters
+of the Old Testament, written two thousand years later, we read how Moses
+too had expressly forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant
+rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later, the great
+Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, had given expression
+to their great disapproval of money that was born of other money. The
+Church fathers had been even more explicit upon this subject. All during
+the Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt. Dante
+even provided a special little alcove in his Hell for the exclusive
+benefit of his banker friends.
+
+Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker and his
+colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were undesirable citizens and
+that the world would be better off without them. At the same time,
+as soon as the world had ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was
+found to be quite impossible to transact even the simplest business
+operations without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had
+become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the views of the
+Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation any way, was urged to occupy
+himself with a trade which was necessary but which no respectable man
+would touch.
+
+In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into certain unpleasant
+trades which made them the natural enemy of both the rich and the poor,
+and then, as soon as they had established themselves, these same enemies
+turned against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest
+part of the city and in moments of great emotional stress, hanged them as
+wicked unbelievers or burned them as renegade Christians.
+
+It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid. These endless
+annoyances and persecutions did not make the Jews any fonder of their
+Christian neighbors. And as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate
+intelligence was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright
+young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce and science
+and the arts, wasted their brains and energy upon the useless study of
+certain old books filled with abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting
+syllogisms and millions of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead
+stunted lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to their
+elders who told them that they were God’s chosen people who would surely
+inherit the earth and all the wealth thereof, and on the other hand being
+frightened to death by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to
+inform them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or the wheel.
+
+To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under such adverse
+circumstances shall retain a normal outlook upon life is to demand the
+impossible.
+
+Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate act by their
+Christian compatriots and then, when white with rage, they turned upon
+their oppressors, they were called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains”
+and were subjected to further humiliations and restrictions. But these
+restrictions had only one result. They increased the number of Jews who
+had a grievance, turned the others into nervous wrecks and generally made
+the Ghetto a ghastly abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.
+
+Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the misery which was
+the birthright of most of his relatives. He went first of all to the
+school maintained by his synagogue (appropriately called “the Tree of
+Life”) and as soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to the
+learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who was to drill him in
+Latin and in the sciences.
+
+Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic origin. Rumor had
+it that he was a graduate of the University of Louvain and if one were to
+believe the best informed deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in
+disguise and a very dangerous person. This however was nonsense. Van den
+Ende in his youth had actually spent a few years at a Catholic seminary.
+But his heart was not in his work and he had left his native city of
+Antwerp, had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private school of
+his own.
+
+He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods that would make
+his pupils like their classical lessons, that heedless of the man’s
+popish past, the Calvinistic burghers of Amsterdam willingly entrusted
+their children to his care and were very proud of the fact that the
+pupils of his school invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the
+little boys of all other local academies.
+
+Van den Ende taught little Baruch his Latin, but being an enthusiastic
+follower of all the latest discoveries in the field of science and a
+great admirer of Giordano Bruno, he undoubtedly taught the boy several
+things which as a rule were not mentioned in an orthodox Jewish household.
+
+For young Spinoza, contrary to the customs of the times, did not board
+with the other boys, but lived at home. And he so impressed his family by
+his profound learning that all the relations proudly pointed to him as
+the little professor and liberally supplied him with pocket money. He
+did not waste it upon tobacco. He used it to buy books on philosophy.
+
+One author especially fascinated him.
+
+That was Descartes.
+
+René Descartes was a French nobleman born in that region between Tours
+and Poitiers where a thousand years before the grandfather of Charlemagne
+had stopped the Mohammedan conquest of Europe. Before he was ten years
+old he had been sent to the Jesuits to be educated and he spent the next
+decade making a nuisance of himself. For this boy had a mind of his own
+and accepted nothing without “being shown.” The Jesuits are probably the
+only people in the world who know how to handle such difficult children
+and who can train them successfully without breaking their spirit.
+The proof of the educational pudding is in the eating. If our modern
+pedagogues would study the methods of Brother Loyola, we might have a few
+Descartes of our own.
+
+When he was twenty years old, René entered military service and went to
+the Netherlands where Maurice of Nassau had so thoroughly perfected his
+military system that his armies were the post-graduate school for all
+ambitious young men who hoped to become generals. Descartes’ visit to
+the headquarters of the Nassau prince was perhaps a little irregular.
+A faithful Catholic taking service with a Protestant chieftain! It
+sounds like high treason. But Descartes was interested in problems of
+mathematics and artillery but not of religion or politics. Therefore
+as soon as Holland had concluded a truce with Spain, he resigned his
+commission, went to Munich and fought for a while under the banner of the
+Catholic Duke of Bavaria.
+
+But that campaign did not last very long. The only fighting of any
+consequence then still going on was near La Rochelle, the city which the
+Huguenots were defending against Richelieu. And so Descartes went back to
+France that he might learn the noble art of siege-craft. But camp life
+was beginning to pall upon him. He decided to give up a military career
+and devote himself to philosophy and science.
+
+He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to marry. His wishes
+were few. He anticipated a quiet and happy life and he had it.
+
+Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not know. But it was
+a country full of printers and publishers and bookshops and as long as
+one did not openly attack the established form of government or religion,
+the existing law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore, as
+he never learned a single word of the language of his adopted country (a
+trick not difficult to a true Frenchman), Descartes was able to avoid
+undesirable company and futile conversations and could give all of his
+time (some twenty hours per day) to his own work.
+
+This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been a soldier. But
+Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems that he was perfectly
+contented with his self-inflicted exile. He had during the course of
+years become convinced that the world was still plunged in a profound
+gloom of abysmal ignorance; that what was then being called science
+had not even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no
+general progress would be possible until the whole ancient fabric of
+error and falsehood had first of all been razed to the ground. No small
+order, this. Descartes however was possessed of endless patience and at
+the age of thirty he set to work to give us an entirely new system of
+philosophy. Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomy and
+physics to his original program and he performed his task with such noble
+impartiality of mind that the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and
+the Calvinists cursed him for an atheist.
+
+This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him in the least.
+He quietly continued his researches and died peacefully in the city of
+Stockholm, whither he had gone to talk philosophy with the Queen of
+Sweden.
+
+Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism (the name under
+which his philosophies became known) made quite as much of a stir as
+Darwinism was to make among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be
+a Cartesian in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something almost
+indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the established order of society,
+a Socinian, a low fellow who by his own confession had set himself apart
+from the companionship of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent
+the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting Cartesianism as
+readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers accepted Darwinism. But among
+the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam, such subjects were never even mentioned.
+Cartesianism was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah. Hence it did
+not exist. And when it became apparent that it existed just the same in
+the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza, it was a foregone conclusion that said
+Baruch de Spinoza would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities
+of the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and take official
+action.
+
+The Amsterdam synagogue had at that moment passed through a severe
+crisis. When little Baruch was fifteen years old, another Portuguese
+exile by the name of Uriel Acosta had arrived in Amsterdam, had forsworn
+Catholicism, which he had accepted under a threat of death, and had
+returned to the faith of his fathers. But this fellow Acosta had not been
+an ordinary Jew. He was a gentleman accustomed to carry a feather in his
+hat and a sword at his side. To him the arrogance of the Dutch rabbis,
+trained in the German and Polish schools of learning, had come as a most
+unpleasant surprise, and he had been too proud and too indifferent to
+hide his opinions.
+
+In a small community like that, such open defiance could not possibly be
+tolerated. A bitter struggle had followed. On the one side a solitary
+dreamer, half prophet, half hidalgo. On the other side the merciless
+guardians of the law.
+
+It had ended in tragedy.
+
+First of all Acosta had been denounced to the local police as the author
+of certain blasphemous pamphlets which denied the immortality of the
+soul. This had got him into trouble with the Calvinist ministers. But
+the matter had been straightened out and the charge had been dropped.
+Thereupon the synagogue had excommunicated the stiff-necked rebel and had
+deprived him of his livelihood.
+
+For months thereafter the poor man had wandered through the streets
+of Amsterdam until destitution and loneliness had driven him back to
+his own flock. But he was not re-admitted until he had first of all
+publicly apologized for his evil conduct and had then suffered himself
+to be whipped and kicked by all the members of the congregation. These
+indignities had unbalanced his mind. He had bought a pistol and had blown
+his brains out.
+
+This suicide had caused a tremendous lot of talk among the principal
+citizens of Amsterdam. The Jewish community felt that it could not risk
+the chance of another public scandal. When it became evident that the
+most promising pupil of the “Tree of Life” had been contaminated by the
+new heresies of Descartes, a direct attempt was made to hush things up.
+Baruch was approached and was offered a fixed annual sum if he would give
+his word that he would be good, would continue to show himself in the
+synagogue and would not publish or say anything against the law.
+
+Now Spinoza was the last man to consider such a compromise. He curtly
+refused to do anything of the sort. In consequence whereof he was duly
+read out of his own church according to that famous ancient Formula of
+Damnation which leaves very little to the imagination and goes back all
+the way to the days of Jericho to find the appropriate number of curses
+and execrations.
+
+As for the victim of these manifold maledictions, he remained quietly in
+his room and read about the occurrence in next day’s paper. Even when an
+attempt was made upon his life by an over zealous follower of the law, he
+refused to leave town.
+
+This came as a great blow to the prestige of the Rabbis who apparently
+had invoked the names of Joshua and Elisha in vain and who saw themselves
+publicly defied for the second time in less than half a dozen years. In
+their anxiety they went so far as to make an appeal to the town hall.
+They asked for an interview with the Burgomasters and explained that this
+Baruch de Spinoza whom they had just expelled from their own church was
+really a most dangerous person, an agnostic who refused to believe in God
+and who therefore ought not to be tolerated in a respectable Christian
+community like the city of Amsterdam.
+
+Their lordships, after their pleasant habit, washed their hands of the
+whole affair and referred the matter to a sub-committee of clergymen. The
+sub-committee studied the question, discovered that Baruch de Spinoza had
+done nothing that could be construed as an offense against the ordinances
+of the town, and so reported to their lordships. At the same time
+they considered it to be good policy for members of the cloth to stand
+together and therefore they suggested that the Burgomasters ask this
+young man, who seemed to be so very independent, to leave Amsterdam for a
+couple of months and not to return until the thing had blown over.
+
+From that moment on the life of Spinoza was as quiet and uneventful as
+the landscape upon which he looked from his bedroom windows. He left
+Amsterdam and hired a small house in the village of Rijnsberg near
+Leiden. He spent his days polishing lenses for optical instruments and
+at night he smoked his pipe and read or wrote as the spirit moved him.
+He never married. There was rumor of a love affair between him and a
+daughter of his former Latin teacher, van den Ende. But as the child was
+ten years old when Spinoza left Amsterdam, this does not seem very likely.
+
+He had several very loyal friends and at least twice a year they offered
+to give him a pension that he might devote all his time to his studies.
+He answered that he appreciated their good intentions but that he
+preferred to remain independent and with the exception of an allowance
+of eighty dollars a year from a rich young Cartesian, he never touched
+a penny and spent his days in the respectable poverty of the true
+philosopher.
+
+He had a chance to become a professor in Germany, but he declined.
+He received word that the illustrious King of Prussia would be happy
+to become his patron and protector, but he answered nay and remained
+faithful to the quiet routine of his pleasant exile.
+
+After a number of years in Rijnsberg he moved to the Hague. He had never
+been very strong and the particles of glass from his half-finished lenses
+had affected his lungs.
+
+He died quite suddenly and alone in the year 1677.
+
+To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than six private
+carriages belonging to prominent members of the court followed the
+“atheist” to his grave. And when two hundred years later a statue was
+unveiled to his memory, the police reserves had to be called out to
+protect the participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of a
+rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists.
+
+So much for the man. What about his influence? Was he merely another
+of those industrious philosophers who fill endless books with endless
+theories and speak a language which drove even Omar Khayyam to an
+expression of exasperated annoyance?
+
+No, he was not.
+
+Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of his wit or the
+plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was great mainly by force of his
+courage. He belonged to a race that knew only one law, a set of hard and
+fast rules laid down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten
+past, a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a class of
+professional priests who had taken it upon themselves to interpret this
+sacred code.
+
+He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom was almost
+synonymous with political anarchy.
+
+He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews and Gentiles.
+
+But he never wavered.
+
+He approached all problems as universal problems. He regarded them
+without exception as the manifestation of an omnipresent will and
+believed them to be the expression of an ultimate reality which would
+hold good on Doomsday as it had held good at the hour of creation.
+
+And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of human tolerance.
+
+Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow boundaries laid
+down by the older forms of religion and boldly built himself a new system
+of thought based upon the rocks of a million stars.
+
+By so doing he made man what man had not been since the days of the
+ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen of the universe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE NEW ZION
+
+
+There was little reason to fear that the works of Spinoza would ever be
+popular. They were as amusing as a text-book on trigonometry and few
+people ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given
+chapter.
+
+It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas among the mass of
+the people.
+
+In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation had
+come to an end as soon as the country had been turned into an absolute
+monarchy.
+
+In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed in the wake of
+the Thirty Years War had killed all personal initiative for at least two
+hundred years.
+
+During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore, England was
+the only one among the larger countries of Europe where further progress
+along the lines of independent thought was still possible and the
+prolonged quarrel between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element
+of instability which proved to be of great help to the cause of personal
+freedom.
+
+First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For years these
+unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil of Catholicism and the
+deep sea of Puritanism.
+
+Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many faithful
+Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome) were forever clamoring
+for a return to that happy era when the British kings had been vassals of
+the pope.
+
+Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye firmly glued upon
+the example of Geneva, dreamed of the day when there should be no king at
+all and England should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away
+in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.
+
+But that was not all.
+
+The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland and their Scottish
+subjects, when it came to religion, knew exactly what they wanted. And so
+thoroughly were they convinced that they themselves were right that they
+were firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They thought
+it wicked that other denominations should be suffered to exist and to
+worship freely within the confines of their own Protestant land. And they
+insisted not only that all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the
+British Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians, in
+short all those who did not share their own views upon the existence of a
+living God, be hanged.
+
+This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected result. It
+forced the men who were obliged to keep peace between those mutually
+hostile parties to be much more tolerant than they would have been
+otherwise.
+
+If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of their careers
+insisted upon equal rights for all denominations, and history tells
+us they did, they were most certainly not animated by a love for
+Presbyterians or High Churchmen, or vice versa. They were merely making
+the best of a very difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened
+in the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect finally
+became all powerful, show us what would have been the fate of England if
+any one of the many contending factions had been able to establish an
+absolute dictatorship over the entire country.
+
+Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able to do as he liked.
+But the Lord Protector was a very wise man. He knew that he ruled by the
+grace of his iron brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct
+or of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make common
+cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning tolerance did not go.
+
+As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned Socinians and
+Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles of the divine right of the
+individual human being, their lives were just as difficult as before.
+
+Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous advantage. They
+lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six hours of sickness separated them
+from the safe asylum of the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these
+cities were turning out most of the contraband literature of southern
+and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really meant a voyage to
+one’s publisher and gave the enterprising traveler a chance to gather in
+his royalties and see what were the latest additions to the literature of
+intellectual protest.
+
+Among those who at one time or another availed themselves of this
+convenient opportunity for quiet study and peaceful reflection, no one
+has gained a more deserving fame than John Locke.
+
+He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like Spinoza (indeed like
+most independent thinkers) he was the product of an essentially pious
+household. The parents of Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John
+were orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well by their
+children when they trained them in the strict doctrines of their own
+respective creeds. But such an education either breaks a boy’s spirit or
+it turns him into a rebel. Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever
+surrenders, gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.
+
+At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there for the first time
+heard of Descartes. But among the dusty book-stalls of St. Catherine
+Street he found certain other volumes that were much to his taste. For
+example, there were the works of Thomas Hobbes.
+
+An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a
+restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo,
+who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had
+spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the
+fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book
+which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which
+bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a
+Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.”
+
+This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore
+year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights
+and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going
+Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans
+felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged
+royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed
+not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom
+it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a
+Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics
+of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the
+Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree of
+“latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as
+non-essential.
+
+Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too remained within the
+Church until the end of his life but he was heartily in favor of a most
+generous interpretation both of life and of faith. What was the use,
+Locke and his friends argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who
+wore a golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power by
+another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why renounce allegiance
+to one set of priests and then the next day accept the rule of another
+set of priests who were fully as overbearing and arrogant as their
+predecessors? Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of
+view could not possibly be popular among those who would have lost their
+livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful and had changed a
+rigid social system into an ethical debating society?
+
+And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of great personal charm,
+had influential friends who could protect him against the curiosity of
+the sheriffs, the day was soon to come when he would no longer be able to
+escape the suspicion of being an atheist.
+
+That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke thereupon went
+to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for half a dozen years, but the
+intellectual atmosphere of the Dutch capital continued to be decidedly
+liberal and Locke was given a chance to study and write without the
+slightest interference on the part of the authorities. He was an
+industrious fellow and during the four years of his exile he composed
+that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes him one of the heroes of
+our little history. In this letter (which under the criticism of his
+opponents grew into three letters) he flatly denied that the state had
+the right to interfere with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and
+in this he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name of
+Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time composing his
+incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia), the state was merely a sort
+of protective organization which a certain number of people had created
+and continued to maintain for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such
+an organization should presume to dictate what the individual citizens
+should believe and what not—that was something which Locke and his
+disciples failed to understand. The state did not undertake to tell them
+what to eat or drink. Why should it force them to visit one church and
+keep away from another?
+
+The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted victory of
+Protestantism, was an era of strange religious compromises.
+
+The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make an end to all
+religious warfare had laid down the principle that “all subjects
+shall follow the religion of their ruler.” Hence in one six-by-nine
+principality all citizens were Lutherans (because the local grand duke
+was a Lutheran) and in the next they were all Catholics (because the
+local baron happened to be a Catholic).
+
+“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the
+people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the
+people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot
+possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it
+follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound
+for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell
+and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future
+salvation.”
+
+That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of tolerance is
+regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the
+seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction
+but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety
+of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of
+gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly
+nation.
+
+Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was
+willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they
+continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the
+ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they
+professed a different faith.
+
+One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then
+a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an
+affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite
+capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had
+been injured.
+
+The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes
+of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the
+fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense.
+
+When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke
+followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England.
+Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at
+the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and
+no longer feared as a heretic.
+
+Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears
+the atmosphere.
+
+The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had completely
+consumed the superfluous energy of the English nation and while the
+citizens of other countries continued to kill each other for the sake
+of the Trinity and prenatal damnation, religious persecution in Great
+Britain came to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the
+established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant contact
+with the law, but the author of “Robinson Crusoe” was pilloried because
+he was a humorist rather than an amateur theologian and because the
+Anglo-Saxon race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of
+irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance, he would have
+escaped with a reprimand. When he turned his attack upon the tyranny of
+the church into a semi-humorous pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with
+Dissenters,” he showed that he was a vulgar person without a decent sense
+of the proprieties and one who deserved no better than the companionship
+of the pickpockets of Newgate Prison.
+
+Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended his travels
+beyond the confines of the British Isles. For intolerance having been
+driven from the mother country had found a most welcome refuge in certain
+of the colonies on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so
+much to the character of the people who had moved into these recently
+discovered regions as to the fact that the new world offered infinitely
+greater economic advantages than the old one.
+
+In England itself, a small island so densely populated that it offered
+standing room only to the majority of her people, all business would soon
+have come to an end if the people had not been willing to practice the
+ancient and honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a country
+of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent inhabited by a
+mere handful of farmers and workmen, no such compromise was necessary.
+
+And so it happened that a small communist settlement on the shores of
+Massachusetts Bay could develop into such a stronghold of self-righteous
+orthodoxy that the like of it had not been seen since the happy days
+when Calvin exercised the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High
+Executioner in western Switzerland.
+
+The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly regions
+of the Charles River usually goes to a small group of people who are
+referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A Pilgrim, in the usual sense of
+the word, is one who “journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious
+devotion.” The passengers of the _Mayflower_ were not pilgrims in
+that sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and tailors and
+cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights who had left their country
+to escape certain of those hated “poperies” which continued to cling to
+the worship in most of the churches around them.
+
+First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland
+where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our
+school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to
+their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and
+otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It
+seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such
+shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course
+of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to
+live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living
+in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better
+revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in
+Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed, but having been thrown by adverse
+currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they
+decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another
+voyage in their leaky tub.
+
+But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and
+seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them
+came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude
+for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by
+the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and
+their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And,
+finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured
+people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country,
+were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who
+without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety
+of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for
+several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.
+
+Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land, forever on
+the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever inclined to find an
+excuse for everything they thought and did within the pages of the Old
+Testament. Cut off from polite human society and books, they began to
+develop a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes they
+had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon and soon became
+veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors of the west. They had
+nothing to reconcile them to their lives of hardship and drudgery except
+the conviction that they were suffering for the sake of the only true
+faith. Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other people
+must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of those who failed to share
+their own views, who suggested by implication that the Puritan way of
+doing and thinking was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from
+their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully
+flogged and then driven into the wilderness or suffered the loss of their
+ears and tongues unless they were fortunate enough to find a refuge in
+one of the neighboring colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the
+Dutch.
+
+No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this colony
+achieved nothing except in that roundabout and involuntary fashion
+which is so common in the history of human progress. The very violence
+of their religious despotism brought about a reaction in favor of a
+more liberal policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny,
+there arose a new generation which was the open and avowed enemy of all
+forms of priest-rule, which believed profoundly in the desirability of
+the separation of state and church and which looked askance upon the
+ancestral admixture of religion and politics.
+
+By a stroke of good luck this development came about very slowly and the
+crisis did not occur until the period immediately before the outbreak of
+hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. As a result,
+the Constitution of the United States was written by men who were either
+freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned Calvinism and who
+incorporated into this document certain highly modern principles which
+have proved of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance of
+our republic.
+
+But ere this happened, the new world had experienced a most unexpected
+development in the field of tolerance and curiously enough it took place
+in a Catholic community, in that part of America now covered by the free
+state of Maryland.
+
+The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting experiment, were
+of Flemish origin, but the father had moved to England and had rendered
+very distinguished services to the house of Stuart. Originally they had
+been Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and general
+utility man to King James I, had become so utterly disgusted with the
+futile theological haggling of his contemporaries that he returned to the
+old faith. Good, bad or indifferent, it called black, black and white,
+white and did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine
+to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.
+
+This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts. His back-sliding (a
+very serious offense in those days!) did not lose him the favor of his
+royal master. On the contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore
+and was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to establish a
+little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted Catholics. First,
+he tried his luck in Newfoundland. But his settlers were frozen out of
+house and home and his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square
+miles in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian, would
+have naught of such dangerous neighbors and Baltimore then asked for a
+slice of that wilderness which lay between Virginia and the Dutch and
+Swedish possessions of the north. Ere he received his charter he died.
+His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the winter of
+1633-1634 two little ships, the _Ark_ and the _Dove_, under command of
+Leonard Calvert, brother to George, crossed the ocean, and in March of
+1634 they safely landed their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake
+Bay. The new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor of Mary,
+daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose plans for a European League
+of Nations had been cut short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife
+to that English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head at the
+hands of his Puritan subjects.
+
+This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its Indian neighbors
+and offered equal opportunities to both Catholics and Protestants
+passed through many difficult years. First of all it was overrun by
+Episcopalians who tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans
+in Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried to escape the
+fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia. And the two groups
+of fugitives, with the usual arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard
+to introduce their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth
+that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which might give rise
+to religious passions” were expressly forbidden on Maryland territory,
+the older colonists were entirely within their right when they bade both
+Episcopalians and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards war
+broke out in the home country between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads
+and the Marylanders feared that, no matter who should win, they would
+lose their old freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly
+after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them, and at the
+direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed their famous Act of
+Tolerance which, among other things, contained this excellent passage:
+
+“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of religion has
+often produced very harmful results in those communities in which it
+was exercised, for the more tranquil and pacific government in this
+province and for the better preservation of mutual love and unity among
+its inhabitants, it is hereby decided that nobody in this province
+who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested or
+persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his religion or the free
+exercise thereof.”
+
+That such an act could be passed in a country in which the Jesuits
+occupied a favorite position shows that the Baltimore family was
+possessed of remarkable political ability and of more than ordinary
+courage. How profoundly this generous spirit was appreciated by some of
+their guests was shown in the same year when a number of Puritan exiles
+overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished the Act of Tolerance and
+replaced it by an “Act Concerning Religion” of their own which granted
+full religious liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians
+“with the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”
+
+This period of reaction fortunately did not last long. In the year 1660
+the Stuarts returned to power and once more the Baltimores reigned in
+Maryland.
+
+The next attack upon their policy came from the other side. The
+Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the mother country and they
+insisted that henceforth their church should be the official church of
+all the colonies. The Calverts continued to fight but they found it
+impossible to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which
+lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.
+
+Protestantism triumphed.
+
+So did intolerance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE SUN KING
+
+
+The eighteenth century is usually referred to as an era of despotism. And
+in an age which believes in the dogma of democracy, despotism, however
+enlightened, is not apt to be regarded as a desirable form of government.
+
+Historians who mean well by the human race are very apt to point the
+finger of scorn at that great monarch Louis XIV and ask us to draw our
+own conclusions. When this brilliant sovereign came to the throne, he
+inherited a country in which the forces of Catholicism and Protestantism
+were so evenly balanced that the two parties, after a century of mutual
+assassination (with the odds heavily in favor of the Catholics), had at
+last concluded a definite peace and had promised to accept each other as
+unwelcome but unavoidable neighbors and fellow citizens. The “perpetual
+and irrevocable” Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 which contained the
+terms of agreement, stated that the Catholic religion was the official
+religion of the state but that the Protestants should enjoy complete
+liberty of conscience and should not suffer any persecution on account
+of their belief. They were furthermore allowed to build churches of
+their own and to hold public office. And as a token of good faith,
+the Protestants were allowed to hold two hundred fortified cities and
+villages within the realm of France.
+
+This, of course, was an impossible arrangement. The Huguenots were no
+angels. To leave two hundred of the most prosperous cities and villages
+of France in the hands of a political party which was the sworn enemy of
+the government was quite as absurd as if we should surrender Chicago and
+San Francisco and Philadelphia to the Democrats to make them accept a
+Republican administration, or vice versa.
+
+Richelieu, as intelligent a man as ever ruled a country, recognized this.
+After a long struggle he deprived the Protestants of their political
+power, but although a cardinal by profession, he scrupulously refrained
+from any interference with their religious freedom. The Huguenots could
+no longer conduct independent diplomatic negotiations with the enemies
+of their own country, but otherwise they enjoyed the same privileges as
+before and could sing psalms and listen to sermons or not as pleased them.
+
+Mazarin, the next man to rule France in the real sense of the word, had
+followed a similar policy. But he died in the year 1661. Then young Louis
+XIV personally undertook to rule his domains, and there was an end to the
+era of good will.
+
+It seems most unfortunate that when this brilliant if disreputable
+Majesty was forced for once in his life into the companionship of decent
+people he should have fallen into the clutches of a good woman who was
+also a religious fanatic. Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow of a literary
+hack by the name of Scarron, had begun her career at the French court
+as governess to the seven illegitimate children of Louis XIV and the
+Marquise de Montespan. When that lady’s love philtres ceased to have the
+desired effect and the King began to show occasional signs of boredom,
+it was the governess who stepped into her shoes. Only she was different
+from all her predecessors. Before she agreed to move into His Majesty’s
+apartments, the Archbishop of Paris had duly solemnized her marriage to
+the descendant of Saint Louis.
+
+During the next twenty years the power behind the throne was therefore
+in the hands of a woman who was completely dominated by her confessor.
+The clergy of France had never forgiven either Richelieu or Mazarin for
+their conciliatory attitude towards the Protestants. Now at last they had
+a chance to undo the work of these shrewd statesmen and they went to it
+with a will. For not only were they the official advisers of the Queen,
+but they also became the bankers of the King.
+
+That again is a curious story.
+
+During the last eight centuries the monasteries had accumulated the
+greater part of the wealth of France and as they paid no taxes in a
+country which suffered perpetually from a depleted treasury, their
+surplus wealth was of great importance. And His Majesty, whose glory
+was greater than his credit, made a grateful use of this opportunity to
+replenish his own coffers and in exchange for certain favors extended
+to his clerical supporters he was allowed to borrow as much money as he
+wanted.
+
+In this way the different stipulations of the “irrevocable” Edict of
+Nantes were one by one revoked. At first the Protestant religion was
+not actually forbidden, but life for those who remained faithful to the
+Huguenot cause was made exasperatingly uncomfortable. Whole regiments of
+dragoons were turned loose upon those provinces where the false doctrines
+were supposed to be most strongly entrenched. The soldiers were billeted
+among the inhabitants with instructions to make themselves thoroughly
+detestable. They ate the food and drank the wine and stole the forks and
+spoons and broke the furniture and insulted the wives and daughters of
+perfectly harmless citizens and generally behaved as if they were in a
+conquered territory. When their poor hosts, in their despair, rushed to
+the courts for some form of redress and protection, they were laughed at
+for their trouble and were told that they had brought their misfortunes
+upon their own heads and knew perfectly well how they could get rid of
+their unwelcome guests and at the same time regain the good will of the
+government.
+
+A few, a very few, followed this suggestion and allowed themselves to be
+baptized by the nearest village priest. But the vast majority of these
+simple people remained faithful to the ideals of their childhood. At
+last, however, when one after another their churches were closed and
+their clergy were sent to the galleys, they began to understand that they
+were doomed. Rather than surrender, they decided to go into exile. But
+when they reached the frontier, they were told that no one was allowed
+to leave the country, that those who were caught in the act were to be
+hanged, and that those who aided and abetted such fugitives were liable
+to be sent to the galleys for life.
+
+There are apparently certain things which this world will never learn.
+
+From the days of the Pharaohs to those of Lenin, all governments at one
+time or another have tried the policy of “closing the frontier” and none
+of them has ever been able to score a success.
+
+People who want to get out so badly that they are willing to take all
+sorts of risks can invariably find a way. Hundreds of thousands of French
+Protestants took to the “underground route” and soon afterwards appeared
+in London or Amsterdam or Berlin or Basel. Of course, such fugitives were
+not able to carry much ready cash. But they were known everywhere as
+honest and hard working merchants and artisans. Their credit was good
+and their energy undiminished. After a few years they usually regained
+that prosperity which had been their share in the old country and the
+home government was deprived of a living economic asset of incalculable
+value.
+
+Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the revocation of the Edict of
+Nantes was the prelude to the French Revolution.
+
+France had been and still was a very rich country. But commerce and
+clericalism have never been able to coöperate.
+
+From the moment that the French government surrendered to petticoats and
+cassocks, her fate was sealed. The same pen that decreed the expulsion of
+the Huguenots signed the death-warrant of Louis XVI.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+FREDERICK THE GREAT
+
+
+The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous for its love of
+popular forms of government. But ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian
+Wittelsbachs had tainted this sober-minded family of bookkeepers and
+overseers, they rendered some very useful service to the cause of
+tolerance.
+
+In part this was the result of a practical necessity. The Hohenzollerns
+had fallen heir to the poorest part of Europe, a half-populated
+wilderness of sand and forests. The Thirty Years War had left them
+bankrupt. They needed both men and money to start in business once more
+and they set out to get them, regardless of race, creed or previous
+condition of servitude.
+
+The father of Frederick the Great, a vulgarian with the manners of a
+coal-heaver and the personal tastes of a bartender, could grow quite
+tender when he was called upon to meet a delegation of foreign fugitives.
+“The more the merrier,” was his motto in all matters pertaining to the
+vital statistics of his kingdom and he collected the disinherited of all
+nations as carefully as he collected the six-foot-three grenadiers of his
+lifeguard.
+
+His son was of a very different caliber, a highly civilized human being
+who, having been forbidden by his father to study Latin and French, had
+made a speciality of both languages and greatly preferred the prose of
+Montaigne to the poetry of Luther and the wisdom of Epictetus of that
+of the Minor Prophets. The Old Testament severity of his father (who
+ordered the boy’s best friend to be decapitated in front of his window
+so as to teach him a lesson in obedience) had not inclined his heart
+toward those Judaean ideals of rectitude of which the Lutheran and
+Calvinist ministers of his day were apt to speak with such great praise.
+He came to regard all religion as a survival of prehistoric fear and
+ignorance, a mood of subservience carefully encouraged by a small class
+of clever and unscrupulous fellows who knew how to make good use of
+their own pre-eminent position by living pleasantly at the expense of
+their neighbors. He was interested in Christianity and even more so in
+the person of Christ himself, but he approached the subject by way of
+Locke and Socinius and as a result he was, in religious matters at least,
+a very broad minded person, and could truly boast that in his country
+“every one could find salvation after his own fashion.”
+
+This clever saying he made the basis for all his further experiments
+along the line of Tolerance. For example, he decreed that all religions
+were good as long as those who professed them were upright people who led
+decent, law-abiding lives; that therefore all creeds must enjoy equal
+rights and the state must never interfere in religious questions, but
+must content herself with playing policeman and keeping the peace between
+the different denominations. And because he truly believed this, he asked
+nothing of his subjects except that they be obedient and faithful and
+leave the final judgment of their thoughts and deeds “to Him alone who
+knew the conscience of men” and of whom he (the King) did not venture to
+form so small an opinion as to believe him to be in need of that human
+assistance which imagines that it can further the divine purpose by the
+exercise of violence and cruelty.
+
+In all these ideas, Frederick was a couple of centuries ahead of his day.
+His contemporaries shook their heads when the king gave his Catholic
+subjects a piece of land that they might build themselves a church right
+in the heart of his capital. They began to murmur ominous words of
+warning when he made himself the protector of the Jesuit order, which
+had just been driven out of most Catholic countries, and they definitely
+ceased to regard him as a Christian when he claimed that ethics and
+religion had nothing to do with each other and that each man could
+believe whatever he pleased as long as he paid his taxes and served his
+time in the army.
+
+Because at that time they happened to live within the boundaries of
+Prussia, these critics held their peace, for His Majesty was a master
+of epigram and a witty remark on the margin of a royal rescript could
+do strange things to the career of those who in some way or another had
+failed to please him.
+
+The fact however remains that it was the head of an unlimited monarchy,
+an autocrat of thirty years’ standing, who gave Europe a first taste of
+almost complete religious liberty.
+
+In this distant corner of Europe, Protestant and Catholic and Jew and
+Turk and Agnostic enjoyed for the first time in their lives equal rights
+and equal prerogatives. Those who preferred to wear red coats could not
+lord it over their neighbors who preferred to wear green coats, and vice
+versa. And the people who went back for their spiritual consolation to
+Nicaea were forced to live in peace and amity with others who would as
+soon have supped with the Devil as with the Bishop of Rome.
+
+That Frederick was entirely pleased with the outcome of his labors, that
+I rather doubt. When he felt his last hour approaching, he sent for his
+faithful dogs. They seemed better company in this supreme hour than the
+members of “the so-called human race.” (His Majesty was a columnist of no
+mean ability.)
+
+And so he died, another Marcus Aurelius who had strayed into the wrong
+century and who, like his great predecessor, left a heritage which was
+entirely too good for his successors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+VOLTAIRE
+
+
+In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about the nefarious
+labors of the press agent and many good people denounce “publicity”
+as an invention of the modern devil of success, a new-fangled and
+disreputable method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause.
+But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the past, when
+examined without prejudice, completely contradict the popular notion that
+publicity is something of recent origin.
+
+The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and minor, were
+past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd. Greek history and Roman
+history are one long succession of what we people of the journalistic
+profession call “publicity stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified.
+A great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that today even
+Broadway would refuse to fall for it.
+
+Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the tremendous value of
+carefully pre-arranged publicity. And we cannot blame them. They were not
+the sort of men who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the road
+like the blushing daisies. They were very much in earnest. They wanted
+their ideas to live. How could they hope to succeed without attracting a
+crowd of followers?
+
+A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence by spending eighty
+years in a quiet corner of a monastery, for such long voluntary exile,
+if duly advertised (as it was), becomes an excellent selling point and
+makes people curious to see the little book which was born of a lifetime
+of prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola, who hope
+to see some tangible results of their work while they are still on this
+planet, must willy-nilly resort to methods now usually associated with a
+circus or a new movie star.
+
+Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises those who are
+humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols these virtues was delivered
+under circumstances which have made it a subject of conversation to this
+very day.
+
+No wonder that those men and women who were denounced as the arch enemies
+of the Church took a leaf out of the Holy Book and resorted to certain
+rather obvious methods of publicity when they began their great fight
+upon the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in bondage.
+
+I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest of all
+virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has very often been blamed
+for the way in which he sometimes played upon the tom-tom of public
+consciousness. Perhaps he did not always show the best of good taste. But
+those whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.
+
+And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating,
+the success or failure of a man like Voltaire should be measured by
+the services he actually rendered to his fellow-men and not by his
+predilection for certain sorts of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.
+
+In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature once said,
+“What of it if I have no scepter? I have got a pen.” And right he was.
+He had a pen. Any number of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose
+and used more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged to
+that class of literary giants who all alone and under the most adverse
+circumstances can turn out as much copy as an entire syndicate of modern
+sport writers. He scribbled on the tables of dirty country inns. He
+composed endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country
+houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses in
+Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets of the royal Prussian
+residence and used reams of the private stationery which bore the
+monogram of the governor of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play
+with a hoop and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a
+considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some books,” and
+eighty years later, in the self-same town of Paris, we hear him ask for
+a pad of foolscap and unlimited coffee that he may finish yet one more
+volume before the inevitable hour of darkness and rest.
+
+His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and his treatises
+upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle him to an entire chapter of
+this book. He wrote no better verses than half a hundred other sonneteers
+of that era. As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his
+ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort of stuff we
+find in the Sunday papers.
+
+But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was stupid and narrow
+and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence which has endured until
+the beginning of the Great Civil War of the year 1914.
+
+The age in which he lived was a period of extremes. On the one hand, the
+utter selfishness and corruption of a religious, social and economic
+system which had long since outlived its usefulness. On the other side,
+a large number of eager but overzealous young men and young women ready
+to bring about a millennium which was based upon nothing more substantial
+than their good intentions. A humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly
+son of an inconspicuous notary public into this maelstrom of sharks and
+pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred to swim and struck
+out for shore. The methods he employed during his long struggle with
+adverse circumstances were often of a questionable nature. He begged and
+flattered and played the clown. But this was in the days before royalties
+and literary agents. And let the author who never wrote a potboiler throw
+the first stone!
+
+Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a few additional
+bricks. During a long and busy life devoted to warfare upon stupidity,
+he had experienced too many defeats to worry about such trifles as a
+public beating or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a man
+of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend his leisure hours in
+His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may find himself honored with a high
+titulary position at the same court from which he has just been banished.
+And if all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests
+denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion, isn’t there
+somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love letters that beautiful medal
+presented to him by the Pope to prove that he can gain the approbation of
+Holy Church as well as her disapproval?
+
+It was all in the day’s work.
+
+Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and crowd his days
+and weeks and months and years with a strange and colorful assortment of
+the most variegated experiences.
+
+By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class. His father was
+what for the lack of a better term we might call a sort of private trust
+company. He was the confidential handy-man of a number of rich nobles
+and looked after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet (for
+that was the family name) was therefore accustomed to a society a little
+better than that of his own people, something which later in life gave
+him a great advantage over most of his literary rivals. His mother was
+a certain Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who did not
+bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was possessed of that small
+“d’” which all Frenchmen of the middle classes (and all Europeans in
+general and a few Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and
+her husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize. As for the
+son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his ennobled grandparents
+and as soon as he began to write, he exchanged the plebeian François
+Marie Arouet for the more aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but
+how and where he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery.
+He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care of him after
+his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely. The brother, on the other
+hand, a faithful priest of the Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and
+rectitude, bored him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he
+spent as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.
+
+Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his little “Zozo”
+promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent him to the Jesuits that he
+might become versed in Latin hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good
+fathers did their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil a
+sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and living tongues. But
+they found it impossible to eradicate a certain bump of “queerness”
+which from the very beginning had set this child apart from the other
+scholars.
+
+At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and to please his
+father, young François then took up the study of the law. Unfortunately
+one could not read all day long. There were the long hours of the
+lazy evenings. These hours François whiled away either writing funny
+little pieces for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary
+compositions to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two centuries
+ago such a life was generally believed to lead straight to perdition.
+Father Arouet fully appreciated the danger his son was running. He went
+to one of his many influential friends and obtained for M. François a
+position as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The Dutch
+capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out of sheer boredom
+Voltaire began a love affair with the not particularly attractive
+daughter of a terrible old woman who was a society reporter. The lady,
+who hoped to marry her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the
+French minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous Romeo
+before the whole city knew about the scandal. His Excellency had troubles
+enough of his own and was not eager for more. He bundled his secretary
+into the next stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once
+more found himself at the mercy of his father.
+
+In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of an expedient which
+was often used by such Frenchmen as had a friend at court. He asked and
+obtained a “lettre de cachet” and placed his son before the choice of
+enforced leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school.
+The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised that he would
+be a model of industry and application. He was as good as his word and
+applied himself to the happy life of a free lance pamphleteer with such
+industry that the whole town talked about it. This was not according to
+the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely within his rights
+when he decided to send his son away from the flesh-pots of the Seine and
+packed him off to a friend in the country, where the young man was to
+remain for a whole year.
+
+There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the week (Sundays
+included) Voltaire began the study of letters in all seriousness and
+composed the first of his plays. After twelve months of fresh air and a
+very healthy monotony, he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere
+of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series of lampoons
+upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved all that was said about him
+but did not like this publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second
+period of exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at last
+a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days, that is to say,
+prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s social prominence, was not a bad
+place. One was not allowed to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty
+much as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A lonely cell
+in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do some serious work. When
+he was released, he had finished several plays and these were performed
+with such tremendous success that one of them broke all records of the
+eighteenth century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.
+
+This brought him some money (which he needed badly) but it also
+established his reputation as a wit, a most unfortunate thing for a
+young man who still has to make his career. For hereafter he was held
+responsible for every joke that enjoyed a few hours’ popularity on
+the boulevards and in the coffee-houses. And incidentally it was the
+reason why he went to England and took a post-graduate course in liberal
+statesmanship.
+
+It happened in the year 1725. Voltaire had (or had not) been funny about
+the old but otherwise useless family of de Rohan. The Chevalier de Rohan
+felt that his honor had been assailed and that something must be done
+about it. Of course, it was impossible for a descendant of the ancient
+rulers of Brittany to fight a duel with the son of a notary public and
+the Chevalier delegated the work of revenge to his flunkeys.
+
+One night Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully, one of his father’s
+customers, when he was told that some one wished to speak to him outside.
+He went to the door, was fallen upon by the lackeys of my Lord de Rohan
+and was given a sound beating. The next day the story was all over the
+town. Voltaire, even on his best days, looked like the caricature of
+a very ugly little monkey. What with his eyes blackened and his head
+bandaged, he was a fit subject for half a dozen popular reviews. Only
+something very drastic could save his reputation from an untimely death
+at the hands of the comic papers. And as soon as raw beefsteak had done
+its work, M. de Voltaire sent his witnesses to M. le Chevalier de Rohan
+and began his preparation for mortal combat by an intensive course in
+fencing.
+
+Alas! when the morning came for the great fight, Voltaire once more found
+himself behind the bars. De Rohan, a cad unto the last, had given the
+duel away to the police, and the battling scribe remained in custody
+until, provided with a ticket for England, he was sent traveling in
+a northwestern direction and was told not to return to France until
+requested to do so by His Majesty’s gendarmes.
+
+Four whole years Voltaire spent in and near London. The British kingdom
+was not exactly a Paradise, but compared to France, it was a little bit
+of Heaven.
+
+A royal scaffold threw its shadow over the land. The thirtieth of January
+of the year 1649 was a date remembered by all those in high places. What
+had happened to sainted King Charles might (under slightly modified
+circumstances) happen to any one else who dared to set himself above
+the law. And as for the religion of the country, of course the official
+church of the state was supposed to enjoy certain lucrative and agreeable
+advantages, but those who preferred to worship elsewhere were left in
+peace and the direct influence of the clerical officials upon the affairs
+of state was, compared to France, almost negligible. Confessed Atheists
+and certain bothersome non-conformists might occasionally succeed in
+getting themselves into jail, but to a subject of King Louis XV the
+general condition of life in England must have seemed wellnigh perfect.
+
+In 1729, Voltaire returned to France, but although he was permitted to
+live in Paris, he rarely availed himself of that privilege. He was like
+a scared animal, willing to accept bits of sugar from the hands of his
+friends, but forever on the alert and ready to escape at the slightest
+sign of danger. He worked very hard. He wrote prodigiously and with a
+sublime disregard for dates and facts, and choosing for himself subjects
+which ran all the way from Lima, Peru, to Moscow, Russia, he composed a
+series of such learned and popular histories, tragedies and comedies that
+at the age of forty he was by far the most successful man of letters of
+his time.
+
+Followed another episode which was to bring him into contact with a
+different kind of civilization.
+
+In distant Prussia, good King Frederick, yawning audibly among the yokels
+of his rustic court, sadly pined for the companionship of a few amusing
+people. He felt a tremendous admiration for Voltaire and for years he had
+tried to induce him to come to Berlin. But to a Frenchman of the year
+1750 such a migration seemed like moving into the wilds of Virginia and
+it was not until Frederick had repeatedly raised the ante that Voltaire
+at last condescended to accept.
+
+He traveled to Berlin and the fight was on. Two such hopeless egotists
+as the Prussian king and the French playwright could not possibly hope
+to live under one and the same roof without coming to hate each other.
+After two years of sublime disagreement, a violent quarrel about nothing
+in particular drove Voltaire back to what he felt inclined to call
+“civilization.”
+
+But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he was right, and the
+French poetry of the Prussian king was atrocious. But His Majesty’s
+attitude upon the subject of religious liberty left nothing to be desired
+and that was more than could be said of any other European monarch.
+
+And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned to his native
+land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal sentences by which the
+French courts tried to maintain order without some very scathing words of
+protest. All his life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness
+to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on the sixth
+day of creation had bestowed upon the most sublime product of His
+handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated and loathed stupidity in every shape, form
+and manner. The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of his
+anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening to demolish, this
+“infamous enemy” was nothing more or less than the lazy stupidity of the
+mass of the people who refused to think for themselves as long as they
+had enough to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.
+
+From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself pursued by a
+gigantic machine which seemed to move through sheer force of lethargy and
+combined the cruelty of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency
+of Juggernaut. To destroy or at least upset this contraption become the
+obsession of his old years, and the French government, to give this
+particular devil his due, ably assisted him in his efforts by providing
+the world with a choice collection of legal scandals.
+
+The first one occurred in the year 1761.
+
+In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France there lived a
+certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant. Toulouse had always
+been a pious city. No Protestant was there allowed to hold office or
+to be a doctor or a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was
+permitted to keep a Protestant servant. And on August 23rd and 24th
+of each year the entire community celebrated the glorious anniversary
+of the massacre of St. Bartholomew with a solemn feast of praise and
+thanksgiving.
+
+Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had lived all his life in
+complete harmony with his neighbors. One of his sons had turned Catholic,
+but the father had continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and
+had let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children were
+entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them best.
+
+But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was Marc Antony, the
+oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but
+that career was closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and
+refused to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused an attack
+of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey upon the young man’s
+mind. He began to entertain his father and mother with long recitations
+of Hamlet’s well known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his
+friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.
+
+This went on for some time and then one night, while the family was
+entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped into his father’s storeroom,
+took a piece of packing rope and hanged himself from the doorpost.
+
+There his father found him a few hours later, his coat and vest neatly
+folded upon the counter.
+
+The family was in despair. In those days the body of a person who had
+committed suicide was dragged nude and face downward through the streets
+of the town and was hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by
+the birds.
+
+The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of such a disgrace.
+They stood around and talked of what they ought to do and what they were
+going to do until one of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent
+for the police, and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was
+immediately filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for the
+death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to prevent him from
+becoming a Catholic.”
+
+In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial nest of
+eighteenth century France, with boredom like a black funeral pall hanging
+heavily upon the entire community, the most idiotic and fantastic yarns
+were given credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.
+
+The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under such suspicious
+circumstances, at once arrested the entire family, their guests and
+their servants and every one who had recently been seen in or near the
+Calas home. They dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in
+irons and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most desperate
+criminals. The next day they were examined. All of them told the same
+story. How Marc Antony had come into the house in his usual spirits, how
+he had left the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his
+solitary walks, etc., etc.
+
+By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse had taken
+a hand in the matter and with their help the dreadful news of this
+bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed one of his own children because he
+was about to return to the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout
+the land of Languedoc.
+
+Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime might think that
+the authorities would have spent that day inspecting the scene of the
+murder. Marc Antony enjoyed quite a reputation as an athlete. He was
+twenty-eight and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father
+having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a struggle were
+small indeed. But none of the town councilors bothered about such little
+details. They were too busy with the body of the victim. For Marc Antony,
+the suicide, had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three
+weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon it was most
+solemnly buried by the White Penitents who for some mysterious reason had
+made the defunct Calvinist an ex-officio member of their own order and
+who conducted his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance
+and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop or an exceedingly rich
+patron of the local Basilica.
+
+During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town, the good people of
+Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever testimony they could against
+the person of Jean Calas and his family and finally, after the case had
+been thoroughly thrashed out in the public press, and five months after
+the suicide, the trial began.
+
+One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested that the shop
+of the old man be visited to see whether such a suicide as he described
+would have been possible, but he was overridden and with twelve votes
+against one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken on the
+wheel.
+
+He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his wrists until his
+feet were a meter from the ground. Then his body was stretched until the
+limbs were “drawn from their sockets.” (I am copying from the official
+report.) As he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed,
+he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast quantities of
+water that his body had soon “swollen to twice its natural size.” As he
+persisted in his diabolical refusal to confess his guilt, he was placed
+on a tumbril and was dragged to the place of execution where his arms
+and legs were broken in two places by the executioner. During the next
+two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates and priests
+continued to bother him with their questions. With incredible courage the
+old man continued to proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice,
+exasperated by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and
+ordered him to be strangled to death.
+
+The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself and none of the
+other members of the family were killed. The widow, deprived of all her
+goods, was allowed to go into retirement and starve as best she could in
+the company of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent to
+different convents with the exception of the youngest who had been away
+at school at Nîmes at the time of his brother’s suicide and who had
+wisely fled to the territory of the sovereign city of Geneva.
+
+The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire in his castle
+of Ferney (conveniently built near the frontier of Switzerland so that a
+few minutes’ walk could carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at
+first refused to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with the
+Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private little theater
+which stood within sight of their own city as a direct provocation and
+the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire, in one of his supercilious moods,
+wrote that he could not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called
+Protestant martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those
+terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides, it
+seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other people) that twelve
+supposedly respectable judges would have condemned an innocent man to
+such a terrible death without very good reason.
+
+But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open house to all
+comers and no questions asked, had a visit from an honest merchant from
+Marseilles who had happened to be in Toulouse at the time of the trial
+and who was able to give him some first-hand information. Then at last he
+began to understand the horror of the crime that had been committed and
+from that moment on he could think of nothing else.
+
+There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of merit is reserved
+for those rare souls who, practically alone, dare to face the entire
+established order of society and who loudly cry for justice when the high
+courts of the land have pronounced sentence and when the community at
+large has accepted their verdict as equitable and just.
+
+Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should dare to
+accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder, and he prepared
+his case as carefully as if he had been a professional attorney. He
+interviewed the Calas boy who had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every
+one who could possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired
+counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions, lest
+his anger and his indignation carry him away. And when he felt sure of
+his ground, he opened his campaign.
+
+First of all he induced every man of some influence whom he knew within
+the realm of France (and he knew most of them) to write to the Chancellor
+of the Kingdom and ask for a revision of the Calas case. Then he set
+about to find the widow and as soon as she had been located, he ordered
+her to be brought to Paris at his own expense and engaged one of the
+best known lawyers to look after her. The spirit of the woman had been
+completely broken. She vaguely prayed that she might get her daughters
+out of the convent before she died. Beyond that, her hopes did not extend.
+
+Then he got into communication with the other son who was a Catholic,
+made it possible for him to escape from his school and to join him in
+Geneva. And finally he published all the facts in a short pamphlet
+entitled “Original Documents Concerning the Calas Family,” which
+consisted of letters written by the survivors of the tragedy and
+contained no reference whatsoever to Voltaire himself.
+
+Afterwards, too, during the revision of the case, he remained carefully
+behind the scenes, but so well did he handle his publicity campaign that
+soon the cause of the Calas family was the cause of all families in all
+countries of Europe and that thousands of people everywhere (including
+the King of England and the Empress of Russia) contributed to the funds
+that were being raised to help the defense.
+
+Eventually Voltaire gained his victory, but not until he had fought one
+of the most desperate battle of his entire career.
+
+The throne of France just then was occupied by Louis XV of unsavory
+memory. Fortunately his mistress hated the Jesuits and all their works
+(including the Church) with a most cordial hatred and was therefore
+on the side of Voltaire. But the King loved his ease above all other
+things and was greatly annoyed at all the fuss made about an obscure and
+dead Protestant. And of course as long as His Majesty refused to sign a
+warrant for a new trial, the Chancellor would not take action, and as
+long as the Chancellor would not take action, the tribunal of Toulouse
+was perfectly safe and so strong did they feel themselves that they
+defied public opinion in a most high-handed fashion and refused to let
+Voltaire or his lawyers have access to the original documents upon which
+they had based their conviction.
+
+During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation until finally
+in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse
+to surrender all the records in the Calas case and moved that there be
+a new trial. The widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at
+last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles when this
+decision was made public. A year later the special court which had been
+ordered to investigate the appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done
+to death for a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts the
+King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon the widow and her
+children. Furthermore the magistrates who had handled the Calas case were
+deprived of their office and it was politely suggested to the people of
+Toulouse that such a thing must not happen again.
+
+But although the French government might take a lukewarm view of the
+incident, the people of France had been stirred to the very depths of
+their outraged souls. And suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was
+not the only miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many
+others who had suffered as innocently as Calas.
+
+In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the neighborhood of
+Toulouse had offered the hospitality of his house to a visiting Calvinist
+minister. For this hideous crime he had been deprived of his estate and
+had been sent to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly
+strong man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire was
+told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate man away from
+the galleys, brought him to Switzerland where his wife and children were
+being supported by public charity and looked after the family until the
+crown was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property and the
+family were given permission to return to their deserted homestead.
+
+Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had been caught at
+an open-air meeting of Protestants and who for that crime had been
+dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate period, but who now, at
+the intercession of Voltaire, was set free.
+
+These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome hors d’œuvre to what
+was to follow.
+
+Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long suffering part of
+France which after the extermination of the Albigensian and Waldensian
+heretics had been left a wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.
+
+In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant by the name of
+Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made a living as an expert in
+medieval law, a lucrative position at a time when the feudal judicial
+system had grown so complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an
+income tax blank.
+
+Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless idiot, much given
+to brooding. In March of the year 1764 she left her home. The parents
+searched far and wide but found no trace of the child until a few days
+later when the bishop of the district informed the father that the girl
+had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a nun and was now in a
+convent.
+
+Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the spirit of the
+Protestants in that part of France. Sirven humbly answered that
+everything undoubtedly would be for the best in this worst of all
+possible worlds and meekly accepted the inevitable. But in the
+unaccustomed atmosphere of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the
+last vestiges of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself,
+she was returned to her own people. She was then in a state of terrible
+mental depression and in such continual horror of voices and spooks that
+her parents feared for her life. A short time afterwards she once more
+disappeared. Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.
+
+At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people were in a mood
+to believe anything that was said against a Protestant. The Sirvens,
+remembering what had just happened to innocent Jean Calas, decided not
+to court a similar fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through
+the Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to death, they
+at last reached Switzerland. They had not left a moment too soon. A few
+months later, both the father and the mother were found guilty (in their
+absence) of the crime of having murdered their child and were ordered
+to be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the execution of
+their parents and thereafter to be banished for life.
+
+A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of Voltaire and as
+soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he turned his attention to the
+Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had died. Remained the duty of vindicating
+the husband. It took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the
+tribunal of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender
+any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom of publicity
+and beg money from Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia and
+Poniatowski of Poland before he could force the crown to take an
+interest. But finally, in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in
+the eighth year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated
+and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.
+
+So ended the second case.
+
+The third one followed immediately.
+
+In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of Abbeville, not far
+from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by the side of the road were found
+broken to pieces by an unknown hand. Three young boys were suspected
+of this sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of them
+escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught. Of these, the older
+one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre, was suspected of being an atheist.
+A copy of the Philosophical Dictionary, that famous work to which all the
+great leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among his
+books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided to look into
+the young man’s past. It was true they could not connect him with the
+Abbeville case but had he not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel
+down and uncover while a religious procession went by?
+
+De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch a stage-coach
+and had meant no offense.
+
+Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing the pain less
+easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that he had mutilated one
+of the two crucifixes and was condemned to death for “impiously and
+deliberately walking before the Host without kneeling or uncovering,
+singing blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane
+books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which were supposed to have
+indicated a lack of respect for the Church.
+
+The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be torn out with hot
+irons, his right hand was to be cut off, and he was to be slowly burned
+to death, and all that only a century and a half ago!) that the public
+was stirred into several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were
+guilty of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one could
+not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions were sent to the King,
+ministers were besieged with requests for a respite. But the country was
+full of unrest and there must be an example, and de la Barre, having
+undergone the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was
+decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and his corpse,
+together with his Philosophical Dictionary and some volumes by our old
+friend Bayle, were publicly burned by the hangman.
+
+It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing
+influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and the Descartes. It showed
+what invariably happened to those ill-guided young men who left the
+narrow path between the right and the wrong and followed the leadership
+of a group of radical philosophers.
+
+Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was fast approaching
+his eightieth birthday, but he plunged into the case with all his old
+zeal and with a brain that burned with a clear white flame of outraged
+decency.
+
+De la Barre had been executed for “blasphemy.” First of all, Voltaire
+tried to discover whether there existed a law by which people guilty
+of that supposed crime could be condemned to death. He could not find
+one. Then he asked his lawyer friends. They could not find one. And it
+gradually dawned upon the community that the judges in their unholy
+eagerness had “invented” this bit of legal fiction to get rid of their
+prisoner.
+
+There had been ugly rumors at the time of de la Barre’s execution. The
+storm that now arose forced the judges to be very circumspect and the
+trial of the third of the youthful prisoners was never finished. As for
+de la Barre, he was never vindicated. The review of the case dragged on
+for years and when Voltaire died, no decision had as yet been reached.
+But the blows which he had struck, if not for tolerance at least against
+intolerance, were beginning to tell.
+
+The official acts of terror instigated by gossiping old women and senile
+courts came to an end.
+
+Tribunals that have religious axes to grind are only successful when they
+can do their work in the dark and are able to surround themselves with
+secrecy. The method of attack followed by Voltaire was one against which
+such courts had no means of defense.
+
+Voltaire turned on all the lights, hired a voluminous orchestra, invited
+the public to attend, and then bade his enemies do their worst.
+
+As a result, they did nothing at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
+
+
+There are three different schools of statesmanship. The first one teaches
+a doctrine which reads somewhat as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by
+poor benighted creatures who are unable to think for themselves, who
+suffer mental agonies whenever they are obliged to make an independent
+decision and who therefore can be led astray by the first ward-heeler
+that comes along. Not only is it better for the world at large that these
+‘herd people’ be ruled by some one who knows his own mind, but they
+themselves, too, are infinitely happier when they do not have to bother
+about parliaments and ballot-boxes and can devote all their time to their
+work-shops, their children, their flivvers and their vegetable gardens.”
+
+The disciples of this school become emperors, sultans, sachems, sheiks
+and archbishops and they rarely regard labor unions as an essential part
+of civilization. They work hard and build roads, barracks, cathedrals and
+jails.
+
+The adherents of the second school of political thought argue as follows:
+“The average man is God’s noblest invention. He is a sovereign in his own
+right, unsurpassed in wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives.
+He is perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but those
+committees through which he tries to rule the universe are proverbially
+slow when it comes to handling delicate affairs of state. Therefore, the
+masses ought to leave all executive business to a few trusted friends
+who are not hampered by the immediate necessity of making a living and
+who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”
+
+Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the logical
+candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first consul and Lord
+protector.
+
+They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the cathedrals they turn
+into jails.
+
+But there is a third group of people. They contemplate man with the
+sober eye of science and accept him as he is. They appreciate his good
+qualities, they understand his limitations. They are convinced from a
+long observation of past events that the average citizen, when not under
+the influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard to do
+what is right. But they make themselves no false illusions. They know
+that the natural process of growth is exceedingly slow, that it would be
+as futile to try and hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of
+human intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government of
+a state, but whenever they have a chance to put their ideas into action,
+they build roads, improve the jails and spend the rest of the available
+funds upon schools and universities. For they are such incorrigible
+optimists that they believe that education of the right sort will
+gradually rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore a
+thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.
+
+And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal, they usually
+write an encyclopedia.
+
+Like so many other things that give evidence of great wisdom and profound
+patience, the encyclopedia-habit took its origin in China. The Chinese
+Emperor K’ang-hi tried to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in
+five thousand and twenty volumes.
+
+Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was contented with
+thirty-seven books.
+
+The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced nothing of
+the slightest value along this line of enlightenment. A fellow-countryman
+of Saint Augustine, the African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years
+of his life composing something which he held to be a veritable treasure
+house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that people might the more
+easily retain the many interesting facts which he presented to them, he
+used poetry. This terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by
+heart by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and was
+held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature, music and
+science.
+
+Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name of Isidore wrote
+an entirely new encyclopedia and after that, the output increased at the
+regular rate of two for every hundred years. What has become of them
+all, I do not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals) has
+possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these volumes had been allowed to
+survive, there would not be room for anything else on this earth.
+
+When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe
+experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual curiosity, the
+purveyors of encyclopedias entered into a veritable Paradise. Such books,
+then as now, were usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live
+on eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted for less
+than the money spent upon paper and ink. England especially was a great
+country for this sort of literature and so it was quite natural that John
+Mills, a Britisher who lived in Paris, should think of translating the
+successful “Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the French
+language that he might peddle his product among the subjects of good
+King Louis and grow rich. For this purpose he associated himself with a
+German professor and then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do
+the actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton, who saw a
+chance to make a small fortune, deliberately swindled his partner and as
+soon as he had frozen Mills and the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise,
+continued to publish the pirated edition on his own account. He called
+the forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel des Arts
+et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful prospectuses with such
+a tremendous selling appeal that the list of subscribers was soon filled.
+
+Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the Collège de France
+to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot of paper and awaited results.
+
+Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did not prove as
+simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor produced notes but no
+articles, the subscribers loudly clamored for Volume I and everything was
+in great disorder.
+
+In this emergency Lebreton remembered that a “Universal Dictionary of
+Medicine” which had appeared only a few months before had been very
+favorably received. He sent for the editor of this medical handbook and
+hired him on the spot. And so it happened that a mere encyclopedia became
+the “Encyclopédie.” For the new editor was no one less than Denis Diderot
+and the work which was to have been a hack job became one of the most
+important contributions of the eighteenth century towards the sum total
+of human enlightenment.
+
+Diderot at that time was thirty-seven years old and his life had been
+neither easy nor happy. He had refused to do what all respectable young
+Frenchmen were supposed to do and go to a university. Instead, as soon
+as he could get away from his Jesuit teachers, he had proceeded to Paris
+to become a man of letters. After a short period of starvation (acting
+upon the principle that two can go hungry just as cheaply as one) he
+had married a lady who proved to be a terribly pious woman and an
+uncompromising shrew, a combination which is by no means as rare as some
+people seem to believe. But as he was obliged to support her, he had been
+forced to take all sorts of odd jobs and to compile all sorts of books
+from “Inquiries concerning Virtue and Merit” to a rather disreputable
+rehash of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” In his heart, however, this pupil of
+Bayle remained faithful to his liberal ideals. Soon the government (after
+the fashion of governments during times of stress) discovered that this
+inoffensive looking young author maintained grave doubts about the story
+of creation as rendered in the first chapter of Genesis and otherwise was
+considerable of a heretic. In consequence whereof Diderot was conducted
+to the prison of Vincennes and there held under lock and key for almost
+three months.
+
+It was after his release from jail that he entered the service of
+Lebreton. Diderot was one of the most eloquent men of his time. He saw
+the chance of a lifetime in the enterprise of which he was to be the
+head. A mere rehash of Chambers’ old material seemed entirely beneath his
+dignity. It was an era of tremendous mental activity. Very well! Let the
+Encyclopedia of Lebreton contain the latest word upon every conceivable
+subject and let the articles be written by the foremost authorities in
+every line of human endeavor.
+
+Diderot was so full of enthusiasm that he actually persuaded Lebreton to
+give him full command and unlimited time. Then he made up a tentative
+list of his coöperators, took a large sheet of foolscap and began, “A:
+the first letter of the alphabet, etc., etc.”
+
+Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was done. Rarely,
+however, has a man worked under such tremendous disadvantages. Lebreton
+had increased his original capital when he hired Diderot, but he never
+paid his editor more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the
+other people who were supposed to lend their assistance, well, we all
+know how those things are. They were either busy just then, or they
+would do it next month, or they had to go to the country to see their
+grandmother. With the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the
+work himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped upon him by
+the officials of both the Church and the State.
+
+Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not because so many
+people want them but because so many people are glad to get rid of
+them. The book which a century and a half ago was howled down as a
+manifestation of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and
+harmless tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative
+element among the clergy of the eighteenth century, it sounded like a
+clarion call of destruction, anarchy, atheism and chaos.
+
+Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the editor-in-chief
+as an enemy of society and religion, a loose reprobate who believed
+neither in God, home or the sanctity of the family ties. But the Paris
+of the year 1770 was still an overgrown village where every one knew
+every one else. And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of
+life was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually lived up
+to this motto, who kept open house for all those who were hungry, who
+labored twenty hours a day for the sake of humanity and asked nothing in
+return but a bed, a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded,
+hard-working fellow was so shining an example of those virtues in which
+the prelates and the monarchs of that day were so conspicuously lacking,
+that it was not easy to attack him from that particular angle. And
+so the authorities contented themselves with making his life just as
+unpleasant as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage,
+by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding Diderot’s home,
+by confiscating his notes and occasionally by suppressing the work
+altogether.
+
+These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen his enthusiasm. At
+last the work was finished and the “Encyclopédie” actually accomplished
+what Diderot had expected of it—it became the rallying point for all
+those who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age and who
+knew that the world was desperately in need of a general overhauling.
+
+It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor slightly out of
+the true perspective.
+
+Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby coat, counted
+himself happy when his rich and brilliant friend, the Baron D’Holbach,
+invited him to a square meal once a week, and who was more than satisfied
+when four thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived at the
+same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot and Helvétius and Volney
+and Condorcet and a score of others, all of whom gained a much greater
+personal renown than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good
+people would never have been able to exercise the influence they did.
+It was more than a book, it was a social and economic program. It told
+what the leading minds of the day were actually thinking. It contained a
+concrete statement of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire
+world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the human race.
+
+France had reached a point where those who had eyes to see and ears to
+hear knew that something drastic must be done to avoid an immediate
+catastrophe, while those who had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused
+to use them, maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that
+peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement of a
+set of antiquated laws that belonged to the era of the Merovingians. For
+the moment, those two parties were so evenly balanced that everything
+remained as it had always been and this led to strange complications.
+The same France which on one side of the ocean played such a conspicuous
+rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom and addressed the most
+affectionate letters to Monsieur Georges Washington (who was a Free
+Mason) and arranged delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre,
+Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used to call a “sceptic”
+and what we call a plain atheist, this country on the other side of
+the broad Atlantic stood revealed as the most vindictive enemy of all
+forms of spiritual progress and only showed her sense of democracy in
+the complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher and
+peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.
+
+Eventually all this was changed.
+
+But it was changed in a way which no one had been able to foresee. For
+the struggle that was to remove the spiritual and social handicaps of all
+those who were born outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves
+themselves. It was the work of a small group of disinterested citizens
+whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated quite as bitterly
+as their Catholic oppressors and who could count upon no other reward
+than that which is said to await all honest men in Heaven.
+
+The men who during the eighteenth century defended the cause of tolerance
+rarely belonged to any particular denomination. For the sake of personal
+convenience they sometimes went through certain outward motions of
+religious conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their writing
+desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned, they might just as
+well have lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C. or in China in the
+days of Confucius.
+
+They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain reverence for
+various things which most of their contemporaries held in great respect
+and which they themselves regarded as harmless but childish survivals of
+a bygone day.
+
+They took little stock in that ancient national history which the
+western world, for some curious reason, had picked out from among all
+Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and
+had accepted as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true disciples
+of their great master, Socrates, they listened only to the inner voice
+of their own conscience and regardless of consequences, they lived
+fearlessly in a world that had long since been surrendered to the timid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION
+
+
+The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial misery known as the
+Kingdom of France came crashing down on a memorable evening in the month
+of August of the year of grace 1789.
+
+On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing emotional fury,
+the National Assembly worked itself into a veritable orgy of brotherly
+love. Until in a moment of intense excitement the privileged classes
+surrendered all those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken
+them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared themselves
+in favor of those theoretical rights of man which henceforth would be the
+foundation-stone for all further attempts at popular self-government.
+
+As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of the feudal system.
+An aristocracy which is actually composed of the “aristoi,” of the best
+of the most enterprising elements of society, which boldly assumes
+leadership and shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance
+to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active service and
+contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs in diverse departments of
+government is only fit to drink tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on
+Second.
+
+The old France therefore was dead.
+
+Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.
+
+But it was dead and with it there passed away that most outrageous form
+of an invisible government which the Church, ever since the days of
+Richelieu, had been able to impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint
+Louis.
+
+Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.
+
+Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts and souls of all
+honest men and women, it is needless to speak.
+
+The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.
+
+And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in an autocratic form
+of government was for good and all to be eradicated from this fair earth.
+
+Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are gone!
+
+And more words to that effect.
+
+Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its many iniquities,
+the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal and when it was all over,
+behold our old friend Intolerance, wearing a pair of proletarian
+pantaloons and his hair brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side
+with the public prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.
+
+Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for claiming that
+authority maintaining itself solely by the grace of Heaven might
+sometimes be in error.
+
+Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the will of the
+people need not always and invariably be the will of God.
+
+A ghastly joke!
+
+But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular fancies) with the
+blood of a million innocent bystanders.
+
+What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original. One can find
+the same idea couched in different if more elegant words in the works of
+many of the ancients.
+
+In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, and apparently
+there always have been, and most likely there always will be two entirely
+different varieties of human beings.
+
+A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the serious
+searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive at certain
+temperate philosophical conclusions which will place them above and
+beyond the common worries of mankind.
+
+But the vast majority of the people are not contented with a mild diet of
+spiritual “light wines.” They want something with a kick to it, something
+that burns on the tongue, that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit
+up and take notice. What that “something” is does not matter very much,
+provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications and is served
+in a direct and simple fashion and in unlimited quantities.
+
+This fact seems to have been little understood by historians and
+this has led to many and serious disappointments. No sooner has an
+outraged populace torn down the stronghold of the past (a fact duly and
+enthusiastically reported by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it
+turns mason, carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the
+city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit as vile and
+tyrannical as the old one and used for the same purpose of repression and
+terror.
+
+The very moment a number of proud nations have at last succeeded in
+throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an “infallible man” they
+accept the dictates of an “infallible book.”
+
+Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a flunkey, is madly
+galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters the deserted palace, puts
+on the discarded royal raiment and forthwith commits herself to those
+selfsame blunders and cruelties which have just driven her predecessor
+into exile.
+
+It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our story and
+must be told.
+
+No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible for the
+great French upheaval were of the best. The Declaration of the Rights of
+Man had laid down the principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed
+in the peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not even
+his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not disturb the
+public order as laid down by the various decrees and laws.
+
+This however did not mean equal rights for all religious denominations.
+The Protestant faith henceforth was to be tolerated, Protestants were not
+to be annoyed because they worshiped in a different church from their
+Catholic neighbors, but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant”
+Church of the state.
+
+Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of political
+life, knew that this far famed concession was only a half-way measure.
+But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn a great social cataclysm into a
+one-man revolution, died under the effort and many noblemen and bishops,
+repenting of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of August,
+were already beginning that policy of obstructionism which was to be of
+such fatal consequence to their master the king. And it was not until
+two years later in the year 1791 (and exactly two years too late for any
+practical purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants and
+the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality and were declared
+to enjoy the same liberty before the law.
+
+From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed. The constitution
+which the representatives of the French people finally bestowed upon
+an expectant country insisted that all priests of whatsoever faith
+should swear an oath of allegiance to the new form of government and
+should regard themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the
+school-teachers and postal employees and light-house keepers and customs
+officials who were their fellow-citizens.
+
+Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the new constitution
+were in direct violation of every solemn agreement that had been
+concluded between France and the Holy See since the year 1516. But the
+Assembly was in no mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents
+and treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this decree
+or resign their positions and starve to death. A few bishops and a few
+priests accepted what seemed inevitable. They crossed their fingers and
+went through the formality of an oath. But by far the greater number,
+being honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf out
+of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted during so many
+years, they began to say mass in deserted stables and to give communion
+in pigsties, to preach their sermons behind country hedges and to pay
+clandestine visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the
+middle of the night.
+
+Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants
+had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly
+disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the
+enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk
+of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that
+they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly
+called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be
+accorded those privileges which during the previous three centuries
+they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the
+Calvinist faith.
+
+The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance
+of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite
+decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under
+the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court,
+combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a
+panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the
+shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of
+wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of
+September of the year 1792.
+
+From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign
+of terror.
+
+The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught
+when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were
+engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The
+explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct
+of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the
+hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every
+honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the
+principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a
+hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no
+one had been able to foresee.
+
+When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it
+was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of
+warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have
+testified.
+
+Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of
+politics and economics and social organization. But not until the
+historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn
+historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark
+forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and
+travail.
+
+There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light.
+There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one
+thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a
+choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all
+experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a
+noisy apotheosis of violence.
+
+Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world by way of reason
+were either dead or were put to death by the very people whom they had
+helped to glory. And with the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots
+and the Condorcets out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New
+Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s fate. What
+a ghastly mess they made of their high mission!
+
+During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out
+enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the
+very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had
+suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere
+sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of
+incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. Together with a few
+others who believed that they could disprove the existence of a personal
+God with the help of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy
+the Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful task
+but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary psychology that the
+normal becomes abnormal and the impossible is turned into an every day
+occurrence. Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old
+Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing Christmas and
+Easter; abolishing weeks and months and re-dividing the year into periods
+of ten days each with a new pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another
+paper pronunciamento which abolished the worship of God and left the
+universe without a master.
+
+But not for long.
+
+However eloquently explained and defended within the bare rooms of the
+Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and empty void was too repellent to
+most citizens to be tolerated for more than a couple of weeks. The old
+Deity no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example of Moses
+and Mahomet and invent a new one that should suit the demands of the
+times?
+
+As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!
+
+Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime a comely
+actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek draperies, would fill the bill
+perfectly. The lady was found among the dancers of his late Majesty’s
+corps de ballet and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to the
+high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the loyal followers of
+an older faith.
+
+As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries, had stood a
+tender watch over all those who had bared the wounds of their soul before
+the patient eyes of perfect understanding, she too was gone, hastily
+hidden by loving hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned
+into mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty, the proud
+product of an amateur sculptor and done rather carelessly in white
+plaster. But that was not all. Notre Dame had seen other innovations. In
+the middle of the choir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple
+of Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a throne for
+the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl was not holding court and
+receiving the worship of her trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy
+harbored a “Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry
+high the burning flame of world enlightenment.
+
+The “end of time” came before another six months.
+
+On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794 the French people
+were officially informed that God had been reëstablished and that the
+immortality of the soul was once more a recognized article of faith. On
+the eighth of June, the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the
+second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques Rousseau) was
+officially presented to his eager disciples.
+
+Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address of welcome. He
+had reached the highest point of his career. The obscure law clerk from
+a third rate country town had become the high priest of the Revolution.
+More than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine Théot,
+revered by thousands as the true mother of God, had just proclaimed the
+forthcoming return of the Messiah and she had even revealed his name.
+It was Maximilian Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic
+uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing reams of oratory in
+which he assured God that from now on all would be well with His little
+world.
+
+And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law by which those
+suspected of treason and heresy (for once more they were held to be the
+same, as in the good old days of the Inquisition) were deprived of all
+means of defense, a measure so ably conceived that during the next six
+weeks more than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath the
+slanting knife of the guillotine.
+
+The rest of his story is only too well known.
+
+As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself held to be
+Good (with a capital G) he could, in his quality of a logical fanatic,
+not possibly recognize the right of other men, less perfect, to exist on
+the same planet with himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a
+capital E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the brink
+of depopulation.
+
+Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the enemies of
+Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate struggle destroyed this
+Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.
+
+Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent itself. The
+constitution which the French people then adopted recognized the
+existence of different denominations and gave them the same rights
+and privileges. Officially at least the Republic washed her hands of
+all religion. Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an
+association, were free to do so but they were obliged to support their
+own ministers and priests and recognize the superior rights of the state
+and the complete freedom of choice of the individual.
+
+Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have lived peacefully
+side by side.
+
+It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat, continues to deny
+the principle of a division of state and church (see the decree of Pope
+Pius IX of December 8th, 1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back
+to power by supporting those political parties who hope to upset the
+republican form of government and bring back the monarchy or the empire.
+But these battles are usually fought in the private parlors of some
+minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodge of a retired general
+with an ambitious mother-in-law.
+
+They have thus far provided the funny papers with some excellent material
+but they are proving themselves increasingly futile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+LESSING
+
+
+On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a battle was fought
+between the armies of the French Revolution and the armies of the
+allied monarchs who had set forth to annihilate the terrible monster of
+insurrection.
+
+It was a glorious victory, but not for the allies. Their infantry could
+not be employed on the slippery hillsides of the village of Valmy. The
+battle therefore consisted of a series of solemn broadsides. The rebels
+fired harder and faster than the royalists. Hence the latter were the
+first to leave the field. In the evening the allied troops retreated
+northward. Among those present at the engagement was a certain Johann
+Wolfgang von Goethe, aide to the hereditary Prince of Weimar.
+
+Several years afterwards this young man published his memoirs of that
+day. While standing ankle-deep in the sticky mud of Lorraine, he had
+turned prophet. And he had predicted that after this cannonade, the world
+would never be the same. He had been right. On that ever memorable day,
+Sovereignty by the grace of God was blown into limbo. The Crusaders of
+the Rights of Man did not run like chickens, as they had been expected to
+do. They stuck to their guns. And they pushed those guns forward through
+valleys and across mountains until they had carried their ideal of
+“Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to the furthermost corners of Europe
+and had stabled their horses in every castle and church of the entire
+continent.
+
+It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence. The
+revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one hundred and fifty
+years and we can poke as much fun at them as we like. We can even be
+grateful for the many good things which they bestowed upon this world.
+
+But the men and women who lived through those days, who one morning had
+gaily danced around the Tree of Liberty and then during the next three
+months had been chased like rats through the sewers of their own city,
+could not possibly take such a detached view of those problems of civic
+upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their cellars and garrets
+and had combed the cobwebs out of their perukes, they began to devise
+measures by which to prevent a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity.
+
+But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must first of all bury
+the past. Not a vague past in the broad historical sense of the word but
+their own individual “pasts” when they had surreptitiously read the works
+of Monsieur de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for
+the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de Voltaire were
+stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur Diderot were sold to the
+junk-man. Pamphlets that had been reverently read as the true revelation
+of reason were relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an
+effort was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short sojourn in
+the realm of liberalism.
+
+Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the literary
+material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant brotherhood
+overlooked one item which was even more important as a telltale of the
+popular mind. That was the stage. It was a bit childish on the part of
+the generation that had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The
+Marriage of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment believed
+in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and the people who had
+wept over “Nathan the Wise” could never successfully prove that they
+had always regarded religious tolerance as a misguided expression of
+governmental weakness.
+
+The play and its success were there to convict them of the opposite.
+
+The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment of the
+latter half of the eighteenth century was a German, one Gotthold Ephraim
+Lessing. He was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology
+in the University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination for a
+religious career and had played hooky so persistently that his father
+heard of it, had told him to come home and had placed him before
+the choice of immediate resignation from the university or diligent
+application as a member of the medical department. Gotthold, who was no
+more of a doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was asked
+of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of his beloved actor
+friends and upon their subsequent disappearance from town was obliged to
+hasten to Wittenberg that he might escape arrest for debt.
+
+His flight meant the beginning of a period of long walks and short meals.
+First of all he went to Berlin where he spent several years writing badly
+paid articles for a number of theatrical papers. Then he engaged himself
+as private secretary to a rich friend who was going to take a trip around
+the world. But no sooner had they started than the Seven Years’ war must
+break out. The friend, obliged to join his regiment, had taken the first
+post-chaise for home and Lessing, once more without a job, found himself
+stranded in the city of Leipzig.
+
+But he was of a sociable nature and soon found a new friend in the person
+of one Eduard Christian von Kleist, an officer by day and a poet by
+night, a sensitive soul who gave the hungry ex-theologian insight into
+the new spirit that was slowly coming over this world. But von Kleist was
+shot to death in the battle of Kunersdorf and Lessing was driven to such
+dire extremes of want that he became a columnist.
+
+Then followed a period as private secretary to the commander of the
+fortress of Breslau where the boredom of garrison life was mitigated by a
+profound study of the works of Spinoza which then, a hundred years after
+the philosopher’s death, were beginning to find their way to foreign
+countries.
+
+All this, however, did not settle the problem of the daily Butterbrod.
+Lessing was now almost forty years old and wanted a home of his own. His
+friends suggested that he be appointed keeper of the Royal Library. But
+years before, something had happened that had made Lessing persona non
+grata at the Prussian court. During his first visit to Berlin he had made
+the acquaintance of Voltaire. The French philosopher was nothing if not
+generous and being a person without any idea of “system” he had allowed
+the young man to borrow the manuscript of the “Century of Louis XIV,”
+then ready for publication. Unfortunately, Lessing, when he hastily left
+Berlin, had (entirely by accident) packed the manuscript among his own
+belongings. Voltaire, exasperated by the bad coffee and the hard beds
+of the penurious Prussian court, immediately cried out that he had been
+robbed. The young German had stolen his most important manuscript, the
+police must watch the frontier, etc., etc., etc., after the manner of an
+excited Frenchman in a foreign country. Within a few days the postman
+returned the lost document, but it was accompanied by a letter from
+Lessing in which the blunt young Teuton expressed his own ideas of people
+who would dare to suspect his honesty.
+
+This storm in a chocolate-pot might have easily been forgotten, but the
+eighteenth century was a period when chocolate-pots played a great rôle
+in the lives of men and women and Frederick, even after a lapse of almost
+twenty years, still loved his pesky French friend and would not hear of
+having Lessing at his court.
+
+And so farewell to Berlin and off to Hamburg, where there was rumor of a
+newly to be founded national theater. This enterprise came to nothing and
+Lessing in his despair accepted the office of librarian to the hereditary
+grand duke of Brunswick. The town of Wolfenbüttel which then became
+his home was not exactly a metropolis, but the grand-ducal library was
+one of the finest in all Germany. It contained more than ten thousand
+manuscripts and several of these were of prime importance in the history
+of the Reformation.
+
+Boredom of course is the main incentive to scandal mongering and gossip.
+In Wolfenbüttel a former art critic, columnist and dramatic essayist was
+by this very fact a highly suspicious person and soon Lessing was once
+more in trouble. Not because of anything he had done but on account of
+something he was vaguely supposed to have done, to wit: the publication
+of a series of articles attacking the orthodox opinions of the old school
+of Lutheran theology.
+
+These sermons (for sermons they were) had actually been written by a
+former Hamburg minister, but the grand duke of Brunswick, panic stricken
+at the prospect of a religious war within his domains, ordered his
+librarian to be discreet and keep away from all controversies. Lessing
+complied with the wishes of his employer. Nothing, however, had been
+said about treating the subject dramatically and so he set to work to
+re-valuate his opinions in terms of the stage.
+
+The play which was born out of this small-town rumpus was called “Nathan
+the Wise.” The theme was very old and I have mentioned it before in this
+book. Lovers of literary antiquities can find it (if Mr. Sumner will
+allow them) in Boccaccio’s “Decameron” where it is called the “Sad Story
+of the Three Rings” and where it is told as follows:
+
+Once upon a time a Mohammedan prince tried to extract a large sum of
+money from one of his Jewish subjects. But as he had no valid reason to
+deprive the poor man of his property, he bethought himself of a ruse.
+He sent for the victim and having complimented him gracefully upon his
+learning and wisdom, he asked him which of the three most widely spread
+religions, the Turkish, the Jewish and the Christian, he held to be most
+true. The worthy patriarch did not answer the Padishah directly but said,
+“Let me, oh great Sultan, tell you a little story. Once upon a time there
+was a very rich man who had a beautiful ring and he made a will that
+whichever of his sons at the time of his death should be found with that
+ring upon his finger should fall heir to all his estates. His son made
+a like will. His grandson too, and for centuries the ring changed hands
+and all was well. But finally it happened that the owner of the ring
+had three sons whom he loved equally well. He simply could not decide
+which of the three should own that much valued treasure. So he went to a
+goldsmith and ordered him to make two other rings exactly like the one
+he had. On his death-bed he sent for his children and gave them each his
+blessing and what they supposed was the one and only ring. Of course, as
+soon as the father had been buried, the three boys all claimed to be his
+heir because they had The Ring. This led to many quarrels and finally
+they laid the matter before the Kadi. But as the rings were absolutely
+alike, even the judges could not decide which was the right one and so
+the case has been dragged on and on and very likely will drag on until
+the end of the world. Amen.”
+
+Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that no one
+religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it was the inner spirit
+of man that counted rather than his outward conformity to certain
+prescribed rituals and dogmas and that therefore it was the duty of
+people to bear with each other in love and friendship and that no one had
+the right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured perfection
+and say, “I am better than all others because I alone possess the Truth.”
+
+But this idea, much applauded in the year 1778, was no longer popular
+with the little princelings who thirty years later returned to salvage
+such goods and chattels as had survived the deluge of the Revolution. For
+the purpose of regaining their lost prestige, they abjectly surrendered
+their lands to the rule of the police-sergeant and expected the clerical
+gentlemen who depended upon them for their livelihood to act as a
+spiritual militia and help the regular cops to reëstablish law and order.
+
+But whereas the purely political reaction was completely successful, the
+attempt to reshape men’s minds after the pattern of fifty years before
+ended in failure. And it could not be otherwise. It was true that the
+vast majority of the people in all countries were sick and tired of
+revolution and unrest, of parliaments and futile speeches and forms of
+taxation that had completely ruined commerce and industry. They wanted
+peace. Peace at any price. They wanted to do business and sit in their
+own front parlors and drink coffee and not be disturbed by the soldiers
+billeted upon them and forced to drink an odious extract of oak-leaves.
+Provided they could enjoy this blessed state of well-being, they were
+willing to put up with certain small inconveniences such as saluting
+whoever wore brass buttons, bowing low before every imperial letter-box
+and saying “Sir” to every assistant official chimney-sweep.
+
+But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of sheer necessity,
+of the need for a short breathing space after the long and tumultuous
+years when every new morning brought new uniforms, new political
+platforms, new police regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and
+earth. It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general air
+of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely appointed
+masters, that the people in their heart of hearts had forgotten the new
+doctrines which the drums of Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into
+their heads and hearts.
+
+As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent in all
+reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward semblance
+of decency and order and cared not one whit for the inner spirit, the
+average subject enjoyed a fairly wide degree of independence. On Sunday
+he went to church with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week
+he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept his private
+opinions to himself and aired his views when a careful inspection of the
+premises had first assured him that no secret agent was hidden underneath
+the sofa or was lurking behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed
+the events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head when
+his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper told him what new
+idiotic measures his masters had taken to assure the peace of the realm
+and bring about a return to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.
+
+What his masters were doing was exactly what similar masters with
+an imperfect knowledge of the history of human nature under similar
+circumstances have been doing ever since the year one. They thought that
+they had destroyed free speech when they ordered the removal of the
+cracker-barrels from which the speeches that had so severely criticized
+their government had been made. And whenever they could, they sent the
+offending orators to jail with such stiff sentences (forty, fifty, a
+hundred years) that the poor devils gained great renown as martyrs,
+whereas in most instances they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a
+few books and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.
+
+Warned by this example, the others kept away from the public parks and
+did their grumbling in obscure wine shops or in the public lodging houses
+of overcrowded cities where they were certain of a discreet audience and
+where their influence was infinitely more harmful than it would have been
+on a public platform.
+
+There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom
+the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who
+is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne
+and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption
+of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears
+his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. But the mayor of a
+third rate town, once he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of
+office, is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself
+airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore woe unto
+him who dares to approach such a potentate pro tem without visible
+manifestations of that reverence and worship due to so exalted a human
+being.
+
+But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who openly questioned the
+existing order of things in learned tomes and handbooks of geology and
+anthropology and economics, fared infinitely worse.
+
+They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their livelihood. Then
+they were exiled from the town in which they had taught their pernicious
+doctrines and with their wives and children were left to the charitable
+mercies of the neighbors.
+
+This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience to a
+large number of perfectly sincere people who were honestly trying to go
+to the root of our many social ills. Time, however, the great laundress,
+has long since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates
+were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these amiable
+scholars. Today, King Frederick William of Prussia is chiefly remembered
+because he interfered with the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous
+radical who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be worthy of
+being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines, according to the
+police reports, appealed only to “beardless youths and idle babblers.”
+The Duke of Cumberland has gained lasting notoriety because as King of
+Hanover he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a protest against
+“His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the country’s constitution.” And
+Metternich has retained a certain notoriety because he extended his
+watchful suspicion to the field of music and once censored the music of
+Schubert.
+
+Poor old Austria!
+
+Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly disposed towards
+the “gay empire” and forgets that once upon a time it had an active
+intellectual life of its own and was something more than an amusing and
+well-mannered county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars
+and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted by no one less
+than Johann Strauss himself.
+
+We may go even further and state that during the entire eighteenth
+century Austria played a very important rôle in the development of the
+idea of religious tolerance. Immediately after the Reformation the
+Protestants had found a fertile field for their operations in the rich
+province between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had
+changed when Rudolf II became emperor.
+
+This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a ruler to whom
+treaties made with heretics were of no consequence whatsoever. But
+although educated by the Jesuits, he was incurably lazy and this saved
+his empire from too drastic a change of policy.
+
+That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This monarch’s chief
+qualification for office was the fact that he alone among all the
+Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons. Early during his reign he had
+visited the famous House of the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year
+1291 by a number of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central
+Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had sworn a dire
+oath to make his country one-hundred-percent Catholic.
+
+He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism once more
+was proclaimed the official and exclusive faith of Austria and Styria and
+Bohemia and Silesia.
+
+Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange family, which
+acquired vast quantities of European real estate with every new wife, an
+effort was made to drive the Protestants from their Magyar strongholds.
+But backed up by the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the
+Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain their
+independence until the second half of the eighteenth century. And by that
+time a great change had taken place in Austria itself.
+
+The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last even their
+sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference with their
+affairs on the part of the Popes and they were willing for once to risk a
+policy contrary to the wishes of Rome.
+
+In an earlier part of this book I have already told how many medieval
+Catholics believed that the organization of the Church was all wrong.
+In the days of the martyrs, these critics argued, the Church was a true
+democracy ruled by elders and bishops who were appointed by common
+consent of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede that the
+Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct successor of the
+Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite position in the councils
+of the Church, but they insisted that this power had been purely honorary
+and that the popes therefore should never have considered themselves
+superior to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend their
+influence beyond the confines of their own territory.
+
+The popes from their side had fought this idea with all the bulls,
+anathemas and excommunications at their disposal and several brave
+reformers had lost their lives as a result of their bold agitation for
+greater clerical decentralization.
+
+The question had never been definitely settled, and then during
+the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was revived by the
+vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop of Trier. His name
+was Johann von Hontheim, but he is better known by his Latin pseudonym
+of Febronius. Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberal
+education. After a few years spent at the University of Louvain he had
+temporarily forsaken his own people and had gone to the University
+of Leiden. He got there at a time when that old citadel of undiluted
+Calvinism was beginning to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This
+suspicion had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard Noodt,
+a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to enter the field of
+theology and had been permitted to publish a speech in which he had
+extolled the ideal of religious tolerance.
+
+His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.
+
+“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to lay down certain
+laws of science which hold good for all people at all times and under all
+conditions. It follows that it would have been very easy for him, had
+he desired to do so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that
+they all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject of
+religion. We know that He did not do anything of the sort. Therefore, we
+act against the express will of God if we try to coerce others by force
+to believe that which we ourselves hold to be true.”
+
+Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or not, it is hard to
+say. But something of that same spirit of Erasmian rationalism can be
+found in those works of Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own
+ideas upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.
+
+That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in February of
+the year 1764) is of course no more than was to be expected. But it
+happened to suit the interests of Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and
+Febronianism or Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started
+was called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practical
+shape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the son of Maria Theresa,
+bestowed upon his subjects on the thirteenth of October of the year 1781.
+
+Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great enemy, Frederick
+of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing the right thing at the wrong
+moment. During the last two hundred years the little children of Austria
+had been sent to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them
+if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those same infants
+henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors (who, as they all knew,
+had horns and a long black tail), as their dearly beloved brothers and
+sisters was to ask the impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard
+working, blundering Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles
+and aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and cardinals
+and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden outburst of
+courage. He was the first among the Catholic rulers who dared to advocate
+tolerance as a desirable and practical possibility of statecraft.
+
+And what he did three months later was even more startling. On the
+second of February of the year of grace 1782 he issued his famous
+decree concerning the Jews and extended the liberty then only enjoyed
+by Protestants and Catholics to a category of people who thus far had
+considered themselves fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the
+same air as their Christian neighbors.
+
+Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe that the good work
+continued indefinitely and that Austria now became a Paradise for those
+who wished to follow the dictates of their own conscience.
+
+I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers might rise to
+a sudden height of common sense, but the Austrian peasant, taught
+since time immemorial to regard the Jew as his natural enemy and the
+Protestant as a rebel and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that
+old and deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people as his
+natural enemies.
+
+A century and a half after the promulgation of these excellent Edicts
+of Tolerance, the position of those who did not belong to the Catholic
+Church was quite as unfavorable as it had been in the sixteenth century.
+Theoretically a Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers
+or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And in practice it was
+impossible for them to be invited to dinner by the imperial boot-black.
+
+So much for paper decrees.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+TOM PAINE
+
+
+Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect that God moves in a
+mysterious way, his wonders to perform.
+
+The truth of this statement is most apparent to those who have studied
+the history of the Atlantic seaboard.
+
+During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the
+American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their
+devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor
+might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of
+the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and
+very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up
+a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting
+orgies of the Mather family.
+
+Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two reverend
+gentlemen could in any way be held responsible for the very tolerant
+tendencies which we find expounded with such able vigor in the
+Constitution of the United States and in the many documents that were
+written immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between England
+and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case, for the period
+of repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was
+bound to create a furious reaction in favor of a more liberal point of
+view.
+
+This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent for the collected
+works of Socinius and ceased to frighten little children with stories
+about Sodom and Gomorrah. But their leaders were almost without
+exception representatives of the new school of thought and with great
+ability and tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into the
+parchment platform upon which the edifice of their new and independent
+nation was to be erected.
+
+They might not have been quite so successful if they had been obliged to
+deal with one united country. But colonization in the northern part of
+America had always been a complicated business. The Swedish Lutherans had
+explored part of the territory. The French had sent over some of their
+Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied a large share of the land.
+While almost every sort and variety of English sect had at one time or
+another tried to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness
+between the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
+
+This had made for a variety of religious expression and so well had the
+different denominations been balanced that in several of the colonies a
+crude and rudimentary form of mutual forbearance had been forced upon a
+people who under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at each
+other’s throats.
+
+This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend gentlemen who
+prospered where others quarreled. For years after the advent of the new
+spirit of charity they had continued their struggle for the maintenance
+of the old ideal of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had
+successfully estranged many of the younger men from a creed which seemed
+to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and kindliness from some of its
+more ferocious Indian neighbors.
+
+Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt of battle in the
+long struggle for freedom belonged to this small but courageous group of
+dissenters.
+
+Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner of eighty
+tons can carry enough new notions to upset an entire continent. The
+American colonists of the eighteenth century were obliged to do without
+sculpture and grand pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more
+intelligent among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand
+that there was something astir in the big world, of which they had
+never heard anything in their Sunday sermons. The booksellers then
+became their prophets. And although they did not officially break away
+from the established church and changed little in their outer mode of
+life, they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they were
+faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania, who had refused
+to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the ground that the good Lord had
+expressly reserved for himself the right to three things: “To be able
+to create something out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate
+man’s conscience.”
+
+And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political and social
+program for the future conduct of their country, these brave patriots
+incorporated their ideas into the documents in which they placed their
+ideals before the high court of public opinion.
+
+It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of Virginia had
+they known that some of the oratory to which they listened with such
+profound respect was directly inspired by their arch-enemies, the
+Libertines. But Thomas Jefferson, their most successful politician, was
+himself a man of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that
+religion could only be regulated by reason and conviction and not by
+force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal right to the free
+exercise of their religion according to the dictates of their conscience,
+he merely repeated what had been thought and written before by Voltaire
+and Bayle and Spinoza and Erasmus.
+
+And later when the following heresies were heard: “that no declaration of
+faith should be required as a condition of obtaining any public office in
+the United States,” or “that Congress should make no law which referred
+to the establishment of religion or which prohibited the free exercise
+thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.
+
+In this way the United States came to be the first country where religion
+was definitely separated from politics; the first country where no
+candidate for office was forced to show his Sunday School certificate
+before he could accept the nomination; the first country in which people
+could, as far as the law was concerned, worship or fail to worship as
+they pleased.
+
+But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter) the average
+man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable to follow them as soon
+as they deviated the least little bit from the beaten track. Not only
+did many of the states continue to impose certain restrictions upon
+those of their subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but
+the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or Bostonians or
+Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant of those who did not
+share their own views as if they had never read a single line of their
+own Constitution. All of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the
+case of Thomas Paine.
+
+Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of the Americans.
+
+He was the publicity man of the Revolution.
+
+By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor; by instinct
+and training, a rebel. He was forty years old before he visited the
+colonies. While on a visit to London he had met Benjamin Franklin and had
+received the excellent advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided
+with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had sailed for
+Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the son-in-law of Franklin, to
+found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania Gazette.”
+
+Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon found himself in the
+midst of those events that were trying men’s souls. And being possessed
+of a singularly well-ordered mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted
+collection of American grievances and had incorporated them into a
+pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application of “common
+sense” should convince the people that the American cause was a just
+cause and deserved the hearty coöperation of all loyal patriots.
+
+This little book at once found its way to England and to the continent
+where it informed many people for the first time in their lives that
+there was such a thing as “an American nation” and that it had an
+excellent right, yea, it was its sacred duty to make war upon the mother
+country.
+
+As soon as the Revolution was over, Paine went back to Europe to show the
+English people the supposed absurdities of the government under which
+they lived. It was a time when terrible things were happening along the
+banks of the Seine and when respectable Britishers were beginning to look
+across the Channel with very serious misgivings.
+
+A certain Edmund Burke had just published his panic-stricken “Reflections
+on the French Revolution.” Paine answered with a furious counter-blast of
+his own called “The Rights of Man” and as a result the English government
+ordered him to be tried for high treason.
+
+Meanwhile his French admirers had elected him to the Convention and
+Paine, who did not know a word of French but was an optimist, accepted
+the honor and went to Paris. There he lived until he fell under the
+suspicion of Robespierre. Knowing that at any moment he might be arrested
+and decapitated, he hastily finished a book that was to contain his
+philosophy of life. It was called “The Age of Reason.” The first part was
+published just before he was taken to prison. The second part was written
+during the ten months he spent in jail.
+
+Paine believed that true religion, what he called “the religion of
+humanity,” had two enemies, atheism on the one hand and fanaticism on
+the other. But when he gave expression to this thought he was attacked
+by every one and when he returned to America in 1802 he was treated with
+such profound and relentless hatred that his reputation as a “dirty
+little atheist” has survived him by more than a century.
+
+It is true that nothing happened to him. He was not hanged or burned or
+broken on the wheel. He was merely shunned by all his neighbors, little
+boys were encouraged to stick their tongues out at him when he ventured
+to leave his home, and at the time of his death he was an embittered and
+forgotten man who found relief for his anger in writing foolish political
+tracts against the other heroes of the Revolution.
+
+This seems a most unfortunate sequel to a splendid beginning.
+
+But it is typical of something that has repeatedly happened during the
+history of the last two thousand years.
+
+As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private intolerance
+begins.
+
+And lynchings start when official executions have come to an end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS
+
+
+Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to write this book.
+The word “Intolerance,” in the minds of most people, was then almost
+exclusively identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when
+an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of tolerance” it
+was generally accepted that so and so had spent his life fighting the
+abuses of the Church and the tyranny of a professional priesthood.
+
+Then came the war.
+
+And much was changed in this world.
+
+Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen.
+
+Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his fellow-men, we
+got a hundred.
+
+And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of the horrors
+of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with the infinitely more
+painful manifestations of a paltry form of racial intolerance and social
+intolerance and a score of petty forms of intolerance, the existence of
+which had not even been suspected a decade ago.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This seems very terrible to many good people who until recently lived in
+the happy delusion that progress was a sort of automatic time-piece which
+needed no other winding than their occasional approbation.
+
+They sadly shake their heads, whisper “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”
+and mutter disagreeable things about the cussedness of the human race
+which goes everlastingly to school, yet always refuses to learn.
+
+Until, in sheer despair, they join the rapidly increasing ranks of our
+spiritual defeatists, attach themselves to this or that or the other
+religious institution (that they may transfer their own burden to the
+back of some one else), and in the most doleful tones acknowledge
+themselves beaten and retire from all further participation in the
+affairs of their community.
+
+I don’t like such people.
+
+They are not merely cowards.
+
+They are traitors to the future of the human race.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So far so good, but what is the solution, if a solution there be?
+
+Let us be honest with ourselves.
+
+There is not any.
+
+At least not in the eyes of a world which asks for quick results and
+expects to settle all difficulties of this earth comfortably and speedily
+with the help of a mathematical or medical formula or by an act of
+Congress. But those of us who have accustomed ourselves to consider
+history in the light of eternity and who know that civilization does not
+begin and end with the twentieth century, feel a little more hopeful.
+
+That vicious circle of despair of which we hear so much nowadays (“man
+has always been that way,” “man always will be that way,” “the world
+never changes,” “things are just about the same as they were four
+thousand years ago,”) does not exist.
+
+It is an optical illusion.
+
+The line of progress is often interrupted but if we set aside all
+sentimental prejudices and render a sober judgment upon the record of
+the last twenty thousand years (the only period about which we possess
+more or less concrete information) we notice an indubitable if slow rise
+from a condition of almost unspeakable brutality and crudeness to a state
+which holds the promise of something infinitely nobler and better than
+what has ever gone before and even the ghastly blunder of the Great War
+can not shake the firm conviction that this is true.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The human race is possessed of almost incredible vitality.
+
+It has survived theology.
+
+It due time it will survive industrialism.
+
+It has lived through cholera and plague, high heels and blue laws.
+
+It will also learn how to overcome the many spiritual ills which beset
+the present generation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+History, chary of revealing her secrets, has thus far taught us one great
+lesson.
+
+What the hand of man has done, the hand of man can also undo.
+
+It is a question of courage, and next to courage, of education.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That of course sounds like a platitude. For the last hundred years we
+have had “education” driven into our ears until we are sick and tired
+of the word and look longingly back to a time when people could neither
+read nor write but used their surplus intellectual energy for occasional
+moments of independent thinking.
+
+But when I here speak of “education” I do not mean the mere accumulation
+of facts which is regarded as the necessary mental ballast of our modern
+children. Rather, I have in mind that true understanding of the present
+which is born out of a charitable and generous knowledge of the past.
+
+In this book I have tried to prove that intolerance is merely a
+manifestation of the protective instinct of the herd.
+
+A group of wolves is intolerant of the wolf that is different (be it
+through weakness or strength) from the rest of the pack and invariably
+tries to get rid of this offending and unwelcome companion.
+
+A tribe of cannibals is intolerant of the individual who by his
+idiosyncrasies threatens to provoke the wrath of the Gods and bring
+disaster upon the whole village and brutally relegates him or her to the
+wilderness.
+
+The Greek commonwealth can ill afford to harbor within its sacred walls a
+citizen who dares to question the very fundaments upon which the success
+of the community has been built and in a poor outburst of intolerance
+condemns the offending philosopher to the merciful death of poison.
+
+The Roman state cannot possibly hope to survive if a small group of
+well-meaning zealots is allowed to play fast and loose with certain laws
+which have been held indispensable ever since the days of Romulus, and
+much against her own will she is driven into deeds of intolerance which
+are entirely at variance with her age-old policy of liberal aloofness.
+
+The Church, spiritual heir to the material dominions of the ancient
+Empire, depends for her continued existence upon the absolute and
+unquestioning obedience of even the humblest of her subjects and is
+driven to such extremes of suppression and cruelty that many people
+prefer the ruthlessness of the Turk to the charity of the Christian.
+
+The great insurgents against ecclesiastical tyranny, beset by a thousand
+difficulties, can only maintain their rule if they show themselves
+intolerant to all spiritual innovations and scientific experiments and in
+the name of “Reform” they commit (or rather try to commit) the self-same
+mistakes which have just deprived their enemies of most of their former
+power and influence.
+
+And so it goes throughout the ages until life, which might be a glorious
+adventure, is turned into a horrible experience and all this happens
+because human existence so far has been entirely dominated by fear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For fear, I repeat it, is at the bottom of all intolerance.
+
+No matter what form or shape a persecution may take, it is caused by fear
+and its very vehemence is indicative of the degree of anguish experienced
+by those who erect the gallows or throw fresh logs upon the funeral pyre.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once we recognize this fact, the solution of the difficulty immediately
+presents itself.
+
+Man, when not under the influence of fear, is strongly inclined to be
+righteous and just.
+
+Thus far he has had very few opportunities to practice these two virtues.
+
+But I cannot for the life of me see that this matters overmuch. It is
+part of the necessary development of the human race. And that race is
+young, hopelessly, almost ridiculously young. To ask that a certain form
+of mammal, which began its independent career only a few thousand years
+ago should already have acquired those virtues which go only with age and
+experience, seems both unreasonable and unfair.
+
+And furthermore, it warps our point of view.
+
+It causes us to be irritated when we should be patient.
+
+It makes us say harsh things where we should only feel pity.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the last chapters of a book like this, there is a serious temptation
+to assume the rôle of the prophet of woe and indulge in a little amateur
+preaching.
+
+Heaven forbid!
+
+Life is short and sermons are apt to be long.
+
+And what cannot be said in a hundred words had better never be said at
+all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our historians are guilty of one great error. They speak of prehistoric
+times, they tell us about the Golden Age of Greece and Rome, they talk
+nonsense about a supposedly dark period, they compose rhapsodies upon the
+tenfold glories of our modern era.
+
+If perchance these learned doctors perceive certain characteristics which
+do not seem to fit into the picture they have so prettily put together,
+they offer a few humble apologies and mumble something about certain
+undesirable qualities which are part of our unfortunate and barbaric
+heritage but which in due course of time will disappear, just as the
+stage-coach has given way before the railroad engine.
+
+It is all very pretty but it is not true. It may flatter our pride to
+believe ourselves heir to the ages. It will be better for our spiritual
+health if we know ourselves for what we are—contemporaries of the folks
+that lived in caves, neolithic men with cigarettes and Ford cars,
+cliff-dwellers who reach their homes in an elevator.
+
+For then and only then shall we be able to make a first step toward that
+goal that still lies hidden beyond the vast mountain ranges of the future.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To speak of Golden Ages and Modern Eras and Progress is sheer waste of
+time as long as this world is dominated by fear.
+
+To ask for tolerance, as long as intolerance must of need be an integral
+part of our law of self-preservation, is little short of a crime.
+
+The day will come when tolerance shall be the rule, when intolerance
+shall be a myth like the slaughter of innocent captives, the burning of
+widows, the blind worship of a printed page.
+
+It may take ten thousand years, it may take a hundred thousand.
+
+But it will come, and it will follow close upon the first true victory of
+which history shall have any record, the triumph of man over his own fear.
+
+    _Westport, Connecticut_
+
+    _July, 19, 1925_
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***
diff --git a/74798-h/74798-h.htm b/74798-h/74798-h.htm
index 9b36d85..25396de 100644
--- a/74798-h/74798-h.htm
+++ b/74798-h/74798-h.htm
@@ -1,14928 +1,14928 @@
-<!DOCTYPE html>

-<html lang="en">

-<head>

-    <meta charset="UTF-8">

-    <title>

-      Tolerance | Project Gutenberg

-    </title>

-    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">

-    <style>

-

-a {

-    text-decoration: none;

-}

-

-body {

-    margin-left: 10%;

-    margin-right: 10%;

-}

-

-h1,h2 {

-    text-align: center;

-    clear: both;

-}

-

-h2.nobreak {

-    page-break-before: avoid;

-}

-

-hr {

-    margin-top: 2em;

-    margin-bottom: 2em;

-    clear: both;

-}

-

-hr.tb {

-    width: 45%;

-    margin-left: 27.5%;

-    margin-right: 27.5%;

-}

-

-hr.chap {

-    width: 65%;

-    margin-left: 17.5%;

-    margin-right: 17.5%;

-}

-

-img.online {

-    max-height: 2.5em;

-    margin-top: -1.25em;

-}

-

-img.inline {

-    max-height: 0.8em;

-    vertical-align: middle;

-}

-

-img.w100 {

-    width: 100%;

-}

-

-div.chapter {

-    page-break-before: always;

-}

-

-p {

-    margin-top: 0.5em;

-    text-align: justify;

-    margin-bottom: 0.5em;

-    text-indent: 1em;

-}

-

-table {

-    margin: 1em auto 1em auto;

-    max-width: 30em;

-    border-collapse: collapse;

-}

-

-td {

-    padding-left: 2.25em;

-    padding-right: 0.25em;

-    vertical-align: top;

-    text-indent: -2em;

-}

-

-.tdc {

-    text-align: center;

-}

-

-.tdr {

-    text-align: right;

-}

-

-.tdpg {

-    vertical-align: bottom;

-    text-align: right;

-}

-

-.blockquote {

-    margin: 1.5em auto auto auto;

-    max-width: 30em;

-}

-

-.caption p {

-    text-align: center;

-    margin-top: 1em;

-    text-indent: 0em;

-}

-

-.center {

-    text-align: center;

-    text-indent: 0em;

-}

-

-.copyright {

-    margin: 1.5em auto auto auto;

-    max-width: 20em;

-    border-top: 2px solid black;

-    border-bottom: 2px solid black;

-    padding: 1em 0;

-}

-

-.figcenter {

-    margin: auto;

-    text-align: center;

-}

-

-.hanging {

-    margin-top: 3em;

-    padding-left: 2em;

-    text-indent: -2em;

-}

-

-.larger {

-    font-size: 150%;

-}

-

-.noindent {

-    text-indent: 0;

-}

-

-.pagenum {

-    position: absolute;

-    right: 4%;

-    font-size: smaller;

-    text-align: right;

-    font-style: normal;

-}

-

-.right {

-    margin-top: 0;

-    text-align: right;

-}

-

-.smaller {

-    font-size: 80%;

-}

-

-.smcap {

-    font-variant: small-caps;

-    font-style: normal;

-}

-

-.titlepage {

-    text-align: center;

-    margin-top: 3em;

-    text-indent: 0em;

-}

-

-.x-ebookmaker img {

-    max-width: 100%;

-    width: auto;

-    height: auto;

-}

-

-/* Illustration classes */

-.illowp100 {width: 100%;}

-.illowp70 {width: 70%;}

-.x-ebookmaker .illowp70 {width: 100%;}

-.illowp80 {width: 80%;}

-.x-ebookmaker .illowp80 {width: 100%;}

-    </style>

-  </head>

-<body>

-<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_i"></a>[i]</span></p>

-

-<h1>TOLERANCE</h1>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ii"></a>[ii]</span></p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iii"></a>[iii]</span></p>

-

-<p class="titlepage larger">TOLERANCE</p>

-

-<p class="titlepage"><span class="smaller"><i>By</i></span><br>

-HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON</p>

-

-<div class="blockquote">

-

-<p class="noindent"><i>The final end of the State consists not in dominating

-over men, restraining them by fear, subjecting

-them to the will of others. Rather it has for its

-end so to act that its citizens shall in security

-develop soul and body and make free use of their

-reason. For the true end of the State is Liberty.</i></p>

-

-<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Spinoza.</span></p>

-

-</div>

-

-<div class="blockquote">

-

-<p class="noindent"><i>Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future.

-I will wait for Humanity at the crossroads, three

-hundred years hence.</i></p>

-

-<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Luigi Lucatelli.</span></p>

-

-</div>

-

-<figure class="figcenter titlepage illowp100" style="max-width: 4.6875em;">

-  <img class="w100" src="images/b-and-l.jpg" alt=" ">

-</figure>

-

-<p class="titlepage"><span class="smaller"><i>NEW YORK</i></span><br>

-BONI &amp; LIVERIGHT<br>

-<span class="smaller">1925</span></p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iv"></a>[iv]</span></p>

-

-<div class="copyright">

-

-<p class="center smaller">COPYRIGHT 1925 <img class="inline" src="images/deco.jpg" alt=" "> BY<br>

-BONI &amp; LIVERIGHT, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br>

-PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES</p>

-

-</div>

-

-<figure class="figcenter illowp100" style="max-width: 4.6875em;">

-  <img class="online" src="images/b-and-l.jpg" alt=" ">

-</figure>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_v"></a>[v]</span></p>

-

-<p class="center">TO THE MEMORY OF<br>

-JOHN W. T. NICHOLS</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vi"></a>[vi]</span></p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vii"></a>[vii]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<table>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr"></td>

-    <td></td>

-    <td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr"></td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Prologue</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#PROLOGUE">11</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr smaller">CHAPTER</td>

-    <td></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">I.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Tyranny of Ignorance</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">17</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">II.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Greeks</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">28</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">III.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Beginning of Restraint</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">68</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Twilight of the Gods</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">80</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">V.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Imprisonment</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">104</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Pure of Life</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">114</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Inquisition</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">126</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Curious Ones</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">146</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">IX.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The War Upon the Printed Word</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">160</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">X.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Concerning the Writing of History in General

-    and This Book in Particular</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">168</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XI.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Renaissance</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">172</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Reformation</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">181</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XIII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Erasmus</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">195</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XIV.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Rabelais</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">212</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XV.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">New Signboards for Old</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">223</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XVI.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Anabaptists</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">246</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XVII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Sozzini Family</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">257</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XVIII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Montaigne</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">269</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XIX.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Arminius</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">275</a><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_viii"></a>[viii]</span></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XX.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Bruno</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">286</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXI.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Spinoza</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">292</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The New Zion</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">307</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXIII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Sun King</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">321</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXIV.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Frederick the Great</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">326</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXV.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Voltaire</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">330</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXVI.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Encyclopedia</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">352</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXVII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Intolerance of Revolution</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">361</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXVIII.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Lessing</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">372</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXIX.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">Tom Paine</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">387</a></td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td class="tdr">XXX.</td>

-    <td><span class="smcap">The Last Hundred Years</span></td>

-    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">393</a></td>

-  </tr>

-</table>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span></p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span></p>

-

-<h1>TOLERANCE</h1>

-

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="PROLOGUE">TOLERANCE<br>

-<span class="smaller">PROLOGUE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley

-of Ignorance.</p>

-

-<p>To the north, to the south, to the west and

-to the east stretched the ridges of the Hills Everlasting.</p>

-

-<p>A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a

-deep worn gully.</p>

-

-<p>It came out of the Mountains of the Past.</p>

-

-<p>It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.</p>

-

-<p>It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the

-humble needs of the villagers.</p>

-

-<p>In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and

-had filled their casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy

-life.</p>

-

-<p>The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the

-shady corners where they had spent their day, pondering

-over the mysterious pages of an old book.</p>

-

-<p>They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who

-would have preferred to play with the pretty pebbles,

-brought down from distant lands.</p>

-

-<p>Often these words were not very clear.</p>

-

-<p>But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten

-race. Hence they were holy.</p>

-

-<p>For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was

-venerable. And those who dared to gainsay the wisdom of

-the fathers were shunned by all decent people.</p>

-

-<p>And so they kept their peace.</p>

-

-<p>Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused

-the common share of the products of the garden?</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span></p>

-

-<p>Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the

-narrow streets of the little town, vague stories of men and

-women who had dared to ask questions.</p>

-

-<p>They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.</p>

-

-<p>A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range

-that hid the sun.</p>

-

-<p>Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.</p>

-

-<p>The years came and the years went by.</p>

-

-<p>Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Out of the darkness crept a man.</p>

-

-<p>The nails of his hands were torn.</p>

-

-<p>His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of

-long marches.</p>

-

-<p>He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.</p>

-

-<p>Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he

-was carried to a cot.</p>

-

-<p>In the morning throughout the village it was known:

-“He has come back.”</p>

-

-<p>The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They

-had always known that this was to be the end.</p>

-

-<p>Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll

-away from the foot of the mountains.</p>

-

-<p>And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their

-heads and whispered burning words.</p>

-

-<p>They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law.

-Bitterly this man had sinned against the wishes of Those

-Who Knew.</p>

-

-<p>As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought

-to trial.</p>

-

-<p>They meant to be lenient.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span></p>

-

-<p>They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother.

-They recalled the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert

-these thirty years ago.</p>

-

-<p>The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be

-obeyed.</p>

-

-<p>The Men Who Knew would see to that.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the

-people stood around in respectful silence.</p>

-

-<p>He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders

-bade him sit down.</p>

-

-<p>He refused.</p>

-

-<p>They ordered him to be silent.</p>

-

-<p>But he spoke.</p>

-

-<p>Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought

-those who but a short time before had been his comrades.</p>

-

-<p>“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be

-rejoiced. I have come back from beyond the mountains.

-My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands have felt the touch

-of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.</p>

-

-<p>“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my

-father.</p>

-

-<p>“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north

-lay the ranges from the Beginning of Time.</p>

-

-<p>“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush

-and a hasty shaking of heads. When I insisted, I was taken

-to the rocks and shown the bleached bones of those who had

-dared to defy the Gods.</p>

-

-<p>“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love

-those who are brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to

-me from their sacred books. The Law, they explained, had

-ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The Valley was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>

-ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the

-fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the

-mountains were of the Gods. What lay beyond was to

-remain unknown until the End of Time.</p>

-

-<p>“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as

-they have lied to you.</p>

-

-<p>“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as

-rich as any. And men and women of our own flesh and

-blood. And cities resplendent with the glories of a thousand

-years of labor.</p>

-

-<p>“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen

-the promise of a happier life. Follow me and I shall lead

-you thither. For the smile of the Gods is the same there

-as here and everywhere.”</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.</p>

-

-<p>“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege!

-A fit punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason.

-He dares to scoff at the Law as it was written down

-a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”</p>

-

-<p>And they took up heavy stones.</p>

-

-<p>And they killed him.</p>

-

-<p>And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that

-it might lie there as a warning to all who questioned the

-wisdom of the ancestors.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Then it happened a short time later that there was a

-great drought. The little Brook of Knowledge ran dry.

-The cattle died of thirst. The harvest perished in the fields,

-and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.</p>

-

-<p>The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>

-Everything would all come right in the end, they prophesied,

-for so it was writ in their most Holy Chapters.</p>

-

-<p>Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They

-were so very old.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Winter came.</p>

-

-<p>The village was deserted.</p>

-

-<p>More than half of the populace died from sheer want.</p>

-

-<p>The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the

-mountains.</p>

-

-<p>But the Law said “No!”</p>

-

-<p>And the Law must be obeyed.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>One night there was a rebellion.</p>

-

-<p>Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into

-silence.</p>

-

-<p>Feebly the Old Men protested.</p>

-

-<p>They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot.

-They bewailed the ingratitude of their children, but when

-the last wagon pulled out of the village, they stopped the

-driver and forced him to take them along.</p>

-

-<p>The flight into the unknown had begun.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It

-was no easy task to discover the road he had mapped out.</p>

-

-<p>Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the

-first cairn was found.</p>

-

-<p>From there on the trip was less difficult.</p>

-

-<p>The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the

-woods and amidst the endless wilderness of rock.</p>

-

-<p>By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span></p>

-

-<p>Silently the people looked at each other.</p>

-

-<p>“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and

-the Old Men were wrong....</p>

-

-<p>“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....</p>

-

-<p>“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the

-Old Men sit in our carts and chant their ancient lays....</p>

-

-<p>“He saved us, and we slew him....</p>

-

-<p>“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we

-could have known at the time....”</p>

-

-<p>Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and

-they drove their cows and their goats into the pastures and

-they built themselves houses and laid out their fields and

-they lived happily for a long time afterwards.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave

-pioneer in the fine new edifice which had been erected as a

-home for the Wise Old Men.</p>

-

-<p>A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley,

-but when the spot was reached where his body ought to

-have been, it was no longer there.</p>

-

-<p>A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.</p>

-

-<p>A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail

-(now a magnificent highway). It gave the name of the man

-who had first defied the dark terror of the unknown, that his

-people might be guided into a new freedom.</p>

-

-<p>And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some

-day (so we hope) it shall no longer be.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became

-ruler of the eastern half of the Roman Empire.</p>

-

-<p>This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the

-much disputed railroad junction of the late war) had no

-use for “book-learnin’.” It was by his orders that the

-ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally suppressed.

-And it was he who closed the doors of the only

-Egyptian temple that had continued to do business centuries

-after the valley of the Nile had been invaded by the monks

-of the new Christian faith.</p>

-

-<p>This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far

-from the first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men

-could remember, the spot had been dedicated to the worship

-of Isis and for some curious reason, the Goddess had survived

-where all her African and Greek and Roman rivals had

-miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth century, the

-island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of

-picture writing was still understood and where a small number

-of priests continued to practice a trade which had been

-forgotten in every other part of the land of Cheops.</p>

-

-<p>And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His

-Imperial Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were

-declared state property, the statues and images were sent to

-the museum of Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters

-were thrown into jail. And when the last of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>

-them had died from hunger and neglect, the age-old trade of

-making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.</p>

-

-<p>All this was a great pity.</p>

-

-<p>If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little

-less thorough and had saved just a few of those old picture

-experts in a sort of literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made

-the task of the historian a great deal easier. For while

-(owing to the genius of Champollion) we can once more spell

-out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly

-difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their

-message to posterity.</p>

-

-<p>And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient

-world.</p>

-

-<p>What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left

-us whole brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind

-when they exclaimed piously, “Who shall ever be able to

-understand the counsel of the Gods in Heaven?” How did

-they feel towards those divine spirits which they invoked

-so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret,

-whose commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of

-their most holy city? Why were they at once the most

-tolerant of men, encouraging their priests to study the high

-heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and at the same

-time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous punishments

-upon those of their neighbors who had committed some

-breach of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?</p>

-

-<p>Until recently we did not know.</p>

-

-<p>We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand

-of Sinai and deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And

-everywhere in Mesopotamia and Egypt we did our best to

-find the key that should unlock the front door of this mysterious

-store-house of wisdom.</p>

-

-<p>And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>

-that the back door had been wide open all the time and that

-we could enter the premises at will.</p>

-

-<p>But that convenient little gate was not situated in the

-neighborhood of Akkad or Memphis.</p>

-

-<p>It stood in the very heart of the jungle.</p>

-

-<p>And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan

-temple.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in

-contact with what they were pleased to call “wild men” or

-“savages.”</p>

-

-<p>The meeting had not been a pleasant one.</p>

-

-<p>The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the

-white men, had welcomed them with a salvo of spears and

-arrows.</p>

-

-<p>The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.</p>

-

-<p>After that there had been little chance for a quiet and

-unprejudiced exchange of ideas.</p>

-

-<p>The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing

-loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees

-and deserved all that was coming to him.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean

-Jacques Rousseau began to contemplate the world through

-a haze of sentimental tears. His contemporaries, much

-impressed by his ideas, pulled out their handkerchiefs and

-joined in the weeping.</p>

-

-<p>The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite

-subjects. In their hands (although they had never seen

-one) he became the unfortunate victim of circumstances and

-the true representative of all those manifold virtues of which

-the human race had been deprived by three thousand years

-of a corrupt system of civilization.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span></p>

-

-<p>Today, at least in this particular field of investigation,

-we know better.</p>

-

-<p>We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated

-animals, from which as a rule he is not so very far

-removed.</p>

-

-<p>In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble.

-The savage, but for the grace of God, is our own self under

-much less favorable conditions. By examining him carefully

-we begin to understand the early society of the valley of the

-Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia and by knowing

-him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange

-hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin

-crust of manners and customs which our own species of

-mammal has acquired during the last five thousand years.</p>

-

-<p>This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On

-the other hand a realization of the conditions from which we

-have escaped, together with an appreciation of the many

-things that have actually been accomplished, can only tend

-to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything

-it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among

-our distant cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.</p>

-

-<p>This is not a handbook of anthropology.</p>

-

-<p>It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>But tolerance is a very broad theme.</p>

-

-<p>The temptation to wander will be great. And once we

-leave the beaten track, Heaven alone knows where we will

-land.</p>

-

-<p>I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state

-exactly and specifically what I mean by tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the

-human race and all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It

-therefore behooves an humble student to go to that authority<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>

-which is accepted as final by the largest number of those who

-speak the language in which this book is written.</p>

-

-<p>I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.</p>

-

-<p>There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written:

-“Tolerance (from Latin <i>tolerare</i>—to endure):—The allowance

-of freedom of action or judgment to other people, the

-patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from one’s

-own or the generally received course or view.”</p>

-

-<p>There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this

-book I shall let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.</p>

-

-<p>And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a

-definite policy, I shall return to my savages and tell you what

-I have been able to discover about tolerance in the earliest

-forms of society of which we have any record.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>It is still generally believed that primitive society was very

-simple, that primitive language consisted of a few simple

-grunts and that primitive man possessed a degree of liberty

-which was lost only when the world became “complex.”</p>

-

-<p>The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers

-and missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central

-Africa and the Polar regions and Polynesia show the

-exact opposite. Primitive society was exceedingly complicated,

-primitive language had more forms and tenses and

-declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was

-a slave not only to the present, but also to the past and to

-the future; in short, an abject and miserable creature who

-lived in fear and died in terror.</p>

-

-<p>This may seem far removed from the popular picture of

-brave red-skins merrily roaming the prairies in search of

-buffaloes and scalps, but it is a little nearer to the truth.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span></p>

-

-<p>And how could it have been otherwise?</p>

-

-<p>I have read the stories of many miracles.</p>

-

-<p>But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival

-of man.</p>

-

-<p>How and in what manner and why the most defenseless

-of all mammals should have been able to maintain himself

-against microbes and mastodons and ice and heat and eventually

-become master of all creation, is something I shall not

-try to solve in the present chapter.</p>

-

-<p>One thing, however, is certain. He never could have

-accomplished all this alone.</p>

-

-<p>In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality

-in the composite character of the tribe.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single

-idea, an all-overpowering desire to survive.</p>

-

-<p>This was very difficult.</p>

-

-<p>And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to

-the one supreme demand—to live.</p>

-

-<p>The individual counted for nothing, the community at

-large counted for everything, and the tribe became a roaming

-fortress which lived by itself and for itself and of itself

-and found safety only in exclusiveness.</p>

-

-<p>But the problem was even more complicated than at first

-appears. What I have just said held good only for the

-visible world, and the visible world in those early times was

-a negligible quantity compared to the realm of the invisible.</p>

-

-<p>In order to understand this fully we must remember that

-primitive people are different from ourselves. They are not

-familiar with the law of cause and effect.</p>

-

-<p>If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence,

-send for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>

-of the stuff as soon as he can. My ability to recognize cause

-and effect tells me that the poison ivy has caused the rash,

-that the doctor will be able to give me something that will

-make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine will

-prevent a repetition of this painful experience.</p>

-

-<p>The true savage would act quite differently. He would

-not connect the rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in

-a world in which past, present and future are inextricably

-interwoven. All his dead leaders survive as Gods and his

-dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all continue to be

-invisible members of the clan and they accompany each

-individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him

-and sleep with him and they stand watch over his door. It

-is his business to keep them at arm’s length or gain their

-friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will be immediately

-punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all

-those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune

-which comes as the revenge of the Gods.</p>

-

-<p>He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the

-ordinary not to a primary cause but to interference on the

-part of an invisible spirit and when he notices a rash on his

-arms he does not say, “Damn that poison ivy!” but he mumbles,

-“I have offended a God. The God has punished me,”

-and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion

-to counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm”

-that shall prove stronger than the charm which the irate

-God (and not the ivy) has thrown upon him.</p>

-

-<p>As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he

-lets it grow right there where it has always grown. And if

-perchance the white man comes with a can of kerosene and

-burns the shrub down, he will curse him for his trouble.</p>

-

-<p>It follows that a society in which everything happens as<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>

-the result of the direct personal interference on the part of

-an invisible being must depend for its continued existence

-upon a strict obedience of such laws as seem to appease the

-wrath of the Gods.</p>

-

-<p>Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed.

-His ancestors had devised it and had bestowed it upon him

-and it was his most sacred duty to keep that law intact and

-hand it over in its present and perfect form to his own

-children.</p>

-

-<p>This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in

-progress, in growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.</p>

-

-<p>But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year

-before last, and it is typical of all low forms of society that

-the people see no possible reason why they should improve

-what (to them) is the best of all possible worlds because

-they never knew any other.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent

-a change in the laws and in the established forms of society?</p>

-

-<p>The answer is simple.</p>

-

-<p>By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to

-regard common police regulations as an expression of the

-divine will, or in plain language, by a rigid system of intolerance.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant

-of human beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten

-to add that given the circumstances under which he lived, it

-was his duty to be intolerant. Had he allowed any one to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>

-interfere with the thousand and one rules upon which his

-tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind,

-the life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and

-that would have been the greatest of all possible crimes.</p>

-

-<p>But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group

-of people, relatively limited in number, protect a most complex

-system of verbal regulations when we in our own day

-with millions of soldiers and thousands of policemen find it

-difficult to enforce a few plain laws?</p>

-

-<p>Again the answer is simple.</p>

-

-<p>The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He

-accomplished by shrewd calculation what he could not do by

-force.</p>

-

-<p>He invented the idea of “taboo.”</p>

-

-<p>Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression.

-Such things are rarely the product of a sudden inspiration.

-They are the result of long years of growth and experiment.

-Let that be as it may, the wild men of Africa and Polynesia

-devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a great deal

-of trouble.</p>

-

-<p>The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know

-more or less what it means. Our own world is full of taboos,

-things we simply must not do or say, like mentioning our

-latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving our spoon in

-our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very

-serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette

-and rarely interfere with our own personal happiness.</p>

-

-<p>To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the

-utmost importance.</p>

-

-<p>It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had

-been “set apart” from the rest of the world, that they (to

-use the Hebrew equivalent) were “holy” and must not be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>

-discussed or touched on pain of instant death and everlasting

-torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who

-dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the

-priesthood was created to maintain the taboo is a problem

-which had not yet been solved. As tradition is much older

-than religion, it seems more than likely that taboos existed

-long before the world had heard of sorcerers and witch-doctors.

-But as soon as the latter had made their appearance,

-they became the staunch supporters of the idea of

-taboo and used it with such great virtuosity that the taboo

-became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric ages.</p>

-

-<p>When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt,

-those countries were still in a state of development in which

-the taboo counted for a great deal. Not a taboo in the crude

-and primitive form as it was afterwards found in New

-Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of

-conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we

-are all familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.</p>

-

-<p>Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely

-unknown in those lands at that early age.</p>

-

-<p>What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely

-indifference caused by ignorance.</p>

-

-<p>But we can find no trace of any willingness (however

-vague) on the part of either kings or priests to allow others

-to exercise that “freedom of action or judgment” or of that

-“patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from the

-generally received cause or view” which has become the ideal

-of our modern age.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span></p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not

-interested in prehistoric history or what is commonly called

-“ancient history.”</p>

-

-<p>The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the

-discovery of the individual.</p>

-

-<p>And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations,

-belongs to the Greeks.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE GREEKS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in

-a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able

-to provide our world in less than two centuries

-with the complete framework for all our present day experiments

-in politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry,

-physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which

-has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries

-and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during

-his career, has tried to give an answer.</p>

-

-<p>Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the

-chemical and physical and astronomical and medical faculties,

-have always looked with ill-concealed contempt upon all

-efforts to discover what one might call “the laws of history.”

-What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and shooting

-stars seems to have no business within the realm of human

-beings.</p>

-

-<p>I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that

-there must be such laws. It is true that thus far we have

-not discovered many of them. But then again we have never

-looked very hard. We have been so busy accumulating facts

-that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them and

-evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of

-wisdom which might be of some real value to our particular

-variety of mammal.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span></p>

-

-<p>It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this

-new field of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s

-book, offer the following historical axiom.</p>

-

-<p>According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life

-(animate existence as differentiated from inanimate existence)

-began when for once all physical and chemical elements

-were present in the ideal proportion necessary for the creation

-of the first living cell.</p>

-

-<p>Translate this into terms of history and you get this:</p>

-

-<p>“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a

-very high form of civilization is only possible when all the

-racial, climatic, economic and political conditions are present

-in an ideal proportion or in as nearly an ideal condition and

-proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”</p>

-

-<p>Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.</p>

-

-<p>A race with the brain development of a cave-man would

-not prosper, even in Paradise.</p>

-

-<p>Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would

-not have composed fugues, Praxiteles would not have made

-statues if they had been born in an igloo near Upernivik

-and had been obliged to spend most of their waking hours

-watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.</p>

-

-<p>Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology

-if he had been obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill

-in Lancashire. And Alexander Graham Bell would not have

-invented the telephone if he had been a conscripted serf and

-had lived in a remote village of the Romanow domains.</p>

-

-<p>In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was

-found, the climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants

-were not very robust or enterprising, and political and economic

-conditions were decidedly bad. The same held true

-of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>

-moved into the valley between the Tigris and the

-Euphrates were strong and vigorous people. There was

-nothing the matter with the climate. But the political and

-economic environment remained far from good.</p>

-

-<p>In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture

-was backward and there was little commerce outside

-of the caravan route which passed through the country from

-Africa to Asia and vice versa. Furthermore, in Palestine

-politics were entirely dominated by the priests of the temple

-of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the development

-of any sort of individual enterprise.</p>

-

-<p>In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The

-race was strong and trade conditions were good. The country,

-however, suffered from a badly balanced economic system.

-A small class of ship owners had been able to get hold

-of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial

-monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had

-at an early date fallen into the hands of the very rich.

-The poor, deprived of all excuse for the practice of a reasonable

-amount of industry, grew callous and indifferent

-and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and

-went to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her

-rulers.</p>

-

-<p>In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization,

-certain of the necessary elements for success were always

-lacking.</p>

-

-<p>When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur,

-in Greece in the fifth century before our era, it lasted only

-a very short time, and strange to say, even then it did not

-take place in the mother country but in the colonies across

-the Aegean Sea.</p>

-

-<p>In another book I have given a description of those famous

-island-bridges which connected the mainland of Asia with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>

-Europe and across which the traders from Egypt and Babylonia

-and Crete since time immemorial had traveled to

-Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise

-and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be

-found on the western coast of Asia Minor in a strip of land

-known as Ionia.</p>

-

-<p>A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow

-bit of mountainous territory, ninety miles long and only a

-few miles wide, had been conquered by Greek tribes from the

-mainland who there had founded a number of colonial towns

-of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus were the

-best known, and it was along those cities that at last the

-conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion

-that civilization reached a point which has sometimes

-been equaled but never has been surpassed.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the

-most active and enterprising elements from among a dozen

-different nations.</p>

-

-<p>In the second place, there was a great deal of general

-wealth derived from the carrying trade between the old and

-the new world, between Europe and Asia.</p>

-

-<p>In the third place, the form of government under which

-the colonists lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance

-to develop their talents to the very best of their ability.</p>

-

-<p>If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that

-in countries devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate

-does not matter much. Ships can be built and goods can be

-unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does not get so cold

-that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are flooded,

-the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily

-weather reports.</p>

-

-<p>But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>

-favorable to the development of an intellectual class. Before

-the existence of books and libraries, learning was handed

-down from man to man by word of mouth and the town-pump

-was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest of

-universities.</p>

-

-<p>In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump

-for 350 out of every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors

-made such excellent use of their climatic advantages

-that they became the pioneers of all future scientific development.</p>

-

-<p>The first of whom we have any report, the real founder

-of modern science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in

-the sense that he had robbed a bank or murdered his family

-and had fled to Miletus from parts unknown. But no one

-knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian or a

-Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned

-racial experts) or a Semite?</p>

-

-<p>It shows what an international center this little old city

-at the mouth of the Meander was in those days. Its population

-(like that of New York today) consisted of so many

-different elements that people accepted their neighbors at

-their face value and did not look too closely into the family

-antecedents.</p>

-

-<p>Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook

-of philosophy, the speculations of Thales do not properly belong

-in these pages, except in so far as they tend to show the

-tolerance towards new ideas which prevailed among the

-Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town on a

-muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region,

-when the Jews were still captives in the land of Assyria and

-when northern and western Europe were naught but a howling

-wilderness.</p>

-

-<p>In order that we may understand how such a development<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>

-was possible, we must know something about the changes

-which had taken place since the days when Greek chieftains

-sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the plunder of

-the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were

-still the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization.

-They were over-grown children who regarded life as

-one long, glorified rough-house, full of excitement and wrestling

-matches and running races and all the many things

-which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not

-forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with

-bread and bananas.</p>

-

-<p>The relationship between these boisterous paladins and

-their Gods was as direct and as simple as their attitude towards

-the serious problems of every-day existence. For the

-inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the world of the

-Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this

-earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals.

-Exactly where and when and how man and his Gods

-had parted company was a more or less hazy point, never

-clearly established. Even then the friendship which those

-who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their

-subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no

-way been interrupted and it had remained flavored with

-those personal and intimate touches which gave the religion

-of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that

-Zeus was a very powerful and mighty potentate with a long

-beard who upon occasion would juggle so violently with his

-flashes of lightning and his thunderbolts that it seemed that

-the world was coming to an end. But as soon as they were

-a little older and were able to read the ancient sagas for

-themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those

-terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span>

-nursery and who now appeared in the light of a merry

-family-party—everlastingly playing practical jokes upon

-each other and taking such bitter sides in the political disputes

-of their mortal friends that every quarrel in Greece

-was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the

-denizens of the aether.</p>

-

-<p>Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings,

-Zeus remained a very great God, the mightiest of all rulers

-and a personage whom it was not safe to displease. But he

-was “reasonable” in that sense of the word which is so well

-understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was

-reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper

-way. And best of all, he had a sense of humor and did not

-take either himself or his world too seriously.</p>

-

-<p>This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a

-divine figure, but it offered certain very distinct advantages.

-Among the ancient Greeks there never was a hard and fast

-rule as to what people must hold true and what they must

-disregard as false. And because there was no “creed” in

-the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and

-a class of professional priests, ready to enforce them with

-the help of the secular gallows, the people in different parts

-of the country were able to reshape their religious ideas

-and ethical conceptions as best suited their own individual

-tastes.</p>

-

-<p>The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of

-Mount Olympus, showed of course much less respect for

-their august neighbors than did the Asopians who dwelled in

-a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The Athenians,

-feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own

-patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great

-liberties with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose

-valleys were far removed from the main trade routes, clung<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span>

-tenaciously to a simpler faith and frowned upon all levity in

-the serious matter of religion, and as for the inhabitants of

-Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound for the

-village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo

-(who was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the

-greatest of all divine spirits and deserved the special homage

-of those who came from afar and still had a couple of

-drachmas in their pocket.</p>

-

-<p>The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to

-set the Jews apart from all other nations, would never have

-been possible if the life of Judaea had not centered around

-a single city which was strong enough to destroy all rival

-places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an exclusive

-religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.</p>

-

-<p>In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither

-Athens nor Sparta ever succeeded in establishing itself as

-the recognized capital of a united Greek fatherland. Their

-efforts in this direction only led to long years of unprofitable

-civil war.</p>

-

-<p>No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists

-offered great scope for the development of a very

-independent spirit of thought.</p>

-

-<p>The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the

-Bible of the Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They

-were just books. They were never united into “The Book.”

-They told the adventures of certain wonderful heroes who

-were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of the generation

-then living. Incidentally they contained a certain

-amount of religious information because the Gods, without

-exception, had taken sides in the quarrel and had neglected

-all other business for the joy of watching the rarest prize-fight

-that had ever been staged within their domain.</p>

-

-<p>The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>

-directly or indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva

-or Apollo never even dawned upon the Greek mind. These

-were a fine piece of literature and made excellent reading

-during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they caused

-children to feel proud of their own race.</p>

-

-<p>And that was all.</p>

-

-<p>In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom,

-in a city filled with the pungent smell of ships from all

-the seven seas, rich with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the

-laughter of a well fed and contented populace, Thales was

-born. In such a city he worked and taught and in such a

-city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed

-greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors,

-remember that his ideas never penetrated beyond a very

-limited circle. The average Miletian may have heard the

-name of Thales, just as the average New Yorker has probably

-heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,

-and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who

-smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle and who wrote something

-about a man walking through a railroad train, about which

-there once was an article in a Sunday paper.</p>

-

-<p>That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the

-fiddle has got hold of a little spark of truth which eventually

-may upset (or at least greatly modify) the scientific conclusions

-of the last sixty centuries, is a matter of profound

-indifference to the millions of easy-going citizens whose

-interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict

-which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the

-law of gravity.</p>

-

-<p>The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the

-difficulty by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.),

-the founder of modern science.” And we can almost see the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>

-headlines in the “Miletus Gazette” saying, “Local graduate

-discovers secret of true science.”</p>

-

-<p>But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten

-track and struck out for himself, I could not possibly tell

-you. This much is certain, that he did not live in an intellectual

-vacuum, nor did he develop his wisdom out of his

-inner consciousness. In the seventh century before Christ,

-a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had

-already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical

-and physical and astronomical information at the

-disposal of those intelligent enough to make use of it.</p>

-

-<p>Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.</p>

-

-<p>Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before

-they dared to dump a couple of million tons of granite on

-top of a little burial chamber in the heart of a pyramid.</p>

-

-<p>The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously

-studied the behavior of the sun that they might predict the

-wet and dry seasons and give the peasants a calendar by

-which they could regulate their work on the farms.</p>

-

-<p>All these problems, however, had been solved by people

-who still regarded the forces of nature as the direct and

-personal expression of the will of certain invisible Gods who

-administered the seasons and the course of the planets and

-the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s cabinet

-manage the department of agriculture or the post-office

-or the treasury.</p>

-

-<p>Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well

-educated people of his day, he did not bother to discuss it in

-public. If the fruit vendors along the water front wanted

-to fall upon their faces whenever there was an eclipse of the

-sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual

-sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the

-last man to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>

-elementary knowledge of the behavior of heavenly bodies

-would have foretold that on the 25th of May of the year 585

-B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would find herself

-between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town

-of Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative

-darkness.</p>

-

-<p>Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians

-and the Lydians had been engaged in battle on the

-afternoon of this famous eclipse and had been obliged to

-cease killing each other for lack of sufficient light, he refused

-to believe that the Lydian deities (following a famous precedent

-established a few years previously during a certain

-battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle,

-and had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the

-victory might go to those whom they favored.</p>

-

-<p>For Thales had reached the point (and that was his

-great merit) where he dared to regard all nature as the

-manifestation of one Eternal Will, subject to one Eternal

-Law and entirely beyond the personal influence of those

-divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own

-image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place

-just the same if there had been no more important engagement

-that particular afternoon than a dog fight in the

-streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast in Halicarnassus.</p>

-

-<p>Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific

-observations, he laid down one general and inevitable law

-for all creation and guessed (and to a certain extent guessed

-correctly) that the beginning of all things was to be found

-in the water which apparently surrounded the world on all

-sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning

-of time.</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales

-himself wrote. It is possible that he may have put his ideas<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>

-into concrete form (for the Greeks had already learned the

-alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not a page which can

-be directly attributed to him survives today. For our

-knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the

-scanty bits of information found in the books of some of

-his contemporaries. From these, however, we have learned

-that Thales in private life was a merchant with wide connections

-in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the

-way, was typical of most of the early philosophers. They

-were “lovers of wisdom.” But they never closed their eyes

-to the fact that the secret of life is found among the living

-and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite as dangerous

-as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of

-the food.</p>

-

-<p>To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad

-and indifferent, was the supreme measure of all things.

-Wherefore they spent their leisure time patiently studying

-this strange creature as he was and not as they thought

-that he ought to be.</p>

-

-<p>This made it possible for them to remain on the most

-amicable terms with their fellow citizens and allowed them to

-wield a much greater power than if they had undertaken to

-show their neighbors a short cut to the Millennium.</p>

-

-<p>They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.</p>

-

-<p>But by their own example they managed to show how a

-true understanding of the forces of nature must inevitably

-lead to that inner peace of the soul upon which all true happiness

-depends and having in this way gained the good-will

-of their community they were given full liberty to study and

-explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture

-within those domains which were popularly believed to be

-the exclusive property of the Gods. And as one of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>

-pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the long years

-of his useful career.</p>

-

-<p>Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks

-apart, although he had examined each little piece separately,

-and had openly questioned all sorts of things which the

-majority of the people since the beginning of time had held

-to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully in

-his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his

-heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.</p>

-

-<p>And once he had shown the way, there were many others

-eager to follow.</p>

-

-<p>There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who

-left Asia Minor for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent

-the following years as a “sophist” or private tutor in different

-Greek cities. He specialized in astronomy and among

-other things he taught that the sun was not a heavenly

-chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a

-red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger

-than the whole of Greece.</p>

-

-<p>When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from

-Heaven killed him for his audacity, he went a little further in

-his theories and stated boldly that the moon was covered with

-mountains and valleys and finally he even hinted at a certain

-“original matter” which was the beginning and the end of

-all things and which had existed from the very beginning of

-time.</p>

-

-<p>But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover,

-he trod upon dangerous ground, for he discussed

-something with which people were familiar. The sun and

-the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek did not

-care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But

-when the professor began to argue that all things had gradually

-grown and developed out of a vague substance called<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>

-“original matter”—then he went decidedly too far. Such an

-assertion was in flat contradiction with the story of Deucalion

-and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated

-the world by turning bits of stone into men and women.

-To deny the truth of a most solemn tale which all little

-Greek boys and girls had been taught in their early childhood

-was most dangerous to the safety of established society.

-It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their elders

-and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the

-subject of a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian

-Parents’ League.</p>

-

-<p>During the monarchy and the early days of the republic,

-the rulers of the city would have been more than able to

-protect a teacher of unpopular doctrines from the foolish

-hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants. But Athens by this

-time had become a full-fledged democracy and the freedom

-of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore,

-Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority

-of the people, was himself a favorite pupil of the great

-astronomer, and the legal prosecution of Anaxagoras was

-welcomed as an excellent political move against the city’s

-old dictator.</p>

-

-<p>A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader

-in one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a

-law passed which demanded “the immediate prosecution of

-all those who disbelieved in the established religion or held

-theories of their own about certain divine things.” Under

-this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison. Finally,

-however, the better elements in the city prevailed.

-Anaxagoras was allowed to go free after the payment of a

-small fine and move to Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he

-died, full of years and honor, in the year 428 B.C.</p>

-

-<p>His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>

-suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras

-was forced to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind

-and two centuries later they came to the notice of one Aristotle,

-who in turn used them as a basis for many of his own

-scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a thousand

-years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid

-Muhammad ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës),

-the great Arab physician who in turn popularized them

-among the students of the Moorish universities of southern

-Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote

-them down in a number of books. These were duly carried

-across the Pyrenees until they reached the universities of

-Paris and Boulogne. There they were translated into Latin

-and French and English and so thoroughly were they accepted

-by the people of western and northern Europe that

-today they have become an integral part of every primer of

-science and are considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.</p>

-

-<p>But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation

-after his trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach

-doctrines which were at variance with popular belief. And

-then, during the last years of the fifth century, a second

-case took place.</p>

-

-<p>The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering

-teacher who hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian

-colony in northern Greece. This spot already enjoyed a

-doubtful reputation as the birthplace of Democritus, the

-original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the

-law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the

-largest number of people the greatest amount of happiness

-obtainable with the smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore

-was regarded as a good deal of a radical and a fellow

-who should be under constant police supervision.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span></p>

-

-<p>Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to

-Athens and there, after many years of study, proclaimed

-that man was the measure of all things, that life was too

-short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry into the doubtful

-existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought to be

-used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and

-more thoroughly enjoyable.</p>

-

-<p>This statement, of course, went to the very root of the

-matter and it was bound to shock the faithful more than

-anything that had ever been written or said. Furthermore

-it was made during a very serious crisis in the war between

-Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of

-defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most

-evidently it was not the right moment to incur the wrath

-of the Gods by an inquiry into the scope of their supernatural

-powers. Protagoras was accused of atheism, of

-“godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the

-courts.</p>

-

-<p>Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and

-Protagoras, although a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.</p>

-

-<p>He fled.</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked,

-and it seems that he was drowned, for we never hear of him

-again.</p>

-

-<p>As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence,

-he was really not a philosopher at all but a young writer

-who harbored a personal grudge against the Gods because

-they had once failed to give him their support in a law-suit.

-He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance that finally

-his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts

-of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just

-then enjoyed great popularity among the people of northern<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>

-Hellas. For this unseemly conduct he was condemned

-to death. But ere the sentence was executed, the poor devil

-was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth,

-continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully

-died of his own bad temper.</p>

-

-<p>And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the

-most famous case of Greek intolerance of which we possess

-any record, the judicial murder of Socrates.</p>

-

-<p>When it is sometimes stated that the world has not

-changed at all and that the Athenians were no more broadminded

-than the people of later times, the name of Socrates

-is dragged into the debate as a terrible example of Greek

-bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of the

-case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of

-this brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct

-tribute to the spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed

-throughout ancient Greece in the fifth century before our

-era.</p>

-

-<p>For Socrates, at a time when the common people still

-firmly believed in a large number of divine beings, made himself

-the prophet of an only God. And although the Athenians

-may not always have known what he meant when he

-spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration

-which told him what to do and say), they were fully

-aware of his very unorthodox attitude towards those ideals

-which most of his neighbors continued to hold in holy veneration

-and his utter lack of respect for the established order

-of things. In the end, however, politics killed the old man

-and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the

-crowd) had really very little to do with the outcome of the

-trial.</p>

-

-<p>Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children

-and little money. The boy therefore had never been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>

-able to pay for a regular college course, for most of the

-philosophers were practical fellows and often charged as

-much as two thousand dollars for a single course of instruction.

-Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study

-of useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere

-waste of time and energy. Provided a person cultivated his

-conscience, so he reasoned, he could well do without geometry

-and a knowledge of the true nature of comets and planets

-was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.</p>

-

-<p>All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken

-nose and the shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with

-the loafers on the corner of the street and his nights listening

-to the harangues of his wife (who was obliged to provide

-for a large family by taking in washing, as her husband

-regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible

-detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and

-expeditions and ex-member of the Athenian senate was

-chosen among all the many teachers of his day to suffer for

-his opinions.</p>

-

-<p>In order to understand how this happened, we must know

-something about the politics of Athens in the days when

-Socrates rendered his painful but highly useful service to

-the cause of human intelligence and progress.</p>

-

-<p>All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was

-executed) Socrates tried to show his neighbors that they

-were wasting their opportunities; that they were living hollow

-and shallow lives; that they devoted entirely too much

-time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost invariably

-squandered the divine gifts with which a great

-and mysterious God had endowed them for the sake of a few

-hours of futile glory and self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly

-convinced was he of man’s high destiny that he broke

-through the bounds of all old philosophies and went even<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>

-farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught

-that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached

-that “man’s invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate

-measure of all things and that it is not the Gods but

-we ourselves who shape our destiny.”</p>

-

-<p>The speech which Socrates made before the judges who

-were to decide his fate (there were five hundred of them to

-be precise and they had been so carefully chosen by his

-political enemies that some of them could actually read and

-write) was one of the most delightful bits of commonsense

-ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.</p>

-

-<p>“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has

-the right to tell another man what he should believe or to

-deprive him of the right to think as he pleases,” and further,

-“Provided that man remain on good terms with his own conscience,

-he can well do without the approbation of his friends,

-without money, without a family or even a home. But as no

-one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough

-examination of all the pros and cons of every problem,

-people must be given a chance to discuss all questions with

-complete freedom and without interference on the part of the

-authorities.”</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong

-statement at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian

-war there had been a bitter struggle in Athens between

-the rich and the poor, between capital and labor. Socrates

-was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and evil in both

-systems of government and who tried to find a compromise

-which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course,

-had made him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but

-thus far they had been too evenly balanced to take action

-against him.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span></p>

-

-<p>When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent

-Democrats gained complete control of the state and

-expelled the aristocrats, Socrates was a doomed man.</p>

-

-<p>His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the

-city before it was too late and this would have been a very

-wise thing to do.</p>

-

-<p>For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During

-the greater part of a century he had been a sort of

-vocal “columnist,” a terribly clever busy-body who had made

-it his hobby to expose the shams and the intellectual swindles

-of those who regarded themselves as the pillars of Athenian

-society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His

-name had become a household word throughout eastern

-Greece. When he said something funny in the morning, by

-night the whole town had heard about it. Plays had been

-written about him and when he was finally arrested and

-taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of

-Attica who was not thoroughly familiar with all the details

-of his career.</p>

-

-<p>Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like

-that honorable grain merchant who could neither read nor

-write but who knew all about the will of the Gods and therefore

-was loudest in his accusations) were undoubtedly convinced

-that they were rendering a great service to the community

-by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of

-the so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could

-only lead to laziness and crime and discontent among the

-slaves.</p>

-

-<p>It is rather amusing to remember that even under those

-circumstances, Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous

-virtuosity that a majority of the jury was all for letting

-him go free and suggested that he might be pardoned if only

-he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of debating,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span>

-of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave

-his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not

-bother them with his eternal doubts.</p>

-

-<p>But Socrates would not hear of it.</p>

-

-<p>“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience,

-as long as the still small voice within me, bids me go forth

-and show men the true road to reason, I shall continue to

-buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and I shall say

-what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”</p>

-

-<p>After that, there was no other course but to condemn the

-prisoner to death.</p>

-

-<p>Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy

-ship which made an annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet

-returned from its voyage and until then, the Athenian law

-did not allow any executions. The whole of this month the

-old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system

-of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity

-to escape, he refused to go. He had lived his life and had

-done his duty. He was tired and ready to depart. Until

-the hour of his execution he continued to talk with his

-friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right

-and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things

-of the spirit rather than those of the material world.</p>

-

-<p>Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon

-his couch and settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.</p>

-

-<p>For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this

-terrible outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove

-themselves from the scene of their former activities.</p>

-

-<p>But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed

-their former occupation as public teachers, and within a

-dozen years after the death of the old philosopher, his ideas

-were more popular than ever.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span></p>

-

-<p>The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult

-period. It was five years since the struggle for the leadership

-of the Greek peninsula had ended with the defeat of

-Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans. This had

-been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to

-say that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never

-wrote a line worth remembering or contributed a single idea

-to the sum total of human knowledge (with the exception of

-certain military tactics which survive in our modern game

-of football) thought that they had accomplished their task

-when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the

-Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the

-Athenian mind had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A

-decade after the end of the Peloponnesian war, the old harbor

-of the Piraeus was once more filled with ships from all parts

-of the world and Athenian admirals were again fighting at

-the head of the allied Greek navies.</p>

-

-<p>Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated

-by his own contemporaries, had made the city the

-intellectual capital of the world—the Paris of the fourth

-century before the birth of Christ. Whosoever in Rome or

-Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a fashionable

-education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit

-a school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.</p>

-

-<p>For this ancient world, which we modern people find so

-difficult to understand properly, took the problem of existence

-seriously.</p>

-

-<p>Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of

-pagan civilization, the impression has gained ground that the

-average Roman or Greek was a highly immoral person who

-paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous Gods and for the

-rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners, drinking

-vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>

-pretty prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a

-change he went to war and slaughtered innocent Germans

-and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of shedding

-blood.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there

-were a great many merchants and war contractors who had

-accumulated their millions without much regard for those

-ethical principles which Socrates had so well defined before

-his judges. Because these people were very wealthy, they

-had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that

-they enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded

-as commendable representatives of the civilization of their

-day.</p>

-

-<p>We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions

-as one of the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and

-her colonies. We look at the ruins of the forty room palace

-which the old profiteer built out of his ill-gotten gains. And

-we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”</p>

-

-<p>Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who

-was one of the house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find

-ourselves in the company of a spirit as lofty and as exalted

-as ever lived.</p>

-

-<p>I know that the making of generalizations about our

-neighbors and about other nations is one of the most popular

-of indoor sports, but let us not forget that Epictetus, the

-philosopher, was quite as truly a representative of the time

-in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the imperial flunkey, and

-that the desire for holiness was as great twenty centuries

-ago as it is today.</p>

-

-<p>Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from

-that which is practiced today. It was the product of an

-essentially European brain and had nothing to do with the

-Orient. But the “barbarians” who established it as their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>

-ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were

-our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy

-of life which was highly successful if we agree that

-a clear conscience and a simple, straightforward life, together

-with good health and a moderate but sufficient income,

-are the best guarantee for general happiness and contentment.

-The future of the soul did not interest these people

-overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special

-sort of mammal which by reason of its intellectual application

-had risen high above the other creatures which crawled

-upon this earth. If they frequently referred to the Gods,

-they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons” or

-“aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name,

-but Zeus in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical

-a value as x or y in the problems of Euclid and meant just

-as much or as little.</p>

-

-<p>Life it was which interested those men and next to living,

-art.</p>

-

-<p>Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied

-and following the method of reasoning which Socrates had

-originated and made popular, they achieved some very remarkable

-results.</p>

-

-<p>That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world

-they went to absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more

-than human. But Plato is the only one among all the teachers

-of antiquity who from sheer love for a perfect world

-ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.</p>

-

-<p>This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved

-disciple of Socrates and became his literary executor.</p>

-

-<p>In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates

-had ever said or thought into a series of dialogues which

-might be truthfully called the Socratian Gospels.</p>

-

-<p>When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>

-of the more obscure points in his master’s doctrines and

-explained them in a series of brilliant essays. And finally

-he conducted a number of lecture courses which spread the

-Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond the

-confines of Attica.</p>

-

-<p>In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and

-unselfish devotion that we might almost compare him to St.

-Paul. But whereas St. Paul had led a most adventurous and

-dangerous existence, ever traveling from north to south and

-from west to east that he might bring the Good Tidings to

-all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged

-from his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to

-come to him.</p>

-

-<p>Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent

-wealth allowed him to do this.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through

-his mother could trace his descent to no one less than Solon.

-Then as soon as he came of age he inherited a fortune more

-than sufficient for his simple needs.</p>

-

-<p>And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly

-traveled to the Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to

-follow a few of the lectures in the Platonic University.</p>

-

-<p>For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young

-men of his time. He served in the army, but without any

-particular interest in military affairs. He went in for outdoor

-sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly good runner,

-but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium.

-Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal

-of his time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and

-paid a short visit to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather

-Solon had done before him. After that, however, he

-returned home for good and during fifty consecutive years

-he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners of a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>

-pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the

-river Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the

-Academy.</p>

-

-<p>He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually

-he switched over to politics and in this field he laid the

-foundations for our modern school of government. He was

-at heart a confirmed optimist and believed in a steady process

-of human evolution. The life of man, so he taught, rises

-slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful

-bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from

-beautiful institutions to beautiful ideas.</p>

-

-<p>This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to

-lay down certain definite principles upon which his perfect

-state was to be founded, his zeal for righteousness and his

-desire for justice were so great that they made him deaf and

-blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which has

-ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection

-by the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very

-strange commonwealth and reflected and continues to reflect

-with great nicety the prejudices of those retired colonels

-who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private income,

-who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound

-distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place”

-and want to have a share of those special privileges which

-by right should go to the members of the “upper class.”</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect

-among the medieval scholars of western Europe and in their

-hands the famous Republic became a most formidable

-weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato

-had reached his conclusions from very different premises than

-those which were popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span></p>

-

-<p>For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man

-in the Christian sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors

-he had always regarded with deep contempt as ill-mannered

-rustics from distant Macedonia. He had been deeply

-mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in the

-chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and

-sat and sat and sat in his little olive grove and became more

-and more exasperated by the foolish quarrels of the little

-city-states of his native land, and witnessed the utter failure

-of the old democratic ideal, he grew convinced that some sort

-of religion was necessary for the average citizen, or his

-imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state

-of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative

-body of his model community should establish a definite

-rule of conduct for all citizens and should force both freemen

-and slaves to obey these regulations on pain of death or

-exile or imprisonment. This sounded like an absolute negation

-of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that liberty of

-conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only

-a short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant

-to be.</p>

-

-<p>The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to

-find. Whereas Socrates had been a man among men, Plato

-was afraid of life and escaped from an unpleasant and ugly

-world into the realm of his own day dreams. He knew of

-course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas

-ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states,

-whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of

-centralization had begun and soon the entire Greek peninsula

-was to be incorporated into that vast Macedonian Empire

-which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the

-banks of the Indus River.</p>

-

-<p>But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>

-the unruly democracies of the old peninsula, the country

-had produced the greatest of those many benefactors who

-have put the rest of the world under eternal obligation to

-the now defunct race of the Greeks.</p>

-

-<p>I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from

-Stagira, the man who in his day and age knew everything

-that was to be known and added so much to the sum total

-of human knowledge that his books became an intellectual

-quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans

-and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without

-exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.</p>

-

-<p>At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village

-in Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures

-in Plato’s university. After his graduation he lectured in

-a number of places until the year 336 when he returned to

-Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden near the

-temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum

-and soon attracted pupils from all over the world.</p>

-

-<p>Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor

-of increasing the number of academies within their walls.

-The town was at last beginning to lose its old commercial

-importance and all of her more energetic citizens were moving

-to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other cities of the

-south and the west. Those who remained behind were either

-too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound

-remnant of those old, turbulent masses of free citizens,

-who had been at once the glory and the ruin of

-the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded the

-“goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a

-dozen years after his death, his most notorious pupil came

-back and openly taught still more outrageous doctrines

-about the beginning of the world and the limited ability of

-the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>

-mumbled dark threats against the man who was making

-their city a by-word for free thinking and unbelief.</p>

-

-<p>If they had had their own way, they would have forced

-him to leave their country. But they wisely kept these opinions

-to themselves. For this short-sighted, stoutish gentleman,

-famous for his good taste in books and in clothes,

-was no negligible quantity in the political life of that day,

-no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town

-by a couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the

-son of a Macedonian court-physician and he had been

-brought up with the royal princes. And furthermore, as

-soon as he had finished his studies, he had been appointed

-tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been

-the daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed

-the friendship and the protection of the most powerful

-ruler the world had ever seen and the regent who

-administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s

-absence on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm

-should befall one who had been the boon companion of his

-imperial master.</p>

-

-<p>No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death

-reached Athens than Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered

-what had happened to Socrates and felt no desire

-to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had carefully avoided

-mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his distaste

-for the democratic form of government and his lack of

-belief in the sovereign abilities of the common people were

-known to all. And when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst

-of fury, expelled the Macedonian garrison, Aristotle moved

-across the Euboean Sound and went to live in Calchis, where

-he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the

-Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.</p>

-

-<p>At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>

-positive grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as

-usual in that nation of amateur orators, his case was inextricably

-mixed up with politics and his unpopularity was

-due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few local ward-bosses,

-rather than to the expression of any startlingly new

-heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance

-of Zeus.</p>

-

-<p>Nor does it matter very much.</p>

-

-<p>The days of the small independent republics were numbered.</p>

-

-<p>Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European

-heritage of Alexander and Greece became one of their many

-provinces.</p>

-

-<p>Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the

-Romans in most matters were even more tolerant than the

-Greeks of the Golden Age had been and they permitted

-their subjects to think as they pleased, provided they did

-not question certain principles of political expediency upon

-which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had,

-since time immemorial, been safely builded.</p>

-

-<p>All the same there existed a subtle difference between

-the ideals which animated the contemporaries of Cicero and

-those which had been held sacred by the followers of such

-a man as Pericles. The old leaders of Greek thought had

-based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions which

-they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and

-meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without

-the preliminary study. They were merely indifferent, and

-were proud of the fact. They were interested in practical

-things. They were men of action and had a deep-seated

-contempt for words.</p>

-

-<p>If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath

-an old olive tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>

-government or the influence of the moon upon the tides,

-they were more than welcome to do so.</p>

-

-<p>If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some

-practical use, then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise,

-together with singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture

-and science, this business of philosophizing had better

-be left to the Greeks and to the other foreigners whom

-Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world with

-those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention

-to the administration of their ever increasing domains; they

-would drill the necessary companies of foreign infantry and

-cavalry to protect their outlying provinces; they would

-survey the roads that were to connect Spain with Bulgaria;

-and generally they would devote their energies to the keeping

-of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and

-nations.</p>

-

-<p>Let us give honor where honor is due.</p>

-

-<p>The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected

-a structure which under one form or another has survived

-until our own time, and that in itself is no mean accomplishment.

-As long as the necessary taxes were paid and a

-certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct

-laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes

-enjoyed a very large degree of liberty. They could believe

-or disbelieve whatever they pleased. They could worship

-one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples full of Gods. It

-made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to

-profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling

-empire were forever reminded that the “pax Romana”

-depended for its success upon a liberal application

-of the principle of “live and let live.” They must under<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>

-no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or

-with the strangers within their gates. And if perchance

-they thought that their Gods had been insulted, they must

-not rush to the magistrate for relief. “For,” as the Emperor

-Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if the

-Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they

-can surely take care of themselves.”</p>

-

-<p>And with such scant words of consolation, all similar

-cases were instantly dismissed and people were requested

-to keep their private opinions out of the courts.</p>

-

-<p>If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle

-down among the Colossians, they had a right to bring their

-own Gods with them and erect a temple of their own in the

-town of Colossae. But if the Colossians should for similar

-reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they must

-be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal

-freedom of worship.</p>

-

-<p>It has often been argued that the Romans could permit

-themselves the luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude

-because they felt an equal contempt for both the Colossians

-and the Cappadocians and all the other savage tribes

-who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been true.

-I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand

-years, a form of almost complete religious tolerance was

-strictly maintained within the greater part of civilized and

-semi-civilized Europe, Asia and Africa and that the Romans

-developed a technique of statecraft which produced a maximum

-of practical results together with a minimum of friction.</p>

-

-<p>To many people it seemed that the millennium had been

-achieved and that this condition of mutual forbearance

-would last forever.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span></p>

-

-<p>But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built

-upon force.</p>

-

-<p>Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had

-destroyed herself.</p>

-

-<p>The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand

-battlefields.</p>

-

-<p>For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent

-citizens had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of

-administering a colonial empire that stretched from the

-Irish Sea to the Caspian.</p>

-

-<p>At last the reaction set in.</p>

-

-<p>Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted

-by the impossible task of a single city ruling an entire world.</p>

-

-<p>And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people

-grew tired of life and lost the zest for living.</p>

-

-<p>They had come to own all the country-houses, all the

-town-houses, all the yachts and all the stage-coaches they

-could ever hope to use.</p>

-

-<p>They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the

-world.</p>

-

-<p>They had eaten everything, they had seen everything,

-they had heard everything.</p>

-

-<p>They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been

-everywhere, they had made love to all the women from

-Barcelona to Thebes. All the books that had ever been

-written were in their libraries. The best pictures that had

-ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest musicians

-of the entire world had entertained them at their

-meals. And, as children, they had been instructed by the

-best professors and pedagogues who had taught them everything

-there was to be taught. As a result, all food and

-drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull, all women

-had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>

-into a burden which a good many people were willing to

-drop at the first respectable opportunity.</p>

-

-<p>There remained only one consolation, the contemplation

-of the Unknown and the Invisible.</p>

-

-<p>The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent

-Roman any longer took stock in the silly nursery

-rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.</p>

-

-<p>There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans

-and the Stoics and the Cynics, all of whom preached charity

-and self-denial and the virtues of an unselfish and useful life.</p>

-

-<p>But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in

-the books of Zeno and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch,

-which were to be found in every cornerstore library.</p>

-

-<p>But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found

-to lack the necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans

-began to clamor for a certain amount of “emotion” with

-their spiritual meals.</p>

-

-<p>Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they

-really were, if we associate the idea of religion with a desire

-to lead useful and noble lives) could only appeal to a very

-small number of people, and almost all of those belonged

-to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of

-private instruction at the hands of competent Greek

-teachers.</p>

-

-<p>To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies

-meant less than nothing at all. They too had reached a

-point of development at which a good deal of the ancient

-mythology seemed the childish invention of rude and credulous

-ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as

-their so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence

-of any and all personal Gods.</p>

-

-<p>Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do

-under such circumstances. They paid a formal and outward<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span>

-tribute of respect to the official Gods of the Republic and

-then betook themselves for real comfort and happiness to

-one of the many mystery religions which during the last

-two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the

-ancient city on the banks of the Tiber.</p>

-

-<p>The word “mystery” which I have used before was of

-Greek origin. It originally meant a gathering of “initiated

-people”—of men and women whose “mouth had been shut”

-against the betrayal of those most holy secrets which only

-the true members of the mystery were supposed to know

-and which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a

-college fraternity or the cabalistic incantations of the Independent

-Order of Sea-Mice.</p>

-

-<p>During the first century of our era, however, a mystery

-was nothing more nor less than a special form of worship,

-a denomination, a church. If a Greek or a Roman (if you

-will pardon a little juggling with time) had left the Presbyterian

-church for the Christian Science church, he would

-have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.”

-For the word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of

-the Lord,” is of comparatively recent origin and was not

-known in those days.</p>

-

-<p>If you happen to be especially interested in the subject

-and wish to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a

-New York paper next Saturday. Almost any paper will

-do. Therein you will find four or five columns of announcements

-about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported from

-India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other

-countries and all of them offering special promises of health

-and riches and salvation everlasting.</p>

-

-<p>Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis,

-was just as full of imported and domestic religions. The

-international nature of the city had made this unavoidable.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span>

-From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern Asia

-Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians

-revered as the mother of the Gods and whose worship was

-connected with such unseemly outbreaks of emotional hilarity

-that the Roman police had repeatedly been forced to close

-the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic

-laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged

-public drunkenness and many other things that

-were even worse.</p>

-

-<p>Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed

-half a dozen strange divinities and the names of

-Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become as familiar to Roman

-ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.</p>

-

-<p>As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto

-the world a primary system of abstract truth and a practical

-code of conduct, based upon virtue, they now supplied

-the people of foreign lands who insisted upon images and

-incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and Dionysus

-and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above

-suspicion as far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless

-enjoying immense popularity.</p>

-

-<p>The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had

-frequented the shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar

-with their great God Baal (the arch-enemy of Jehovah)

-and with Astarte his wife, that strange creature to

-whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all

-his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very

-heart of Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized

-as the official protector of the city of Carthage

-during her long struggle for the supremacy of the Mediterranean

-and who finally after the destruction of all her

-temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the

-shape of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span></p>

-

-<p>But the most important of all, because highly popular

-among the soldiers of the army, was a deity whose broken

-images can still be found underneath every rubbish pile that

-marks the Roman frontier from the mouth of the Rhine to

-the source of the Tigris.</p>

-

-<p>This was the great God Mithras.</p>

-

-<p>Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of

-Light and Air and Truth, and he had been worshiped in

-the plains of the Caspian lowlands when our first ancestors

-took possession of those wonderful grazing fields and made

-ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards became

-known as Europe. To them he had been the giver

-of all good things and they believed that the rulers of this

-earth exercised their power only by the grace of his mighty

-will. Hence, as a token of his divine favor, he sometimes

-bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit of that

-celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded,

-and although he is gone and his name has been forgotten,

-the kindly saints of the Middle Ages, with their halo of

-light, remind us of an ancient tradition which was started

-thousands of years before the Church was ever dreamed of.</p>

-

-<p>But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly

-long time, it has been very difficult to reconstruct

-his life with any degree of accuracy. There was a good

-reason for this. The early Christian missionaries abhorred

-the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more bitter than

-that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their

-heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their

-most serious rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible

-to remove everything that might possibly remind people of

-his existence. In this task they succeeded so well that all

-Mithras temples have disappeared and that not a scrap of

-written evidence remains about a religion which for more<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>

-than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as

-Methodism or Presbyterianism is in the United States of

-today.</p>

-

-<p>However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a

-careful perusal of certain ruins which could not be entirely

-destroyed in the days before the invention of dynamite, we

-have been able to overcome this initial handicap and now

-possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting God

-and the things for which he stood.</p>

-

-<p>Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously

-born of a rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle,

-several nearby shepherds came to worship him and make

-him happy with their gifts.</p>

-

-<p>As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange

-adventures. Many of these remind us closely of the deeds

-which had made Hercules such a popular hero with the

-children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was often

-very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had

-engaged in a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten

-him. But he was so generous in his victory, that the sun

-and he had become like brothers, and were often mistaken

-for each other.</p>

-

-<p>When the God of all evil had sent a drought which

-threatened to kill the race of man, Mithras had struck a

-rock with his arrow, and behold! plentiful water had gushed

-forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman (for that

-was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to

-achieve his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had

-heard of it, had warned one man, had told him to build a

-big boat and load it with his relatives and his flocks and in

-this way had saved the human race from destruction. Until

-finally, having done all he could to save the world from the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>

-consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven

-to rule the just and righteous for all time.</p>

-

-<p>Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged

-to go through an elaborate form of initiation and were

-forced to eat a ceremonious meal of bread and wine in memory

-of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and his friend

-the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism

-in a font of water and do many other things which

-have no special interest to us, as that form of religion

-was completely exterminated more than fifteen hundred

-years ago.</p>

-

-<p>Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon

-a footing of absolute equality. Together they prayed before

-the same candle-lit altars. Together they chanted the

-same holy hymns and together they took part in the festivities

-which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of

-December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore

-they abstained from all work on the first day of the week,

-which even today is called Sun-day in honor of the great

-God. And finally when they died, they were laid away in

-patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good

-should enter into their just reward and the wicked should

-be cast into the fire everlasting.</p>

-

-<p>The success of these different mysteries, the widespread

-influence of Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points

-to a condition far removed from religious indifference. Indeed

-the early centuries of the empire were a period of restless

-search after something that should satisfy the emotional

-needs of the masses.</p>

-

-<p>But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened.

-A small vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga,

-the starting point for the overland route to Europe. Among<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span>

-the passengers were two men not overburdened with luggage.</p>

-

-<p>Their names were Paul and Barnabas.</p>

-

-<p>They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport

-and was well versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.</p>

-

-<p>It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.</p>

-

-<p>Christianity had set out to conquer the world.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The rapid conquest of the western world by the

-Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the

-Christian ideas must have been of divine origin.

-It is not my business to debate this point, but I would

-suggest that the villainous conditions under which the majority

-of the Romans were forced to live had as much to

-do with the success of the earliest missionaries as the sound

-common sense of their message.</p>

-

-<p>Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the

-world of the soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers

-and scientists, fortunate folks who lived in delightful

-and enlightened ease on the slopes of the Lateran

-Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or

-somewhere along the bay of Naples.</p>

-

-<p>But they were only part of the story.</p>

-

-<p>Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little

-enough evidence of that plentiful prosperity which made

-the poets rave about the Millennium and inspired orators

-to compare Octavian to Jupiter.</p>

-

-<p>There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and

-reeking tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom

-life was merely an uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat

-and pain. To those men and women, the wonderful tale

-of a simple carpenter in a little village beyond the sea, who

-had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own hands,

-who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>

-had been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant

-something very real and tangible. Yes, they had all of

-them heard of Mithras and Isis and Astarte. But these

-Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and thousands

-of years ago and what people knew about them they only

-knew by hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds

-and thousands of years ago.</p>

-

-<p>Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the

-anointed, as the Greek missionaries called him, had been

-on this earth only a short time ago. Many a man then

-alive might have known him, might have listened to him,

-if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign

-of the Emperor Tiberius.</p>

-

-<p>And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit

-peddler from the next street, who in a little dark garden

-on the Appian Way had spoken with a certain Peter, a

-fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had actually

-been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon

-when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the

-soldiers of the Roman governor.</p>

-

-<p>We should remember this when we try to understand the

-sudden popular appeal of this new faith.</p>

-

-<p>It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling

-of intimacy and near-by-ness which gave Christianity

-such a tremendous advantage over all other creeds. That

-and the love which Jesus had so incessantly expressed for

-the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which

-radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had

-put it into the exact terms used by his followers was of very

-slight importance. The slaves had ears to hear and they

-understood. And trembling before the high promise of a

-glorious future, they for the first time in their lives beheld

-the rays of a new hope.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span></p>

-

-<p>At last the words had been spoken that were to set them

-free.</p>

-

-<p>No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing

-in the sight of the great of this world.</p>

-

-<p>On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a

-loving Father.</p>

-

-<p>They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.</p>

-

-<p>They were to partake of joys withheld from many of

-those proud masters who even then dwelled behind the high

-walls of their Samnian villas.</p>

-

-<p>For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity

-was the first concrete religious system which gave

-the average man a chance.</p>

-

-<p>Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience

-of the soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and

-I have tried to explain how, in a world full of the dry-rot

-of slavery, the good tidings must spread with the speed

-and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except

-upon rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual

-adventures of private citizens, be they free or in bondage.

-When these humble creatures have been neatly organized

-into nations, guilds, churches, armies, brotherhoods and federations;

-when they have begun to obey a single directing

-head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay

-taxes and can be forced into armies for the purpose of

-national conquest, then at last they begin to attract the

-attention of our chroniclers and are given serious attention.

-Hence we know a great deal about the early Church, but

-exceedingly little about the people who were the true founders

-of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early

-development of Christianity is one of the most interesting

-episodes in all history.</p>

-

-<p>The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span>

-ancient empire was really a combination of two conflicting

-interests. On the one side it stood forth as the champion

-of those all-embracing ideals of love and charity which the

-Master himself had taught. But on the other side it found

-itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism

-which since the beginning of time had set the

-compatriots of Jesus apart from the rest of the world.</p>

-

-<p>In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with

-Judaean intolerance and as a result it established a reign

-of terror over the minds of men which was as efficient as it

-was illogical.</p>

-

-<p>To understand how this could have happened, we must

-go back once more to the days of Paul and to the first fifty

-years after the death of Christ, and we must firmly grasp

-the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform movement

-within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely

-nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened

-the rulers of the Jewish state and no one else.</p>

-

-<p>The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when

-Jesus lived had understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally

-they had feared the ultimate consequences of an agitation

-which boldly threatened to question a spiritual monopoly

-which was based upon nothing more substantial than

-brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they

-had been forced to act in a spirit of panic and had sent

-their enemy to the gallows before the Roman authorities

-had had time to intervene and deprive them of their victim.</p>

-

-<p>What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible

-to say. He was killed long before he was able to organize

-his disciples into a special sect nor did he leave a single

-word of writing from which his followers could conclude

-what he wanted them to do.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span></p>

-

-<p>In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in

-disguise.</p>

-

-<p>The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection

-of ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free

-to follow the spirit of their master’s words rather than the

-letter of his law. Had they been bound by a book, they

-would very likely have devoted all their energies to a theological

-discussion upon the ever enticing subject of commas

-and semi-colons.</p>

-

-<p>In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional

-scholars could have possibly shown the slightest interest in

-the new faith and Christianity would have gone the way of

-so many other sects which begin with elaborate written programs

-and end when the police are called upon to throw the

-haggling theologians into the street.</p>

-

-<p>At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize

-what tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman

-Empire, it is a matter of surprise that the authorities took

-practically no steps to quell a movement which was fully as

-dangerous to the safety of the state as an invasion by Huns

-or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this eastern

-prophet had caused great excitement among their house

-slaves, that the women were forever telling each other about

-the imminent reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that

-quite a number of old men had solemnly predicted the impending

-destruction of this world by a ball of fire.</p>

-

-<p>But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had

-gone into hysterics about some new religious hero. Most

-likely it would not be the last time, either. Meanwhile the

-police would see to it that these poor, frenzied fanatics did

-not disturb the peace of the realm.</p>

-

-<p>And that was that.</p>

-

-<p>The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>

-The followers of the new mystery went about their business

-in a most exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow

-the government. At first, several slaves had expected

-that the common fatherhood of God and the common brotherhood

-of man would imply a cessation of the old relation between

-master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had

-hastened to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was

-an invisible and intangible kingdom of the soul and that

-people on this earth had better take things as they found

-them, in expectation of the final reward which awaited them

-in Heaven.</p>

-

-<p>Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of

-matrimony as established by the harsh laws of Rome, had

-rushed to the conclusion that Christianity was synonymous

-with emancipation and full equality of rights between men

-and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a

-number of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to

-refrain from all those extremes which would make their

-church suspect in the eyes of the more conservative pagans

-and had persuaded them to continue in that state of semi-slavery

-which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and

-Eve had been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most

-commendable respect for the law and as far as the authorities

-were concerned, the Christian missionaries could therefore

-come and go at will and preach as best suited their own

-individual tastes and preferences.</p>

-

-<p>But as has happened so often in history, the masses had

-shown themselves less tolerant than their rulers. Just because

-people are poor it does not necessarily follow that

-they are high-minded citizens who could be prosperous and

-happy if their conscience would only permit them to make

-those compromises which are held to be necessary for the

-accumulation of wealth.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span></p>

-

-<p>And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by

-free meals and free prize-fights, was no exception to this

-rule. At first it derived a great deal of rough pleasure from

-those sober-faced groups of men and women who with rapt

-attention listened to the weird stories about a God who had

-ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal,

-and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for

-the hoodlums who pelted their gatherings with stones and

-dirt.</p>

-

-<p>The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a

-detached view of this new development.</p>

-

-<p>The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted

-of certain solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified

-occasions and paid for in cash. This money went toward

-the support of the church officers. When thousands of people

-began to desert the old shrines and went to another

-church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests

-were faced by a very serious reduction in their salary. This

-of course did not please them at all, and soon they were loud

-in their abuse of the godless heretics who turned their backs

-upon the Gods of their fathers and burned incense to the

-memory of a foreign prophet.</p>

-

-<p>But there was another class of people in the city who had

-even better reason to hate the Christians. Those were the

-fakirs, who as Indian Yogis and Pooughies and hierophants

-of the great and only mysteries of Isis and Ishtar and

-Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and

-easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle

-classes. If the Christians had set up a rival establishment

-and had charged a handsome price for their own particular

-revelations, the guild of spook-doctors and palmists and necromancers

-would have had no reason for complaint. Business

-was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>

-mind if a bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a

-plague upon their silly notions!—refused to take

-any reward. Yea, they even gave away what they had, fed

-the hungry and shared their own roof with the homeless.

-And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and

-they never could have done this unless they were possessed

-of certain hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no

-one thus far had been able to discover.</p>

-

-<p>Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers.

-It was the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of

-thousands of disinherited peasants from all parts of the

-empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious laws that rule

-the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those who

-behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who

-for no apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and

-restraint. The hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink

-and (occasionally) will pay for one is a fine neighbor and a

-good fellow. But the man who holds himself aloof and refuses

-to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum, who

-does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being

-dragged through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a

-spoil-sport and an enemy of the community at large.</p>

-

-<p>When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that

-part of Rome inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was

-set for the first organized attacks upon the Christians.</p>

-

-<p>At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of

-drunken conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire

-that he might get rid of the slums and rebuild the city according

-to his own plans. The crowd, however, knew better.

-It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who were forever

-telling each other about the happy day when large balls

-of fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the

-wicked would go up in flames.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span></p>

-

-<p>Once this story had been successfully started, others followed

-in rapid succession. One old woman had heard the

-Christians talk with the dead. Another knew that they stole

-little children and cut their throats and smeared their blood

-upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course, no one

-had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous

-practices, but that was only because they were so terribly

-clever and had bribed the police. But now at last they had

-been caught red-handed and they would be made to suffer

-for their vile deeds.</p>

-

-<p>Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this

-occasion, we know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems,

-were among the victims for thereafter their names are never

-heard again.</p>

-

-<p>That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished

-nothing, it is needless to state. The noble dignity with which

-the martyrs accepted their fate was the best possible propaganda

-for the new ideas and for every Christian who perished,

-there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager to take his

-place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act

-of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year

-68), the Christians returned to their old haunts and everything

-was as it had been before.</p>

-

-<p>By this time the Roman authorities were making a great

-discovery. They began to suspect that a Christian was not

-exactly the same thing as a Jew.</p>

-

-<p>We can hardly blame them for having committed this

-error. The historical researches of the last hundred years

-have made it increasingly clear that the Synagogue was the

-clearing-house through which the new faith was passed on

-to the rest of the world.</p>

-

-<p>Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had

-always been most careful in observing the ancient laws of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>

-fathers and that he had addressed himself almost exclusively

-to Jewish audiences. Once, and then only for a short time,

-had he left his native country, but the task which he had

-set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his fellow-Jews.

-Nor was there anything in what he had ever said

-which could have given the average Roman the impression

-that there was a deliberate difference between Christianity

-and Judaism.</p>

-

-<p>What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had

-clearly seen the terrible abuses which had entered the church

-of his fathers. He had loudly and sometimes successfully

-protested against them. But he had fought his battles for

-reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned upon

-him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some

-one had mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he

-would have rejected the idea as preposterous. But like

-many a reformer before his day and after, he had gradually

-been forced into a position where compromise was no longer

-possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a

-fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of

-reform, who were deeply perplexed when they suddenly

-found themselves at the head of a brand new party “outside”

-the organization to which they belonged, whereas they were

-merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”</p>

-

-<p>For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity

-(to use the name long before it had been coined) was the

-religion of a small Jewish sect which had a few adherents

-in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and Galilee and

-which had never been heard of outside of the province of

-Syria.</p>

-

-<p>It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen

-of Jewish descent, who had first recognized the possibilities

-of the new doctrine as a religion for all the world. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>

-story of his suffering tells us how bitterly the Jewish Christians

-had been opposed to the idea of a universal religion

-instead of a purely national denomination, membership to

-which should only be open to people of their own race.

-They had hated the man who dared preach salvation to

-Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly that on his last visit

-to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered the fate

-of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the

-fury of his enraged compatriots.</p>

-

-<p>But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman

-soldiers to protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal

-town from where he could be shipped to Rome for that

-famous trial which never took place.</p>

-

-<p>A few years after his death, that which he had so often

-feared during his lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold

-actually occurred.</p>

-

-<p>Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place

-of the temple of Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor

-of Jupiter. The name of the city was changed to Aelia

-Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of the Roman

-province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they

-were either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed

-to live within several miles of the ruins on pain of death.</p>

-

-<p>It was the final destruction of their holy city which had

-been so disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several

-centuries afterwards, in the little villages of the Judaean

-hinterland colonies might have been found of strange people

-who called themselves “poor men” and who waited with great

-patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end of the

-world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the

-old Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time

-to time we hear them mentioned in books written during the

-fifth and sixth centuries. Far away from civilization, they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>

-developed certain strange doctrines of their own in which

-hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After

-the seventh century however we no longer find any trace of

-these so-called Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious

-Mohammedans had killed them all. And, anyway, if they

-had managed to exist a few hundred years longer, they

-would not have been able to avert the inevitable.</p>

-

-<p>Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into

-one large political union, had made the world ready for the

-idea of a universal religion. Christianity, because it was

-both simple and practical and full of a direct appeal, was

-predestined to succeed where Judaism and Mithraism and

-all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail.

-But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of

-certain rather unpleasant characteristics which only too

-clearly betrayed its origin.</p>

-

-<p>The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas

-from Asia to Europe had carried a message of hope and

-mercy.</p>

-

-<p>But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.</p>

-

-<p>He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.</p>

-

-<p>But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.</p>

-

-<p>And his name was Religious Intolerance.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The early church was a very simple organization.

-As soon as it became apparent that the end of the

-world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was

-not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and

-that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of

-tears for a good long time, the need was felt for a more or

-less definite form of government.</p>

-

-<p>Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews)

-had come together in the synagogue. When the rift had

-occurred between the Jews and the Gentiles, the latter had

-betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house and if none

-could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the

-curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone

-quarry.</p>

-

-<p>At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath,

-but when bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the

-Gentile Christians increased, the latter began to drop the

-habit of keeping the Sabbath-day and preferred to meet on

-Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had taken place.</p>

-

-<p>These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to

-the popular as well as to the emotional character of the entire

-movement. There were no set speeches or sermons. There

-were no preachers. Both men and women, whenever they felt

-themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in meeting

-to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes,

-if we are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>

-brethren, “speaking with tongues,” had filled the heart of

-the great apostle with apprehension for the future. For

-most of them were simple folk without much education. No

-one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations

-but very often they got so excited that they raved like maniacs

-and while a church may survive persecution, it is helpless

-against ridicule. Hence the efforts of Paul and Peter and

-their successors to bring some semblance of order into this

-chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.</p>

-

-<p>At first these efforts met with little success. A regular

-program seemed in direct contradiction to the democratic

-nature of the Christian faith. In the end, however, practical

-considerations supervened and the meetings became subject

-to a definite ritual.</p>

-

-<p>They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to

-placate the Jewish Christians who might be present). Then

-the congregation united in a song of praise of more recent

-composition for the benefit of the Roman and the Greek

-worshipers.</p>

-

-<p>The only prescribed form of oration was the famous

-prayer in which Jesus had summed up his entire philosophy

-of life. The preaching, however, for several centuries remained

-entirely spontaneous and the sermons were delivered

-only by those who felt that they had something to say.</p>

-

-<p>But when the number of those gatherings increased, when

-the police, forever on the guard against secret societies,

-began to make inquiries, it was necessary that certain men

-be elected to represent the Christians in their dealings with

-the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken highly of

-the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities

-which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny

-vessels which were tossed upon a turbulent sea and were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>

-very much in need of a clever pilot if they were to survive

-the fury of the angry ocean.</p>

-

-<p>And so the faithful came together once more and elected

-deacons and deaconesses, pious men and women who were

-the “servants” of the community, who took care of the sick

-and the poor (an object of great concern to the early Christians)

-and who looked after the property of the community

-and took care of all the small daily chores.</p>

-

-<p>Still later when the church continued to grow in membership

-and the business of administration had become too intricate

-for mere amateurs, it was entrusted to a small group

-of “elders.” These were known by their Greek name of

-Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”</p>

-

-<p>After a number of years, when every village or city possessed

-a Christian church of its own, the need was felt for

-a common policy. Then an “overseer” (an Episkopos or

-Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire district and

-direct its dealings with the Roman government.</p>

-

-<p>Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the

-empire, and those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem

-and Carthage and Rome and Alexandria and Athens

-were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who were almost

-as important as the civil and military governors of their

-provinces.</p>

-

-<p>In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over

-that part of the world where Jesus had lived and suffered

-and died enjoyed the greatest respect. But after Jerusalem

-had been destroyed and the generation which had expected

-the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared

-from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in

-his ruined palace saw himself deprived of his former prestige.</p>

-

-<p>And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was

-taken by the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>

-civilized world and who guarded the sites where Peter and

-Paul, the great apostles of the west, had suffered their

-martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.</p>

-

-<p>This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa,

-the common expression of love and respect bestowed upon

-members of the clergy. In the course of centuries, the title

-of Papa however became almost exclusively associated in

-people’s minds with the particular “Father” who was the

-head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the

-Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of

-Rome, and not by any chance the Bishop of Constantinople

-or the Bishop of Carthage. This was an entirely normal

-development. When we read in our newspaper about “the

-President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.”

-We know that the head of our government is meant and

-not the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President

-of Harvard University or the President of the League

-of Nations.</p>

-

-<p>The first time the name occurred officially in a document

-was in the year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital

-of a highly successful empire and the power of the bishops

-was entirely overshadowed by that of the emperors. But

-during the next three hundred years, under the constant

-menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors

-of Caesar began to look for a new home that would

-offer them greater safety. This they found in a city in a

-different part of their domains. It was called Byzantium,

-after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said

-to have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated

-on the straits which separated Europe from Asia and

-dominating the trade route between the Black Sea and the

-Mediterranean, it controlled several important monopolies

-and was of such great commercial importance that already<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>

-Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this

-rich fortress.</p>

-

-<p>Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of

-Alexander and after having been for a short while part of

-Macedonia it had finally been incorporated into the Roman

-Empire.</p>

-

-<p>And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its

-Golden Horn filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it

-was chosen to become the center of the empire.</p>

-

-<p>The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and

-Vandals and Heaven knows what other sort of barbarians,

-felt that the end of the world had come when the imperial

-palaces stood empty for years at a time; when one department

-of state after another was removed to the shores of the

-Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were

-asked to obey laws made a thousand miles away.</p>

-

-<p>But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does

-not blow some one good. With the emperors gone, the

-bishops remained behind as the most important dignitaries

-of the town, the only visible and tangible successors to the

-glory of the imperial throne.</p>

-

-<p>And what excellent use they made of their new independence!

-They were shrewd politicians, for the prestige and

-the influence of their office had attracted the best brains of

-all Italy. They felt themselves to be the representatives of

-certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a hurry, but

-proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared

-to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of

-immediate necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and

-failed.</p>

-

-<p>But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose,

-who moved consistently and persistently towards one

-goal. In all they did and said and thought they were guided<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>

-by the desire to increase the glory of God and the strength

-and power of the organization which represented the divine

-will on earth.</p>

-

-<p>How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries

-was to show.</p>

-

-<p>While everything else perished in the deluge of savage

-tribes which hurled itself across the European continent,

-while the walls of the empire, one after the other, came

-crumbling down, while a thousand institutions as old as the

-plains of Babylon were swept away like so much useless

-rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of

-ages, but more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.</p>

-

-<p>The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought

-at a terrible cost.</p>

-

-<p>For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed

-to end in a palace. It had been started as a protest against

-a form of government in which the priest as the self-appointed

-intermediary between the deity and mankind had

-insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary

-human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less

-than a hundred years it developed into a new supertheocracy,

-compared to which the old Jewish state had been a

-mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and carefree

-citizens.</p>

-

-<p>And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable,

-as I shall now try to show you.</p>

-

-<p>Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to

-the Coliseum and within those wind-swept walls they are

-shown the hallowed ground where thousands of Christian

-martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.</p>

-

-<p>But while it is true that upon several occasions there were

-persecutions of the adherents of the new faith, these had

-very little to do with religious intolerance.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span></p>

-

-<p>They were purely political.</p>

-

-<p>The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed

-the greatest possible freedom.</p>

-

-<p>But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious

-objector, who bragged of his pacifism even when

-the country was threatened with foreign invasion and openly

-defied the laws of the land upon every suitable and unsuitable

-occasion, such a Christian was considered an enemy of

-the state and was treated as such.</p>

-

-<p>That he acted according to his most sacred convictions

-did not make the slightest impression upon the mind of the

-average police judge. And when he tried to explain the

-exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary looked puzzled

-and was entirely unable to follow him.</p>

-

-<p>A Roman police judge after all was only human. When

-he suddenly found himself called upon to try people who

-made an issue of what seemed to him a very trivial matter, he

-simply did not know what to do. Long experience had

-taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies.

-Besides he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing

-public servants to use “tact” in their dealings with the new

-sect. Hence he used tact and argued. But as the whole

-dispute boiled down to a question of principles, very little

-was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.</p>

-

-<p>In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of

-surrendering the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete

-and unqualified vindication of the supreme power of

-the state. But prison and torture meant nothing to people

-who firmly believed that life did not begin until after death

-and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to

-leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.</p>

-

-<p>The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out

-between the authorities and their Christian subjects was long<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span>

-and painful. We possess very few authentic figures upon

-the total number of victims. According to Origen, the famous

-church father of the third century, several of whose own

-relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one of the

-persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for

-their convictions could easily be enumerated.”</p>

-

-<p>On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early

-saints we find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of

-bloodshed that we begin to wonder how a religion exposed

-to these constant and murderous persecutions could ever

-have survived at all.</p>

-

-<p>No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call

-me a prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to

-myself and let my readers draw their own conclusions. By

-studying the lives of the Emperors Decius (249-251) and

-Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a fairly accurate

-opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance

-during the worst era of persecution.</p>

-

-<p>Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and

-liberal minded a ruler as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself

-unable to handle the problem of his Christian subjects successfully,

-they will derive some idea about the difficulties

-which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of the

-empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful

-to their oath of office or execute those of their relatives

-and neighbors who could not or would not obey those

-few and very simple ordinances upon which the imperial

-government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality

-towards their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily

-extending the sphere of their influence.</p>

-

-<p>Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the

-request of the Christian members of the Roman senate who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>

-complained that it hurt their feelings to gather in the

-shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the removal of the

-statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years

-had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators

-protested. This did very little good and only caused

-a number of them to be sent into exile.</p>

-

-<p>It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted

-patriot of great personal distinction, wrote his famous letter

-in which he tried to suggest a compromise.</p>

-

-<p>“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian

-neighbors not live in peace and harmony? We look up

-to the same stars, we are fellow-passengers on the same

-planet and dwell beneath the same sky. What matters it

-along which road each individual endeavors to find the ultimate

-truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there

-should be only one path leading to an answer.”</p>

-

-<p>He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the

-danger which threatened the old Roman tradition of a

-broadminded religious policy. Simultaneously with the removal

-of the statue of Victory in Rome a violent quarrel

-had broken out between two contending factions of the Christians

-who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute

-gave rise to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance

-to which the world had ever listened. Themistius the

-philosopher, who was the author, had remained faithful to

-the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor Valens took

-sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox

-Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of

-his true duty.</p>

-

-<p>“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can

-hope to exercise any authority. That is the domain of the

-virtues and especially that of the religious beliefs of individuals.

-Compulsion within that field causes hypocrisy and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>

-conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence it is much

-better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only by

-toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance

-is a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated

-his desire for a number of different religions. And

-God alone can judge the methods by which humanity aspires

-to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery. God

-delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him.

-He likes the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others,

-the Egyptians again others.”</p>

-

-<p>Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.</p>

-

-<p>The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was

-dead and all efforts to set back the clock of history were

-doomed beforehand. Life means progress, and progress

-means suffering. The old order of society was rapidly disintegrating.

-The army was a mutinous mob of foreign

-mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England

-and the other outlying districts had long since been surrendered

-to the barbarians.</p>

-

-<p>When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant

-young men who in centuries past had entered the service of

-the state found themselves deprived of all but one chance for

-advancement. That was a career in the Church. As Christian

-archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise the

-power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors,

-they could be certain of a fairly large public if they were

-willing to devote themselves exclusively to theological subjects.

-As Christian diplomats, they could be sure of rapid

-promotion if they were willing to represent the bishop of

-Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake

-the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous

-chieftain in the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And

-finally, as Christian financiers, they could hope to make fortunes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>

-administering those rapidly increasing estates which

-had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest

-landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.</p>

-

-<p>We have seen something of the same nature during the

-last five years. Up to the year 1914 the young men of

-Europe who were ambitious and did not depend upon manual

-labor for their support almost invariably entered the

-service of the state. They became officers of the different

-imperial and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher

-judicial positions, administered the finances or spent years

-in the colonies as governors or military commanders. They

-did not expect to grow very rich, but the social prestige of

-the offices which they held was very great and by the application

-of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty,

-they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable

-old age.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of

-the old feudal fabric of society. The lower classes took hold

-of the government. Some few among the former officials

-were too old to change the habits of a lifetime. They

-pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however,

-surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had

-been educated to regard business as a low profession, not

-worthy of their attention. Perhaps business was a low

-profession, but they had to choose between an office and the

-poor house. The number of people who will go hungry for

-the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And

-so within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most

-of the former officers and state officials doing the sort of work

-which they would not have touched ten years ago and doing

-it not unwillingly. Besides, as most of them belonged to

-families which for generations had been trained in executive

-work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>

-have found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new

-careers and are today a great deal happier and decidedly

-more prosperous than they had ever expected to be.</p>

-

-<p>What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries

-ago.</p>

-

-<p>It may not always have been easy for young men who

-traced their ancestry back to Hercules or to Romulus or to

-the heroes of the Trojan war to take orders from a simple

-cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple cleric who

-was the son of a slave had something to give which the young

-men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus

-and the heroes of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly.

-And therefore if they were both bright fellows (as they well

-may have been) they soon learned to appreciate the other

-fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully. For it is

-one of the other strange laws of history that the more things

-appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.</p>

-

-<p>Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that

-there shall be one small group of clever men and women who

-do the ruling and a much larger group of not-quite-so-bright

-men and women who shall do the obeying. The stakes for

-which these two groups play are at different periods known

-by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and

-Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance

-on the other. They have been called Empire and Church and

-Knighthood and Monarchy and Democracy and Slavery and

-Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious law which

-governs human development works the same in Moscow as

-it does in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound

-to neither time nor place. It has often manifested itself

-under strange forms and disguises. More than once it has

-worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its love for

-humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>

-about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath

-such pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and

-continues to hide the grim truth of that primeval law which

-insists that the first duty of man is to keep alive. People

-who resent the fact that they were born in a world of mammals

-are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us

-“materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they

-have always regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they

-are shocked to discover that it is a science which obeys the

-same iron rules which govern the rest of the universe. They

-might as well fight against the habits of parallel lines or the

-results of the tables of multiplication.</p>

-

-<p>Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.</p>

-

-<p>For then and only then can history some day be turned

-into something that shall have a practical value to the human

-race and cease to be the ally and confederate of those who

-profit by racial prejudice, tribal intolerance and the ignorance

-of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.</p>

-

-<p>And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him

-look for the proof in the chronicles of those centuries of

-which I was writing a few pages back.</p>

-

-<p>Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church

-during the first four centuries.</p>

-

-<p>Almost without exception he will find that they came from

-the ranks of the old Pagan society, that they had been

-trained in the schools of the Greek philosophers and had only

-drifted into the Church afterwards, when they had been

-obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were

-attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ

-with heart and soul. But the great majority changed its

-allegiance from a worldly master to a Heavenly ruler because

-the chances for advancement with the latter were

-infinitely greater.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span></p>

-

-<p>The Church from her side, always very wise and very

-understanding, did not look too closely into the motives

-which had impelled many of her new disciples to take this

-sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to be all

-things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical

-and worldly existence were given a chance to make good

-in the field of politics and economics. While those of a

-different temperament, who took their faith more emotionally,

-were offered every possible opportunity to escape from

-the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence upon

-the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of

-personal holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal

-happiness of their souls.</p>

-

-<p>In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life

-of devotion and contemplation.</p>

-

-<p>The Church during the first centuries of her existence

-had been merely a loose spiritual bond between humble folks

-who dwelled far away from the mansions of the mighty. But

-when the Church succeeded the empire as ruler of the world,

-and became a strong political organization with vast real-estate

-holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were

-less opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men

-and women began to harken back to the “good old days”

-when all true Christians had spent their waking hours in

-works of charity and in prayer. That they might again be

-happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been

-a natural development of the times.</p>

-

-<p>This movement for a monastic form of life which was to

-exercise such an enormous influence upon the political and

-economic development of the next thousand years and which

-was to give the Church a devoted group of very useful

-shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was

-of Oriental origin.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span></p>

-

-<p>This need not surprise us.</p>

-

-<p>In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the

-Mediterranean, civilization was very, very old and the human

-race was tired to the point of exhaustion. In Egypt alone,

-ten different and separate cycles of culture had succeeded

-each other since the first settlers had occupied the valley of

-the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between

-the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter

-futility of all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands

-of bygone temples and palaces. The younger races of

-Europe might accept Christianity as an eager promise of

-life, a constant appeal to their newly regained energy and

-enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious

-experiences in a different mood.</p>

-

-<p>To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from

-the curse of being alive. And in anticipation of the joyful

-hour of death, they escaped from the charnel-house of their

-own memories and they fled into the desert that they might

-be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore look

-upon the reality of existence.</p>

-

-<p>For some curious reason the business of reform always

-seems to have had a particular appeal to soldiers. They,

-more than all other people, have come into direct contact

-with the cruelty and the horrors of civilization. Furthermore

-they have learned that nothing can be accomplished

-without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors to

-fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the

-army of the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first

-gathered the spiritual stragglers into a single organization

-had been a private in the army of the Emperor Constantine.

-His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian. When

-he got through with his military service, he joined a small

-group of hermits who under the leadership of a certain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>

-Anthony, who hailed from his own country, had left the

-cities and were living peacefully among the jackals of the

-desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead to all sorts

-of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very

-regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend

-their days on the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a

-deserted grave (thereby giving cause for great mirth to

-the pagans and serious reason for grief to the true believers)

-Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a more

-practical basis and in this way he became the founder of

-the first religious order. From that day on (the middle of

-the fourth century) hermits living together in small groups

-obeyed one single commander who was known as the “superior

-general” and who in turn appointed the abbots who were

-responsible for the different monasteries which they held

-as so many fortresses of the Lord.</p>

-

-<p>Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been

-carried from Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop

-Athanasius and thousands of people had availed themselves

-of this opportunity to flee the world, its wickedness and its

-too insistent creditors.</p>

-

-<p>The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the

-people made it necessary that the original plans of the

-founder be slightly changed. Hunger and cold were not

-quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in the valley of

-the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was

-disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and

-squalor which seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental

-ideal of holiness.</p>

-

-<p>“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves,

-“is to become of those good works upon which the

-early Church has laid so much stress? Are the widows and

-the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>

-self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who

-live in the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away

-from everywhere?”</p>

-

-<p>The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification

-of the monastic institution along more reasonable lines, and

-credit for this innovation goes to a native of the town of

-Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His name was Benedict

-and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His parents

-had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had

-filled his Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the

-village of Subiaco in the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted

-ruins of an old country palace that once upon a time had

-belonged to the Emperor Nero.</p>

-

-<p>There he had lived for three years in complete solitude.

-Then the fame of his great virtue began to spread throughout

-the countryside and the number of those who wished to

-be near him was soon so great that he had enough recruits

-for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.</p>

-

-<p>He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the

-lawgiver of European monasticism. First of all he drew

-up a constitution. In every detail it showed the influence

-of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to obey

-his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those

-hours which they did not devote to prayer and meditation

-were to be filled with work in the fields. If they were too

-old for farm work, they were expected to teach the young

-how to become good Christians and useful citizens and so

-well did they acquit themselves of this task that the Benedictine

-monasteries for almost a thousand years had a

-monopoly of education and were allowed to train most of

-the young men of exceptional ability during the greater part

-of the Middle Ages.</p>

-

-<p>In return for their labors, the monks were decently<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>

-clothed, received a sufficient amount of eatable food and

-were given a bed upon which they could sleep the two or

-three hours of each day that were not devoted to work or

-to prayer.</p>

-

-<p>But most important, from an historical point of view, was

-the fact that the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely

-run away from this world and their obligations to prepare

-their souls for the hereafter. They became the servants of

-God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity

-by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore

-they were expected to take a direct and active part in

-spreading the power and the glory of the kingdom of God.</p>

-

-<p>The first elementary missionary work among the heathen

-of Europe had already been done. But lest the good accomplished

-by the apostles come to naught, the labors of the individual

-preachers must be followed up by the organized effort

-of permanent settlers and administrators. The monks

-now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book

-into the wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia

-and far-away Iceland. They plowed and they harvested and

-they preached and they taught school and brought unto

-those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a civilization

-which most people only knew by hearsay.</p>

-

-<p>In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the

-entire Church, make use of all the manifold forces of the

-human spirit.</p>

-

-<p>The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of

-an opportunity to distinguish himself as the dreamer who

-found happiness in the silence of the woods. There was

-no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste. And

-the result was such an increase of power that soon neither

-emperor nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>

-humble attention to the wishes of those of his subjects

-who confessed themselves the followers of the Christ.</p>

-

-<p>The way in which the final victory was gained is not

-without interest. For it shows that the triumph of Christianity

-was due to practical causes and was not (as is sometimes

-believed) the result of a sudden and overwhelming

-outburst of religious ardor.</p>

-

-<p>The last great persecution of the Christians took place

-under the Emperor Diocletian.</p>

-

-<p>Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of

-the worst among those many potentates who ruled Europe

-by the grace of their body-guards. But he suffered from

-a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who

-are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely

-ignorant upon the subject of elementary economics.</p>

-

-<p>He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly

-going to pieces. Having spent all his life in the army, he

-believed the weak point lay in the organization of the

-Roman military system, which entrusted the defenses of the

-outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had gradually

-lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics,

-selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom

-they were supposed to keep at a safe distance from the

-frontiers.</p>

-

-<p>It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable

-system. He therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating

-a new field army, composed of young and agile men who at

-a few weeks’ notice could be marched to any particular part

-of the empire that was threatened with an invasion.</p>

-

-<p>This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a

-military nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money

-had to be produced in the form of taxes by the people in the

-interior of the country. As was to be expected, they raised<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>

-a great hue and cry and claimed that they could not pay

-another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor

-answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his

-tax-gatherers certain powers thus far only possessed by the

-hangman. But all to no avail. For the subjects, rather

-than work at a regular trade which assured them a deficit at

-the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house and home and

-family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos.

-His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures

-and he solved the difficulty by a decree which shows how

-completely the old Roman Republic had degenerated into

-an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of his pen he made all

-government offices and all forms of handicraft and commerce

-hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers

-were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or

-not. The sons of bakers must themselves become bakers,

-although they might have greater aptitude for music or

-pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed to a

-life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they

-rowed across the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although

-technically they continued to be freemen, were constrained

-to live and die on the same piece of soil on which

-they had been born and were henceforth nothing but a very

-ordinary variety of slaves.</p>

-

-<p>To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence

-in his own ability either could or would tolerate the continued

-existence of a relatively small number of people who only

-obeyed such parts of his regulations and edicts as pleased

-them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for his

-harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember

-that he was fighting with his back against the wall and that

-he had good cause to suspect the loyalty of several million

-of his subjects who profited by the measures he had taken<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>

-for their protection but refused to carry their share of the

-common burden.</p>

-

-<p>You will remember that the earliest Christians had not

-taken the trouble to write anything down. They expected

-the world to come to an end at almost any moment. Therefore

-why waste time and money upon literary efforts which

-in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from

-Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and

-when the story of Christ (after a hundred years of patient

-waiting) was beginning to be repeated with such strange

-additions and variations that a true disciple hardly knew

-what to believe and what not, the need was felt for some

-authentic book upon the subject and a number of short

-biographies of Jesus and such of the original letters of the

-apostles as had been preserved were combined into one large

-volume which was called the New Testament.</p>

-

-<p>This book contained among others a chapter called the

-Book of Revelations and therein were to be found certain

-references and certain prophecies about and anent a city

-built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built on seven

-hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days

-of Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this

-curious chapter carefully called the city of his abomination

-Babylon. But it took no great degree of perspicacity on the

-part of the imperial magistrate to understand what was

-meant when he read these pleasant references to the “Mother

-of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town

-that was drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs,

-foredoomed to become the habitation of all devils, the home

-of every foul spirit, the cage of every unclean and hateful

-bird, and more expressions of a similar and slightly uncomplimentary

-nature.</p>

-

-<p>Such sentences might have been explained away as the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>

-ravings of a poor fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he

-thought of his many friends who had been killed during the

-last fifty years. But they were part of the solemn services

-of the Church. Week after week they were repeated in

-those places where the Christians came together and it was

-no more than natural that outsiders should think that they

-represented the true sentiments of all Christians towards the

-mighty city on the Tiber. I do not mean to imply that the

-Christians may not have had excellent reason to feel the

-way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because

-he failed to share their enthusiasm.</p>

-

-<p>But that was not all.</p>

-

-<p>The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with

-an expression which the world thus far had never heard.

-That was the word “heretics.” Originally the name “heretic”

-was given only to those people who had “chosen” to

-believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.” But

-gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had

-chosen to believe certain doctrines which were not held

-“correct” or “sound” or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly

-established authorities of the Church and which therefore,

-to use the language of the Apostles, were “heretical, unsound,

-false and eternally wrong.”</p>

-

-<p>The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were

-technically free from the charge of heresy because they had

-remained outside of the fold of the Church and therefore

-could not, strictly speaking, be held to account for their

-private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter the imperial

-pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that

-“heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness,

-lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder,

-sedition and drunkenness” and a few other things which

-common decency prevents me from repeating on this page.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span></p>

-

-<p>All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction

-and misunderstanding led to persecution and once more

-Roman jails were filled with Christian prisoners and Roman

-executioners added to the number of Christian martyrs and

-a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was accomplished

-and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his

-home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from

-the business of ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the

-even more exciting pastime of raising great big cabbages

-in his back yard.</p>

-

-<p>His successor did not continue the policy of repression.

-On the contrary, since he could not hope to eradicate the

-Christian evil by force, he decided to make the best of a

-bad bargain and gain the good will of his enemies by offering

-them some special favors.</p>

-

-<p>This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having

-been the first to “recognize” the Christian church officially

-belongs to a man by the name of Constantine.</p>

-

-<p>Some day we shall possess an International Board of

-Revisioning Historians before whom all emperors, kings,

-pontiffs, presidents and mayors who now enjoy the title of

-the “great” shall have to submit their claims for this specific

-qualification. One of the candidates who will have to be

-watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal

-is the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.</p>

-

-<p>This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle

-field of Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the

-shores of the Bosphorus, was among other things the murderer

-of his wife, the murderer of his brother-in-law, the

-murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the executioner

-of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.

-Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a

-moment of panic just before he marched against his most<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>

-dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had made a bold bid for

-Christian support, he gained great fame as the “second

-Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the

-Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and

-died a barbarian who had outwardly accepted Christianity,

-yet until the end of his days tried to read the riddle of the

-future from the steaming entrails of sacrificial sheep, all

-this was most considerately overlooked in view of the famous

-Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto

-his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess

-their private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place

-without fear of molestation.”</p>

-

-<p>For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the

-fourth century, as I have repeatedly stated before, were

-practical politicians and when they had finally forced the

-Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree, they elevated

-Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity

-of the official church of the state. But they knew how and

-in what manner this had been accomplished and the successors

-of Constantine knew it, and although they tried to

-cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks the arrangement

-never quite lost its original character.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the

-Patriarch unto Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all

-the enemies of my church and in return I will give thee

-Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who disagree

-with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting

-down thine enemies.”</p>

-

-<p>There have been other bargains during the history of

-the last twenty centuries.</p>

-

-<p>But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which

-Christianity came to power.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V<br>

-<span class="smaller">IMPRISONMENT</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Just before the curtain rings down for the last time

-upon the ancient world, a figure crosses the stage

-which had deserved a better fate than an untimely

-death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”</p>

-

-<p>The Emperor Julian, to whom I refer, was a nephew of

-Constantine the Great and was born in the new capital of

-the empire in the year 331. In 337 his famous uncle died.

-At once his three sons fell upon their common heritage and

-upon each other with the fury of famished wolves.</p>

-

-<p>To rid themselves of all those who might possibly lay

-claim to part of the spoils, they ordered that those of their

-relatives who lived in or near the city be murdered. Julian’s

-father was one of the victims. His mother had died a few

-years after his birth. In this way, at the age of six, the boy

-was left an orphan. An older half-brother, an invalid,

-shared his loneliness and his lessons. These consisted mostly

-of lectures upon the advantages of the Christian faith, given

-by a kindly but uninspired old bishop by the name of

-Eusebius.</p>

-

-<p>But when the children grew older, it was thought wiser

-to send them a little further away where they would be less

-conspicuous and might possibly escape the usual fate of

-junior Byzantine princes. They were removed to a little

-village in the heart of Asia Minor. It was a dull life, but it

-gave Julian a chance to learn many useful things. For his

-neighbors, the Cappadocian mountaineers, were a simple

-people and still believed in the gods of their ancestors.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span></p>

-

-<p>There was not the slightest chance that the boy would

-ever hold a responsible position and when he asked permission

-to devote himself to a life of study, he was told to go

-ahead.</p>

-

-<p>First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places

-where the old Greek philosophy continued to be taught.

-There he crammed his head so full of literature and science

-that there was no space left for the things he had learned

-from Eusebius.</p>

-

-<p>Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might

-study on the very spot hallowed by the recollections of

-Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and

-Constantius, his cousin and the one and only remaining son

-of Constantine, remembering that he and his cousin, the boy

-philosopher, were by this time the only two surviving male

-members of the imperial family, sent for Julian, received

-him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his

-own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and

-defend that province against the barbarians.</p>

-

-<p>It seems that Julian had learned something more practical

-from his Greek teachers than an ability to argue. When in

-the year 357 the Alamanni threatened France, he destroyed

-their army near Strassburg, and for good measure added all

-the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his own

-province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a

-fresh supply of books by his favorite authors and was as

-happy as his serious nature allowed him to be.</p>

-

-<p>When news of these victories reached the ears of the

-Emperor, little Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the

-event. On the contrary, elaborate plans were laid to get rid

-of a competitor who might be just a trifle too successful.</p>

-

-<p>But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span>

-they heard that their commander-in-chief had been ordered

-to return home (a polite invitation to come and have one’s

-head cut off), they invaded his palace and then and there

-proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it be

-known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.</p>

-

-<p>Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.</p>

-

-<p>Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been

-in a remarkably good state of preservation. Julian was able

-to break all records by the speed with which he marched his

-troops from the heart of France to the shores of the Bosphorus.

-But ere he reached the capital, he heard that his

-cousin Constantius had died.</p>

-

-<p>And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the

-western world.</p>

-

-<p>Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do

-was impossible. It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent

-a man should have been under the impression that the

-dead past could ever be brought back to life by the use of

-force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by reconstructing

-an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating

-the deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed

-up in togas of a bygone age and talking to each other in a

-tongue that had disappeared from the face of the earth more

-than five centuries before.</p>

-

-<p>And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.</p>

-

-<p>All his efforts during the two short years of his reign

-were directed towards the reëstablishment of that ancient

-science which was now held in profound contempt by the

-majority of his people; towards the rekindling of a spirit

-of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt

-certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a

-single book and that independent study and investigation

-could only lead to unbelief and hell fire; towards the requickening<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>

-of the joy-of-living among those who had the vitality

-and the enthusiasm of ghosts.</p>

-

-<p>Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have

-been driven to madness and despair by the spirit of opposition

-which met him on all sides. As for Julian, he simply

-went to pieces under it. Temporarily at least he clung to

-the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The

-Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and

-mud, yet he refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks

-might try to provoke him into another era of persecution,

-yet the Emperor persistently continued to instruct his officials

-“not to make any martyrs.”</p>

-

-<p>In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end

-to this strange career.</p>

-

-<p>It was the best thing that could have happened to this,

-the last and greatest of the Pagan rulers.</p>

-

-<p>Had he lived any longer, his sense of tolerance and his

-hatred of stupidity would have turned him into the most

-intolerant man of his age. Now, from his cot in the hospital,

-he could reflect that during his rule, not a single person had

-suffered death for his private opinions. For this mercy, his

-Christian subjects rewarded him with their undying hatred.

-They boasted that an arrow from one of his own soldiers (a

-Christian legionary) had killed the Emperor and with rare

-delicacy they composed eulogies in praise of the murderer.

-They told how, just before he collapsed, Julian had confessed

-the errors of his ways and had acknowledged the power

-of Christ. And they emptied the arsenal of foul epithets

-with which the vocabulary of the fourth century was so

-richly stocked to disgrace the fame of an honest man who

-had lived a life of ascetic simplicity and had devoted all his

-energies to the happiness of the people who had been entrusted

-to his care.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span></p>

-

-<p>When he had been carried to his grave the Christian

-bishops could at last consider themselves the veritable

-rulers of the Empire and immediately began the task of

-destroying whatever opposition to their domination might

-remain in isolated corners of Europe, Asia and Africa.</p>

-

-<p>Under Valentinian and Valens, two brothers who ruled

-from 364 to 378, an edict was passed forbidding all Romans

-to sacrifice animals to the old Gods. The pagan priests were

-thereby deprived of their revenue and forced to look for

-other employment.</p>

-

-<p>But the regulations were mild compared to the law by

-which Theodosius ordered all his subjects not only to accept

-the Christian doctrines, but to accept them only in the form

-laid down by the “universal” or “Catholic” church of which

-he had made himself the protector and which was to have a

-monopoly in all matters spiritual.</p>

-

-<p>All those who after the promulgation of this ordinance

-stuck to their “erroneous opinions”—who persisted in their

-“insane heresies”—who remained faithful to their “scandalous

-doctrines”—were to suffer the consequences of their willful

-disobedience and were to be exiled or put to death.</p>

-

-<p>From then on the old world marched rapidly to its final

-doom. In Italy and Gaul and Spain and England hardly

-a pagan temple remained. They were either wrecked by the

-contractors who needed stones for new bridges and streets

-and city-walls and water-works, or they were remodeled to

-serve as meeting places for the Christians. The thousands

-of golden and silver images which had been accumulated since

-the beginning of the Republic were publicly confiscated and

-privately stolen and such statues as remained were made

-into mortar.</p>

-

-<p>The Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple which Greeks and

-Romans and Egyptians alike had held in the greatest veneration<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>

-for more than six centuries, was razed to the ground.

-There remained the university, famous all over the world

-ever since it had been founded by Alexander the Great. It

-had continued to teach and explain the old philosophies and

-as a result attracted a large number of students from all

-parts of the Mediterranean. When it was not closed at the

-behest of the Bishop of Alexandria, the monks of his diocese

-took the matter into their own hands. They broke into the

-lecture rooms, lynched Hypatia, the last of the great Platonic

-teachers, and threw her mutilated body into the streets

-where it was left to the mercy of the dogs.</p>

-

-<p>In Rome things went no better.</p>

-

-<p>The temple of Jupiter was closed, the Sibylline books,

-the very basis of the old Roman faith, were burned. The

-capital was left a ruin.</p>

-

-<p>In Gaul, under the leadership of the famous bishop of

-Tours, the old Gods were declared to be the predecessors

-of the Christian devils and their temples were therefore

-ordered to be wiped off the face of the earth.</p>

-

-<p>If, as sometimes happened in remote country districts, the

-peasants rushed forth to the defense of their beloved shrines,

-the soldiers were called out and by means of the ax and

-the gallows made an end to such “insurrections of Satan.”</p>

-

-<p>In Greece, the work of destruction proceeded more slowly.

-But finally in the year 394, the Olympic games were

-abolished. As soon as this center of Greek national life

-(after an uninterrupted existence of eleven hundred and

-seventy years) had come to an end, the rest was comparatively

-easy. One after the other, the philosophers were expelled

-from the country. Finally, by order of the Emperor

-Justinian, the University of Athens was closed. The funds

-established for its maintenance were confiscated. The last

-seven professors, deprived of their livelihood, fled to Persia<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>

-where King Chosroes received them hospitably and allowed

-them to spend the rest of their days peacefully playing the

-new and mysterious Indian game called “chess.”</p>

-

-<p>In the first half of the fifth century, archbishop Chrysostomus

-could truthfully state that the works of the old

-authors and philosophers had disappeared from the face of

-the earth. Cicero and Socrates and Virgil and Homer (not

-to mention the mathematicians and the astronomers and the

-physicians who were an object of special abomination to all

-good Christians) lay forgotten in a thousand attics and cellars.

-Six hundred years were to go by before they were

-called back to life, and in the meantime the world would be

-obliged to subsist on such literary fare as it pleased the

-theologians to place before it.</p>

-

-<p>A strange diet, and not exactly (in the jargon of the

-medical faculty) a balanced one.</p>

-

-<p>For the Church, although triumphant over its pagan

-enemies, was beset by many and serious tribulations. The

-poor peasant in Gaul and Lusitania, clamoring to burn incense

-in honor of his ancient Gods, could be silenced easily

-enough. He was a heathen and the law was on the side of

-the Christian. But the Ostrogoth or the Alaman or the

-Longobard who declared that Arius, the priest of Alexandria,

-was right in his opinion upon the true nature of Christ

-and that Athanasius, the bishop of that same city and Arius’

-bitter enemy, was wrong (or vice versa)—the Longobard or

-Frank who stoutly maintained that Christ was not “of the

-same nature” but of a “like nature only” with God (or vice

-versa)—the Vandal or the Saxon who insisted that Nestor

-spoke the truth when he called the Virgin Mary the “mother

-of Christ” and not the “mother of God” (or vice versa)—the

-Burgundian or Frisian who denied that Jesus was possessed

-of two natures, one human and one divine (or vice versa)—all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>

-these simple-minded but strong-armed barbarians who

-had accepted Christianity and were, outside of their unfortunate

-errors of opinion, staunch friends and supporters of

-the Church—these indeed could not be punished with a general

-anathema and a threat of perpetual hell fire. They

-must be persuaded gently that they were wrong and must be

-brought within the fold with charitable expressions of love

-and devotion. But before all else they must be given a

-definite creed that they might know for once and for all what

-they must hold to be true and what they must reject as false.</p>

-

-<p>It was that desire for unity of some sort in all matters

-pertaining to the faith which finally caused those famous

-gatherings which have become known as Oecumenical or

-Universal Councils, and which since the middle of the fourth

-century have been called together at irregular intervals to

-decide what doctrine is right and what doctrine contains

-the germ of heresy and should therefore be adjudged erroneous,

-unsound, fallacious and heretical.</p>

-

-<p>The first of those Oecumenical councils was held in the

-town of Nicaea, not far from the ruins of Troy, in the year

-325. The second one, fifty-six years later, was held in

-Constantinople. The third one in the year 431 in Ephesus.

-Thereafter they followed each other in rapid succession in

-Chalcedon, twice again in Constantinople, once more in

-Nicaea and finally once again in Constantinople in the

-year 869.</p>

-

-<p>After that, however, they were held in Rome or in some

-particular town of western Europe designated by the Pope.

-For it was generally accepted from the fourth century on

-that although the emperor had the technical right to call

-together such meetings (a privilege which incidentally

-obliged him to pay the traveling expenses of his faithful

-bishops) that very serious attention should be paid to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>

-suggestions made by the powerful Bishop of Rome. And

-although we do not know with any degree of certainty who

-occupied the chair in Nicaea, all later councils were dominated

-by the Popes and the decisions of these holy gatherings

-were not regarded as binding unless they had obtained

-the official approval of the supreme pontiff himself or one

-of his delegates.</p>

-

-<p>Hence we can now say farewell to Constantinople and

-travel to the more congenial regions of the west.</p>

-

-<p>The field of Tolerance and Intolerance has been fought

-over so repeatedly by those who hold tolerance the greatest

-of all human virtues and those who denounce it as an evidence

-of moral weakness, that I shall pay very little attention

-to the purely theoretical aspects of the case. Nevertheless

-it must be confessed that the champions of the Church

-follow a plausible line of reasoning when they try to explain

-away the terrible punishments which were inflicted upon all

-heretics.</p>

-

-<p>“A church,” so they argue, “is like any other organization.

-It is almost like a village or a tribe or a fortress.

-There must be a commander-in-chief and there must be a

-definite set of laws and by-laws, which all members are forced

-to obey. It follows that those who swear allegiance to the

-Church make a tacit vow both to respect the commander-in-chief

-and to obey the law. And if they find it impossible to

-do this, they must suffer the consequences of their own decisions

-and get out.”</p>

-

-<p>All of which, so far, is perfectly true and reasonable.</p>

-

-<p>If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in

-the articles of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn

-Methodist, and if for some reason he ceases to believe in the

-creed as laid down by the Methodist Church, he can become

-a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that matter, a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>

-Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open.

-There is no one outside his own hungry family to say him

-nay.</p>

-

-<p>But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and

-unlimited economic opportunities.</p>

-

-<p>The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple.

-It was far from easy to discover a region where the influence

-of the Bishop of Rome did not make itself felt. One could

-of course go to Persia or to India, as a good many heretics

-did, but the voyage was long and the chances of survival were

-small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self

-and one’s children.</p>

-

-<p>And finally, why should a man surrender his good right

-to believe what he pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception

-of the idea of Christ was the right one and that it was

-only a question of time for him to convince the Church that

-its doctrines needed a slight modification?</p>

-

-<p>For that was the crux of the whole matter.</p>

-

-<p>The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics,

-dealt with ideas which had a relative and not a positive value.</p>

-

-<p>A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the

-gallows because they cannot agree upon the absolute value

-of x would be no more absurd than a council of learned theologians

-trying to define the undefinable and endeavoring to

-reduce the substance of God to a formula.</p>

-

-<p>But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and

-intolerance got hold of the world that until very recently all

-those who advocated tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot

-ever possibly know who is right and who is wrong” did so

-at the risk of their lives and usually couched their warnings

-in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or

-two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they

-meant.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE PURE OF LIFE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Here is a little problem in mathematics which is

-not out of place in a book of history.

-Take a piece of string and make it into a circle,

-like this:</p>

-

-<figure class="figcenter illowp80" id="figure1" style="max-width: 25em;">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><p>I</p></figcaption>

-  <img class="w100" src="images/figure1.jpg" alt=" ">

-</figure>

-

-<p>In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.</p>

-

-<p>AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.</p>

-

-<p>But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two

-sides. Then the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The

-diameters are thrown out of gear. A few like AB and EF

-have been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>

-greatly shortened. Others, and especially CD, have been

-lengthened.</p>

-

-<figure class="figcenter illowp80" id="figure2" style="max-width: 25em;">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><p>II</p></figcaption>

-  <img class="w100" src="images/figure2.jpg" alt=" ">

-</figure>

-

-<p>Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history.

-Let us for the sake of argument suppose that</p>

-

-<table>

-  <tr>

-    <td>AB</td>

-    <td>represents</td>

-    <td>politics</td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>CD</td>

-    <td class="tdc">”</td>

-    <td>trade</td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>EF</td>

-    <td class="tdc">”</td>

-    <td>art</td>

-  </tr>

-  <tr>

-    <td>GH</td>

-    <td class="tdc">”</td>

-    <td>militarism</td>

-  </tr>

-</table>

-

-<p>In the <a href="#figure1">figure I</a> the perfectly balanced state, all lines are

-equally long and quite as much attention is paid to politics

-as to trade and art and militarism.</p>

-

-<p>But in <a href="#figure2">figure II</a> (which is no longer a perfect circle)

-trade has got an undue advantage at the expense of politics

-and art has almost entirely disappeared, while militarism

-shows a gain.</p>

-

-<p>Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the

-others will tend to disappear altogether.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span></p>

-

-<figure class="figcenter illowp70" id="figure3" style="max-width: 23.4375em;">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><p>III</p></figcaption>

-  <img class="w100" src="images/figure3.jpg" alt=" ">

-</figure>

-

-<p>You will find this a handy key to a great many historical

-problems.</p>

-

-<p>Try it on the Greeks.</p>

-

-<p>For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain

-a perfect circle of all-around accomplishments. But the

-foolish quarrels between the different political parties soon

-grew to such proportions that all the surplus energy of the

-nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil wars. The

-soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending

-the country against foreign aggression. They were turned

-loose upon their own neighbors, who had voted for a different

-candidate, or who believed in a slightly modified form of

-taxation.</p>

-

-<p>Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at

-first became difficult, then became entirely impossible and

-fled to other parts of the world, where business enjoyed a

-greater degree of stability.</p>

-

-<p>The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the

-city, the arts escaped by way of the back door, never to be

-seen again. Capital sailed away on the fastest ship it could<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span>

-find within a hundred miles, and since intellectualism is a very

-expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible to maintain

-good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to

-Alexandria.</p>

-

-<p>What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who

-subsisted upon tradition and routine.</p>

-

-<p>And all this happened because the line of politics had

-grown out of all proportion, because the perfect circle had

-been destroyed, and the other lines, art, science, philosophy,

-etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.</p>

-

-<p>If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find

-that there the particular line called “political power” grew

-and grew and grew until there was nothing left of any of

-the others. The circle which had spelled the glory of the

-Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight,

-narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.</p>

-

-<p>And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the

-history of the medieval Church to this sort of mathematics,

-this is what you will find.</p>

-

-<p>The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain

-a circle of conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they

-had rather neglected the diameter of science, but since they

-were not interested in the life of the world, they could not

-very well be expected to pay much attention to medicine

-or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of

-small appeal to men and women who were making ready for

-the last judgment and who regarded this world merely as

-the ante-room to Heaven.</p>

-

-<p>But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored

-(however imperfectly) to lead the good life and

-to be as industrious as they were charitable and as kindly

-as they were honest.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span></p>

-

-<p>As soon, however, as their little communities had been

-united into a single powerful organization, the perfect balance

-of the old spiritual circle was rudely upset by the

-obligations and duties of the new international responsibilities.

-It was easy enough for small groups of half-starved

-carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of

-poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was

-founded. But the heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the

-Pontifex Maximus of the western world, the richest landowner

-of the entire continent, could not live as simply as if

-he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in

-Pomerania or Spain.</p>

-

-<p>Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter

-representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing

-“foreign policy” were lengthened to such an

-extent that the diameters representing “humility” and “poverty”

-and “self-negation” and the other elementary Christian

-virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.</p>

-

-<p>It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly

-of the benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all

-know, lived in utter darkness. It is true they burned wax

-tapers in their churches and went to bed by the uncertain

-light of a sconce, they possessed few books, they were ignorant

-of many things which are now being taught in our

-grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums.

-But knowledge and intelligence are two very different things

-and of the latter, these excellent burghers, who constructed

-the political and social structure in which we ourselves continue

-to live, had their full share.</p>

-

-<p>If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently

-helpless before the many and terrible abuses in their

-Church, let us judge them mercifully. They had at least

-the courage of their convictions and they fought whatever<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>

-they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for personal

-happiness and comfort that they frequently ended

-their lives on the scaffold.</p>

-

-<p>More than that we can ask of no one.</p>

-

-<p>It is true that during the first thousand years of our era,

-comparatively few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not,

-however, because the Church felt less strongly about heresy

-than she did at a later date, but because she was too much

-occupied with more important questions to have any time

-to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe

-where Odin and the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.</p>

-

-<p>And in the second place, something very unpleasant had

-happened, which had wellnigh threatened the whole of

-Europe with destruction.</p>

-

-<p>This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance

-of a brand-new prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the

-conquest of western Asia and northern Africa by the followers

-of a new God who was called Allah.</p>

-

-<p>The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of

-“infidel dogs” and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us

-under the impression that Jesus and Mahomet represented

-ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as fire and water.</p>

-

-<p>But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the

-same race, they spoke dialects which belonged to the same

-linguistic group, they both claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather

-and they both looked back upon a common

-ancestral home, which a thousand years before had

-stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.</p>

-

-<p>And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who

-were such close relatives have always regarded each other

-with bitter scorn and have fought a war which has lasted<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>

-more than twelve centuries and which has not yet come

-to an end.</p>

-

-<p>At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon

-what might have happened, but there was a time when

-Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might have easily been

-gained for the Christian faith.</p>

-

-<p>The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of

-their time tending their flocks and therefore were much given

-to meditation. People in cities can drug their souls with the

-pleasures of a perennial county-fair. But shepherds and

-fisher folk and farmers lead solitary lives and want something

-a little more substantial than noise and excitement.</p>

-

-<p>In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions,

-but had shown a distinct preference for Judaism.

-This is easily explained, as Arabia was full of Jews. In

-the tenth century B.C., a great many of King Solomon’s

-subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism

-of their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred

-years later in 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered

-Judah, there had been a second wholesale exodus of Jews

-towards the desert lands of the south.</p>

-

-<p>Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the

-quest of the Jews after the one and only true God was

-entirely in line with the aspirations and ideals of the Arabian

-tribes.</p>

-

-<p>Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet

-will know how much the Medinite had borrowed from the

-wisdom contained in some of the books of the Old Testament.</p>

-

-<p>Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with

-his mother Hagar lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the

-heart of Arabia) hostile to the ideas expressed by the young

-reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary, they followed

-Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>

-loving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept

-those miracles of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter

-made so much. And as for the resurrection, they

-flatly refused to believe in it. But generally speaking, they

-felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were

-willing to give it a chance.</p>

-

-<p>But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the

-hands of certain Christian zealots who with their usual

-lack of discretion had denounced him as a liar and a false

-prophet before he had fairly opened his mouth. That and

-the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that the

-Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods

-instead of one, made the people of the desert finally turn

-their backs upon Christianity and declare themselves in

-favor of the Medinese camel driver who spoke to them of

-one and only one God and did not confuse them with references

-to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one,

-but were one or three as it might please the convenience of

-the moment and the interests of the officiating priest.</p>

-

-<p>Thus the western world found itself possessed of two

-religions, each of which proclaimed its own God to be the

-One True God and each of which insisted that all other

-Gods were impostors.</p>

-

-<p>Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.</p>

-

-<p>Mahomet died in 632.</p>

-

-<p>Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia

-and Egypt had been conquered and Damascus had become

-the capital of a great Arab empire.</p>

-

-<p>Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa

-had accepted Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a

-century after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina,

-the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake, all

-communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span>

-and the European continent was placed in a state of siege

-which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century.</p>

-

-<p>Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the

-Church to carry her doctrines eastward. All she could hope

-to do was to hold on to what she already possessed. Germany

-and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and Sweden

-and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen

-as a profitable field for intensive spiritual cultivation and

-on the whole, the work was done with great success. Occasionally

-a hardy Christian of the variety of Charlemagne,

-well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might revert

-to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects

-who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner.

-By and large, however, the Christian missionaries were well

-received, for they were honest men who told a simple and

-straightforward story which all the people could understand

-and because they introduced certain elements of order and

-neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife

-and highway robbery.</p>

-

-<p>But while this was happening along the frontier, things

-had not gone so well in the heart of the pontifical empire.

-Incessantly (to revert to the mathematics explained in the

-first pages of this chapter) the line of worldliness had been

-lengthened until at last the spiritual element in the Church

-had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a

-purely political and economic nature and although Rome

-was to grow in power and exercise a tremendous influence

-upon the development of the next twelve centuries, certain

-elements of disintegration had already made their appearance

-and were being recognized as such by the more intelligent

-among the laity and the clergy.</p>

-

-<p>We modern people of the Protestant north think of a

-“church” as a building which stands empty six days out of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span>

-every seven and a place where people go on a Sunday to

-hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We know that some

-of our churches have bishops and occasionally these bishops

-hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves

-surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their

-collars turned backwards and we read in the papers that

-they have declared themselves in favor of dancing or against

-divorce, and then they go home again and nothing has

-happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.</p>

-

-<p>We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to

-be our own) with the sum total of all our experiences, both

-in life and in death.</p>

-

-<p>The State, of course, is something very different. The

-State may take our money and may kill us if it feels that

-such a course is desirable for the public good. The State

-is our owner, our master, but what is now generally called

-“the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or, if we

-happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.</p>

-

-<p>But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different.

-Then, the Church was something visible and tangible, a

-highly active organization which breathed and existed, which

-shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than the State

-would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes

-who accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced

-the ancient ideal of poverty did not foresee the

-consequences to which such a policy was bound to lead. In

-the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and quite

-appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow

-upon the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own

-worldly goods. Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated

-administration which reached all the way from

-John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage to Upsala.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span>

-Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks and

-scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different

-departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed.

-Think of the amount spent upon a courier service across an

-entire continent; the traveling expenses of diplomatic agents

-now going to London, then returning from Novgorod; the

-sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers in the style

-that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly

-princes on a footing of complete equality.</p>

-

-<p>All the same, looking back upon what the Church came

-to stand for and contemplating what it might have been

-under slightly more favorable circumstances, this development

-seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew into a

-gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the

-pope became an international autocrat who held all the nations

-of western Europe in a bondage compared to which

-the rule of the old emperors had been mild and generous.</p>

-

-<p>And then, when complete success seemed within certain

-reach, something happened which proved fatal to the ambition

-for world dominion.</p>

-

-<p>The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir

-among the masses and that is one of the most uncomfortable

-things that can happen to any religious organization.</p>

-

-<p>Heretics were nothing new.</p>

-

-<p>There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a

-single rule of faith from which people could possibly dissent

-and disputes, which had divided Europe and Africa and

-western Asia into hostile camps for centuries at a time, were

-almost as old as the Church herself.</p>

-

-<p>But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and

-Sabellianists and Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians

-hardly come within the scope of this book. As a

-rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as the other and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span>

-there was little to choose between the intolerance of a follower

-of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.</p>

-

-<p>Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain

-obscure points of theology which are gradually beginning

-to be forgotten. Heaven forbid that I should drag

-them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting my

-time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh

-outbreak of theological fury. Rather, I am writing these

-pages to tell our children of certain ideals of intellectual

-liberty for which some of their ancestors fought at the risk

-of their lives and to warn them against that attitude of

-doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused

-such a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand

-years.</p>

-

-<p>But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very

-different story.</p>

-

-<p>Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious

-fellow with a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong

-translation of an obscure sentence in the Apocalypse or the

-mis-spelling of a holy word in the gospel of St. John.</p>

-

-<p>Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which

-during the reign of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the

-village of Nazareth went to his death, and behold! he stands

-revealed as the only true Christian!</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE INQUISITION</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni,

-succeeded to the high honors which his uncle Paolo

-had held only a few years before and as Innocent III

-took possession of the papal chair.</p>

-

-<p>He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided

-in the Lateran Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time

-of his ascension. An honor-student in the universities of

-Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever, full of energy and high

-ambition, he used his office so well that he could rightly

-claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone

-but of the entire world.”</p>

-

-<p>He set Italy free from German interference by driving the

-imperial governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering

-those parts of the peninsula which were held by imperial

-troops; and finally by excommunicating the candidate to

-the imperial throne until that poor prince found himself

-beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew entirely from

-his domains on the other side of the Alps.</p>

-

-<p>He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never

-even came within sight of the Holy Land but sailed for

-Constantinople, murdered a goodly number of the inhabitants

-of that town, stole whatever could be carried away

-and generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no

-crusader could show himself in a Greek port without running

-the chance of being hanged as an outlaw. It is true

-that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these proceedings<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>

-which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable

-minority of Christendom with disgust and despair.

-But Innocent was a practical man of affairs. He soon

-accepted the inevitable and appointed a Venetian to the

-vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this clever

-stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under

-Roman jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good

-will of the Venetian Republic which henceforth regarded the

-Byzantine domains as part of her eastern colonies and

-treated them accordingly.</p>

-

-<p>In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a

-most accomplished and tactful person.</p>

-

-<p>The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation,

-had at last begun to insist that marriage was not merely

-a civil contract between a man and a woman but a most

-holy sacrament which needed the public blessing of a priest

-to be truly valid. When Philip August of France and

-Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic

-affairs according to their own particular preferences, they

-were speedily reminded of their duties and being men of

-great prudence they hastened to comply with the papal

-wishes.</p>

-

-<p>Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity,

-people were shown in unmistakable manner who

-was their master. King Haakon IV (known familiarly

-among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just conquered

-a neat little empire including besides his own Norway,

-part of Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the

-Orkneys and the Hebrides, was obliged to submit the somewhat

-tangled problem of his birth to a Roman tribunal

-before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of

-Trondhjem.</p>

-

-<p>And so it went.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span></p>

-

-<p>The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his

-Greek prisoners of war, and was not above torturing an

-occasional Byzantine emperor, who therefore was not the

-sort of person one might expect to take a deep interest

-in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and

-humbly asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness.

-While in England, certain barons who had undertaken

-to discipline their sovereign master were rudely informed

-that their charter was null and void because “it had been

-obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated

-for having given unto this world the famous document

-known as Magna Charta.</p>

-

-<p>From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not

-the sort of person who would deal lightly with the pretensions

-of a few simple linen-weavers and illiterate shepherds

-who undertook to question the laws of his Church.</p>

-

-<p>And yet, some there were found who had the courage

-to do this very thing as we shall now see.</p>

-

-<p>The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.</p>

-

-<p>Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have

-small gift for publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets

-they write to explain their ideas and to defend themselves

-against their enemies fall an easy prey to the ever

-watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to be

-in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed.

-Hence we depend for our knowledge of most heresies

-upon such information as we are able to glean from

-the records of their trials and upon such articles as have

-been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the

-express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan”

-to the truly faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized

-and warned against doing likewise.</p>

-

-<p>As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>

-individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty

-cellar somewhere in the lowest part of the slums, who refuses

-to touch decent Christian food but subsists entirely

-upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who keeps

-away from the company of women and mumbles strange

-prophecies about the second coming of the Messiah, who

-reproves the clergy for their worldliness and wickedness

-and generally disgusts his more respectable neighbors by

-his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.</p>

-

-<p>Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in

-making a nuisance of themselves, for that seems to be

-the fate of people who take themselves too seriously.</p>

-

-<p>Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost

-unholy zeal for a holy life, were dirty, looked like

-the devil and did not smell pleasantly and generally upset

-the quiet routine of their home town by their strange ideas

-anent a truly Christian existence.</p>

-

-<p>But let us give them credit for their courage and their

-honesty.</p>

-

-<p>They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.</p>

-

-<p>As a rule, they lost it.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized.

-Eventually even those who believe in no organization

-at all must form a Society for the Promotion of

-Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish anything. And

-the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and wallowed

-in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct

-of self-preservation made them flock together and

-their feeling of insecurity forced them to surround their

-sacred doctrines by a double barrier of mystic rites and

-esoteric ceremonials.</p>

-

-<p>But of course the masses of the people, who remained

-faithful to the Church, were unable to make any distinction<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>

-between these different groups and sects. And they

-bunched them all together and called them dirty Manichaeans

-or some other unflattering name and felt that that

-solved the problem.</p>

-

-<p>In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists

-of the Middle Ages. Of course I do not use the latter

-name as indicating membership in a certain well-defined

-political party which a few years ago established itself as

-the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer

-to a vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays

-bestow upon all their personal enemies from the landlord

-who comes to collect the rent down to the elevator boy

-who neglects to stop at the right floor.</p>

-

-<p>A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a

-most objectionable person. But as he could not very well

-try him upon any positive charges, he condemned him upon

-hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable advantages

-over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure

-followed by the regular courts of law but which

-sometimes suffers from a lack of accuracy and is responsible

-for a great many judicial murders.</p>

-

-<p>What made this all the more reprehensible in the case

-of the poor Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of

-the original sect, a Persian by the name of Mani, had been

-the very incarnation of benevolence and charity. He was

-an historical figure and was born during the first quarter

-of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his

-father, Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.</p>

-

-<p>He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and

-spent the years of his youth in a community as international,

-as polyglot, as pious, as godless, as material and as

-idealistically-spiritual as the New York of our own day.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>

-Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of

-east and west and south and north had its followers among

-the crowds that visited the great commercial centers of

-Mesopotamia. Mani listened to all the different preachers

-and prophets and then distilled a philosophy of his own

-which was a <i>mixtum-compositum</i> of Buddhism, Christianity,

-Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a

-dozen old Babylonian superstitions.</p>

-

-<p>Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his

-followers sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated

-that Mani merely revived the old Persian myth of the Good

-God and the Evil God who are eternally fighting for the

-soul of man and that he associated the ancient God of Evil

-with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became

-his Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that

-Heavenly Father whom we find revealed within the pages

-of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that is where

-Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that

-the body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing;

-that all people should try to rid themselves of their worldly

-ambitions by the constant mortification of the flesh and

-should obey the strictest rules of diet and behavior lest they

-fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil) and burn

-in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos

-about things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed

-for his followers a menu composed exclusively of cold water,

-dried vegetables and dead fish. This latter ordinance may

-surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea, being cold-blooded

-animals, have always been regarded as less harmful

-to man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren

-of the dry land, and the self-same people who would rather

-suffer death than eat a veal chop cheerfully consume

-quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of conscience.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span></p>

-

-<p>Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for

-women. He forbade his disciples to marry and advocated

-the slow extinction of the human race.</p>

-

-<p>As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally

-by the Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been

-the exponent, Mani regarded them all with horror and instead

-of being submerged in water, his candidates for holy

-orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.</p>

-

-<p>At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to

-explain his ideas unto all mankind. First he visited

-India and China where he was fairly successful. Then he

-turned homeward to bring the blessings of his creed to his

-own neighbors.</p>

-

-<p>But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived

-of much secret revenue by the success of these unworldly

-doctrines turned against him and asked that he be

-killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the protection of

-the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded

-by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious

-questions, Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They

-took him to the walls of the town and crucified him and

-flayed his corpse and publicly exposed his skin before the

-city gate as an example to all those who might feel inclined

-to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.</p>

-

-<p>By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean

-church itself was broken up. But little bits of the

-prophet’s ideas, like so many spiritual meteors, were showered

-far and wide upon the landscape of Europe and Asia

-and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc among

-the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them

-up, had examined them and had found them singularly to

-their taste.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span></p>

-

-<p>Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I

-do not know.</p>

-

-<p>Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea

-and the Danube. Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed

-immense popularity in Germany and France. There the

-followers of the new creed called themselves by the Oriental

-name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,”

-and so widespread was the affliction that all over western

-Europe the word “Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the

-same as “heretic.”</p>

-

-<p>But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a

-definite religious denomination. No effort was made to establish

-a new sect. The Manichaean ideas exercised great

-influence upon a large number of people who would have

-stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout

-sons of the Church. And that made this particular form of

-heresy so dangerous and so difficult of detection.</p>

-

-<p>It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose

-a disease caused by microbes of such gigantic structure

-that their presence can be detected by the microscope of a

-provincial board-of-health.</p>

-

-<p>But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who

-can maintain their incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet

-illumination, for they shall inherit the earth.</p>

-

-<p>Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was

-therefore the most dangerous expression of all social epidemics

-and it filled the higher authorities of that organization

-with a terror not felt before the more common varieties

-of spiritual afflictions.</p>

-

-<p>It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of

-the staunchest supporters of the early Christian faith had

-shown unmistakable symptoms of the disease. Yea, great

-Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and indefatigable warrior<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span>

-of the Cross, who had done more than any one else to

-destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have

-been at heart considerable of a Manichaean.</p>

-

-<p>Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the

-stake in the year 385 and who gained the distinction of

-being the first victim of the law against heretics, was accused

-of Manichaean tendencies.</p>

-

-<p>Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have

-fallen under the spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.</p>

-

-<p>They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading

-the Old Testament and finally, during the twelfth century,

-promulgated that famous order by which all clergymen

-were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not to

-forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of

-abstinence were soon to make upon one of the greatest

-leaders of spiritual reform, causing that most lovable of

-men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish a new monastic

-order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly earned

-him the title of the Buddha of the West.</p>

-

-<p>But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty

-and humility of soul began to filter down to the common

-people, at the very moment when the world was filled with

-the din of yet another war between emperor and pope, when

-foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross and

-the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable

-bits of territory along the Mediterranean shores, when

-hordes of Crusaders were rushing home with the ill-gotten

-plunder they had taken from friend and enemy alike, when

-abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a staff of

-courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass

-that they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed

-something very unpleasant was bound to happen, and it

-did.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span></p>

-

-<p>Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent

-with the state of the Church made themselves felt in that

-part of France where the old Roman tradition of culture

-had survived longest and where civilization had never been

-quite absorbed by barbarism.</p>

-

-<p>You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence

-and consists of a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean,

-the Rhone and the Alps. Marseilles, a former

-colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is its most important

-harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns

-and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and

-it enjoyed an abundance of sunshine and rain.</p>

-

-<p>While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the

-barbaric deeds of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours,

-the poets of the Provence, had already invented that new

-form of literature which in time was to give birth to our

-modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations

-of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans

-of Spain and Sicily, were making the people familiar

-with the latest publications in the field of science

-at a time when the number of such books in the northern

-part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.</p>

-

-<p>In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement

-had begun to make itself manifest as early as the first decade

-of the eleventh century.</p>

-

-<p>But there had not been anything which, however remotely,

-could be construed into open rebellion. Here and

-there in certain small villages certain people were beginning

-to hint that their priests might live as simply and as unostentatiously

-as their parishioners; who refused (oh, memory

-of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went

-forth to war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they

-might read and study the Gospels for themselves; who let it<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>

-be known that they did not approve of capital punishment;

-who denied the existence of that Purgatory which six centuries

-after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed

-as part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important

-detail) refused to surrender a tenth of their income to

-the Church.</p>

-

-<p>Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions

-against clerical authority were sought out and sometimes, if

-they were deaf to persuasion, they were discreetly put out

-of the way.</p>

-

-<p>But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed

-necessary to call together a meeting of all the bishops of

-the Provence to discuss what measures should be taken to

-put a stop to this very dangerous and highly seditious

-agitation. They duly convened and continued their debates

-until the year 1056.</p>

-

-<p>By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary

-forms of punishment and excommunication did not produce

-any noticeable results. The simple country folk who desired

-to lead a “pure life” were delighted whenever they were

-given a chance to demonstrate their principles of Christian

-charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail

-and if perchance they were condemned to death, they

-marched to the stake with the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore,

-as always happens in such cases, the place left

-vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a

-dozen fresh candidates for holiness.</p>

-

-<p>Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between

-the papal delegates who insisted upon more severe

-persecutions and the local nobility and clergy who (knowing

-the true nature of their subjects) refused to comply

-with the orders from Rome and protested that violence only

-encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span>

-voice of reason and therefore was a waste both of time and

-energy.</p>

-

-<p>And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement

-received a fresh impetus from the north.</p>

-

-<p>In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way

-of the Rhone, there lived a merchant by the name of Peter

-Waldo. A very serious man, a good man, a most generous

-man, almost fanatically obsessed by his eagerness to follow

-the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that it was

-easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than

-for a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

-Thirty generations of Christians had tried to explain just

-what Jesus had actually meant when he uttered these words.

-Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He divided

-whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and

-refused to accumulate fresh wealth.</p>

-

-<p>John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”</p>

-

-<p>Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and

-had carefully stipulated under what conditions it might

-perhaps be desirable for the laity to study the holy books

-directly and without the assistance of a priest.</p>

-

-<p>Peter Waldo did not see it that way.</p>

-

-<p>John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”</p>

-

-<p>Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.</p>

-

-<p>And when he discovered that the things he found did

-not tally with the conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated

-the New Testament into his own language and spread copies

-of his manuscript throughout the good land of Provence.</p>

-

-<p>At first his activities did not attract much attention.

-His enthusiasm for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most

-likely he could be persuaded to found some new and very

-ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those who wished

-to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>

-existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.</p>

-

-<p>Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets

-for those people whose excess of faith might make them

-troublesome.</p>

-

-<p>But all things must be done according to rule and precedent.

-And in that respect the “pure men” of the Provence

-and the “poor men” of Lyons were terrible failures. Not

-only did they neglect to inform their bishops of what they

-were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed

-the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good

-Christian without the assistance of a professional member

-of the priesthood and that the Bishop of Rome had no more

-right to tell people outside of his jurisdiction what to do

-and what to believe than the Grand Duke of Tartary or the

-Caliph of Bagdad.</p>

-

-<p>The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and

-truth compels me to state that she waited a long time before

-she finally decided to exterminate this heresy by force.</p>

-

-<p>But an organization based upon the principle that there

-is only one right way of thinking and living and that all

-other ways are infamous and damnable is bound to take

-drastic measures whenever its authority is being openly

-questioned.</p>

-

-<p>If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive

-and this consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite

-action and devise a series of punishments that should put

-terror into the hearts of all future dissenters.</p>

-

-<p>The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of

-Albi which was a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the

-Waldenses (who bore the name of their founder, Peter

-Waldo) living in countries without great political value<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>

-and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected

-as the first of her victims.</p>

-

-<p>The murder of a papal delegate who for several years

-had ruled the Provence as if it were so much conquered

-territory, gave Innocent III an excuse to interfere.</p>

-

-<p>He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses

-and the Waldenses.</p>

-

-<p>Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition

-against the heretics would be excused from paying

-interest on their debts; they would be absolved from all

-past and future sins and for the time being they would

-be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts

-of law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the

-people of northern Europe.</p>

-

-<p>Why should they bother about going all the way to

-Palestine when a campaign against the rich cities of the

-Provence offered the same spiritual and economic rewards

-as a trip to the Orient and when a man could gain an equal

-amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term of

-service?</p>

-

-<p>For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and

-the worst elements among the nobility and gentry of northern

-France and southern England, of Austria, Saxony and

-Poland came rushing southward to escape the local sheriff

-and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense

-of the prosperous Provençals.</p>

-

-<p>The number of men, women and children hanged, burned,

-drowned, decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders

-is variously given. I have not any idea how many

-thousands perished. Here and there, whenever a formal

-execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete

-figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty

-thousand, according to the size of each town.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span></p>

-

-<p>After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers

-were in a quandary how to know who were heretics and

-who were not. They placed their problem before the papal

-delegate, who followed the army as a sort of spiritual adviser.</p>

-

-<p>“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and

-kill them all. The Lord will know his own people.”</p>

-

-<p>But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de

-Montfort, a veteran of the real crusades, who distinguished

-himself most of all by the novelty and the ingenuity of his

-cruelties. In return for his valuable services, he afterwards

-received large tracts of land in the country which he had

-just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.</p>

-

-<p>As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre,

-they fled to the more inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and

-there maintained a church of their own until the days of

-the Reformation.</p>

-

-<p>The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of

-flogging and hanging, their name disappears from the court

-reports of the Inquisition. But three centuries later, in a

-slightly modified form, their doctrines were to crop up again

-and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin Luther,

-they were to cause that reform which was to break the

-monopoly which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost

-fifteen hundred years.</p>

-

-<p>All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of

-Innocent III. As far as he was concerned, the difficulty was

-at an end and the principle of absolute obedience had been

-triumphantly re-asserted. The famous command in Luke

-xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished

-to give a party, finding that there still was room in his

-banqueting hall and that several of the guests had remained<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>

-away, had said unto his servant, “Go out into the highways

-and compel them to come in,” had once more been fulfilled.</p>

-

-<p>“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.</p>

-

-<p>The problem how to make them stay in still faced the

-Church and this was not solved until many years later.</p>

-

-<p>Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local

-tribunals, special courts of inquiry, such as had been used

-for the first time during the Albigensian uprising, were

-instituted in the different capitals of Europe. They were

-given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they came

-to be known simply as the Inquisition.</p>

-

-<p>Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased

-to function, the mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling

-of unrest. We have visions of dark dungeons in Havanna,

-of torture chambers in Lisbon, of rusty cauldrons

-and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow

-hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw

-leering at an endless row of old men and women, slowly

-shuffling to the gibbet.</p>

-

-<p>Several popular novels written during the latter half of

-the nineteenth century have undoubtedly had something

-to do with this impression of sinister brutality. Let us therefore

-deduct twenty-five per cent for the phantasy of our

-romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant

-prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to

-justify those who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable

-evil and should never again be tolerated in a community

-of civilized people.</p>

-

-<p>Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition

-in eight ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce

-these to two or three pages, and it will be quite impossible

-to give a concise account of one of the most complicated

-problems of medieval history within so short a space. For<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span>

-there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court

-or an International Court of Arbitration.</p>

-

-<p>There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries

-and created for all sorts of purposes.</p>

-

-<p>The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of

-Spain and the Holy Inquisition of Rome. The former was

-a local affair which watched over the heretics in the Iberian

-peninsula and in the American colonies.</p>

-

-<p>The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and

-burned Joan of Arc in the northern part of the continent

-as it burned Giordano Bruno in the southern.</p>

-

-<p>It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never

-killed any one.</p>

-

-<p>After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical

-judges, the convicted heretic was surrendered to the secular

-authorities. These could then do with him what they

-thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death

-penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience

-and might even find themselves excommunicated

-or deprived of their support at the papal court. If, as

-sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped this fate and

-was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only

-increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement

-for the rest of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial

-prisons.</p>

-

-<p>As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror

-of going insane in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many

-prisoners confessed all sorts of crimes of which they were

-totally innocent that they might be found guilty of heresy

-and thus be put out of their misery.</p>

-

-<p>It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing

-to be hopelessly biased.</p>

-

-<p>It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>

-of thousands of harmless people in all parts of the

-world were overnight lifted from their beds at the mere

-whispered hearsay of some loquacious neighbors; that they

-were held for months or for years in filthy cells awaiting

-an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and

-qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never

-informed of the nature of the accusation that was brought

-against them; that they were not allowed to know the

-names of those who had acted as witnesses against them;

-that they were not permitted to communicate with their

-relatives or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest

-their innocence, they could be tortured until all the

-limbs of their body were broken; that other heretics could

-testify against them but were not listened to if they offered

-to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally

-that they could be sent to their death without the haziest

-notion as to the cause of their terrible fate.</p>

-

-<p>It seems even more incredible that men and women who

-had been buried for fifty or sixty years could be dug out

-of their graves, could be found guilty “in absentia” and

-that the heirs of people who were condemned in this fashion

-could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a century

-after the death of the offending parties.</p>

-

-<p>But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended

-for their maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods

-that were confiscated, absurdities of this sort were by no

-means an uncommon occurrence and frequently the grandchildren

-were driven to beggary on account of something

-which their grandfather was supposed to have done two

-generations before.</p>

-

-<p>Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago

-when Czarist Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember

-the agent provocateur. As a rule the agent provocateur<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>

-was a former burglar or a retired gambler with a

-winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly

-known that his sorrow had made him join the revolution

-and in this way he often gained the confidence of those

-who were genuinely opposed to the imperial government.

-But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new

-friends, he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward

-and went to the next city, there to repeat his vile practices.</p>

-

-<p>During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,

-southern and western Europe was overrun by this nefarious

-tribe of private spies.</p>

-

-<p>They made a living denouncing those who were supposed

-to have criticized the Church or who had expressed doubts

-upon certain points of doctrine.</p>

-

-<p>If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the

-business of such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.</p>

-

-<p>As he could rest assured that torture would make his

-victims confess, no matter how innocent they might be, he

-ran no risks and could continue his trade ad infinitum.</p>

-

-<p>In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced

-by this system of allowing anonymous people to denounce

-those whom they suspected of spiritual deficiencies.

-At last, no one dared trust his nearest and dearest friends.

-Members of the same family were forced to be on their

-guard against each other.</p>

-

-<p>The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the

-inquisitorial work made excellent use of the panic which

-their methods created and for almost two centuries they

-lived on the fat of the land.</p>

-

-<p>Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying

-causes of the Reformation was the disgust which a large

-number of people felt for those arrogant beggars who

-under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the homes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>

-of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable

-beds, who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they

-be treated as honored guests and who were able to maintain

-themselves in comfort by the mere threat that they would

-denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition if ever they

-were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had

-come to regard as their just due.</p>

-

-<p>The Church of course could answer to all this that the

-Inquisition merely acted as a spiritual health officer whose

-sworn duty it was to prevent contagious errors from spreading

-among the masses. It could point to the leniency shown

-to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could

-not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even

-claim that few people ever suffered the penalty of death

-unless they were apostates and were caught in a new offense

-after having forsworn their former errors.</p>

-

-<p>But what of it?</p>

-

-<p>The same trick by which an innocent man was changed

-into a desperate criminal could afterwards be used to place

-him in an apparent position of recantation.</p>

-

-<p>The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been

-close friends.</p>

-

-<p>And what are a few faked documents between spies?</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE CURIOUS ONES</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided

-into three parts; the intolerance of laziness, the

-intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance

-of self-interest.</p>

-

-<p>The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to

-be met with in every country and among all classes of

-society. It is most common in small villages and old-established

-towns, and it is not restricted to human beings.</p>

-

-<p>Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five

-years of his placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town,

-resents the equally warm barn of Westport for no other

-reason than that he has always lived in Coley Town, is

-familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and

-knows that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him

-on his daily ambles through that pleasant part of the Connecticut

-landscape.</p>

-

-<p>Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time

-learning the defunct dialects of Polynesian islands that the

-language of dogs and cats and horses and donkeys has been

-sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude says to

-his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an

-outburst of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For

-Dude is no longer young and therefore is “set” in his ways.

-His horsey habits were all formed years and years ago and

-therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and habits

-seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>

-and habits will be declared wrong until the end of his

-days.</p>

-

-<p>It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes

-parents shake their heads over the foolish behavior of their

-children, which has caused the absurd myth of “the good

-old days”; which makes savages and civilized creatures

-wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a

-great deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all

-people with a new idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.</p>

-

-<p>Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively

-harmless.</p>

-

-<p>We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later.

-In ages past it has caused millions of people to leave home,

-and in this way it has been responsible for the permanent

-settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited land which otherwise

-would still be a wilderness.</p>

-

-<p>The second variety is much more serious.</p>

-

-<p>An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance,

-a very dangerous person.</p>

-

-<p>But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack

-of mental faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then

-he erects within his soul a granite bulwark of self-righteousness

-and from the high pinnacle of this formidable fortress,

-he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not share

-his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed

-to live.</p>

-

-<p>People suffering from this particular affliction are both

-uncharitable and mean. Because they live constantly in a

-state of fear, they easily turn to cruelty and love to torture

-those against whom they have a grievance. It was among

-people of this ilk that the strange notion of a predilected

-group of a “chosen people” first took its origin. Furthermore,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>

-the victims of this delusion are forever trying to

-bolster up their own courage by an imaginary relationship

-which exists between themselves and the invisible Gods.

-This, of course, in order to give a flavor of spiritual approbation

-to their intolerance.</p>

-

-<p>For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging

-Danny Deever because we consider him a menace to our

-own happiness, because we hate him with a thousand hates

-and because we just love to hang him.” Oh, no! They get

-together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and for

-days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever.

-When finally sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps

-committed some petty sort of larceny, stands solemnly

-convicted as a most terrible person who has dared to offend

-the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect

-who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution

-therefore becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit

-upon the judges who have the courage to convict such an

-ally of Satan.</p>

-

-<p>That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people

-are quite as apt to fall under the spell of this most fatal

-delusion as their more brutal and blood-thirsty neighbors

-is a commonplace both of history and psychology.</p>

-

-<p>The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of

-a thousand poor martyrs were most assuredly not composed

-of criminals. They were decent, pious folk and they

-felt sure that they were doing something very creditable

-and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.</p>

-

-<p>Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have

-rejected the idea as an ignoble confession of Moral weakness.

-Perhaps they were intolerant, but in that case they

-were proud of the fact and with good right. For there,

-out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span>

-Deever, clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of

-pantaloons adorned with little devils, and he was going, going

-slowly but surely, to be hanged in the Market Place. While

-they themselves, as soon as the show was over, would return

-to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and

-beans.</p>

-

-<p>Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting

-and thinking correctly?</p>

-

-<p>Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would

-not the rôles be reversed?</p>

-

-<p>A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one

-and hard to answer when people feel sincerely convinced

-that their own ideas are the ideas of God and are unable

-to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.</p>

-

-<p>There remains as a third category the intolerance caused

-by self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of

-jealousy and as common as the measles.</p>

-

-<p>When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the

-favor of Almighty God could not be bought by the killing

-of a dozen oxen or goats, all those who made a living from

-the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple decried him as a

-dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed before

-he could do any lasting damage to their main source

-of income.</p>

-

-<p>When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus

-and there preached a new creed which threatened to interfere

-with the prosperity of the jewelers who derived great

-profit from the sale of little images of the local Goddess

-Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the unwelcome

-intruder.</p>

-

-<p>And ever since there has been open warfare between those

-who depend for their livelihood upon some established form<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>

-of worship and those whose ideas threaten to take the crowd

-away from one temple in favor of another.</p>

-

-<p>When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle

-Ages, we must constantly remember that we have to

-deal with a very complicated problem. Only upon very

-rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only

-one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance.

-Most frequently we can discover traces of all three

-varieties in the cases of persecution which are brought to

-our attention.</p>

-

-<p>That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering

-thousands of square miles of land and owning hundreds

-of thousands of serfs, should have turned the full vigor of

-its anger against a group of peasants who had undertaken

-to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth

-was entirely natural.</p>

-

-<p>And in that case, the extermination of heretics became

-a matter of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the

-intolerance of self-interest.</p>

-

-<p>But when we begin to consider another group of men

-who were to feel the heavy hand of official disapprobation,

-the scientists, the problem becomes infinitely more complicated.</p>

-

-<p>And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the

-Church authorities towards those who tried to reveal the

-secrets of nature, we must go back a good many centuries

-and study what had actually happened in Europe during

-the first six centuries of our era.</p>

-

-<p>The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the

-continent with the ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here

-and there a few pieces of the old Roman fabric of state had

-remained standing erect amidst the wastes of the turbulent

-waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>

-walls had perished. Their books had been carried away

-by the waves. Their art lay forgotten in the deep mud

-of a new ignorance. Their collections, their museums, their

-laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of scientific

-facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of uncouth

-savages from the heart of Asia.</p>

-

-<p>We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth

-century. Of Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople,

-then almost as far removed from central Europe as

-the Melbourne of today) the people of the west possessed

-hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely disappeared.

-A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters

-from the works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar

-of that time could find when he wanted to familiarize himself

-with the thoughts of the ancients. If he desired to learn

-their language, there was no one to teach it to him, unless

-a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of

-Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced

-them to find a temporary asylum in France or Italy.</p>

-

-<p>Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of

-those dated from the fourth and fifth centuries. The few

-manuscripts of the classics that survived had been copied

-so often and so indifferently that their contents were no

-longer understandable to any one who had not made a life

-study of paleography.</p>

-

-<p>As for books of science, with the possible exception of

-some of the simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer

-to be found in any of the available libraries and what was

-much more regrettable, they were no longer wanted.</p>

-

-<p>For the people who now ruled the world regarded science

-with a hostile eye and discouraged all independent labor

-in the field of mathematics, biology and zoology, not to

-mention medicine and astronomy, which had descended to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>

-such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of

-the slightest practical value.</p>

-

-<p>It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand

-such a state of affairs.</p>

-

-<p>We men and women of the twentieth century, whether

-rightly or wrongly, profoundly believe in the idea of progress.

-Whether we ever shall be able to make this world

-perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to be

-our most sacred duty to try.</p>

-

-<p>Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of

-progress seems to have become the national religion of our

-entire country.</p>

-

-<p>But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could

-not share such a view.</p>

-

-<p>The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and

-interesting things had lasted such a lamentably short time!

-It had been so rudely disturbed by the political cataclysm

-that had overtaken the unfortunate country that most

-Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed

-pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy

-fatherland, had become abject believers in the doctrine of

-the ultimate futility of all worldly endeavor.</p>

-

-<p>The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw

-their conclusions from almost a thousand years of consecutive

-history, had discovered a certain upward trend in the

-development of the human race and their philosophers,

-notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task

-of educating the younger generation for a happier and

-better future.</p>

-

-<p>Then came Christianity.</p>

-

-<p>The center of interest was moved from this world to the

-other. Almost immediately people fell back into a deep

-and dark abyss of hopeless resignation.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153"></a>[153]</span></p>

-

-<p>Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference.

-He was conceived in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he

-died repenting of his sins.</p>

-

-<p>But there was a difference between the old despair and

-the new.</p>

-

-<p>The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so)

-that they were more intelligent and better educated than

-their neighbors and they felt rather sorry for those unfortunate

-barbarians. But they never quite reached the point

-at which they began to consider themselves as a race that

-had been set apart from all others because it was the chosen

-people of Zeus.</p>

-

-<p>Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape

-from its own antecedents. When the Christians adopted

-the Old Testament as one of the Holy Books of their own

-faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish doctrine that

-their race was “different” from all others and that only those

-who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines

-could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed

-to perdition.</p>

-

-<p>This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to

-those who were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to

-believe themselves predilected favorites among millions and

-millions of their fellow creatures. During many highly

-critical years it had turned the Christians into a closely-knit,

-self-contained little community which floated unconcernedly

-upon a vast ocean of paganism.</p>

-

-<p>What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched

-far and wide towards the north and the south and the

-east and the west was a subject of the most profound

-indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any of those

-other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the

-ideas of their Church into the concrete form of written<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154"></a>[154]</span>

-books. Eventually they hoped to reach a safe shore and

-there to build their city of God. Meanwhile, what those in

-other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve was none

-of their concern.</p>

-

-<p>Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions

-about the origin of man and about the limits of time

-and space. What the Egyptians and Babylonians and the

-Greeks and the Romans had discovered about these mysteries

-did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely

-convinced that all the old values had been destroyed

-with the birth of Christ.</p>

-

-<p>There was for example the problem of our earth.</p>

-

-<p>The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of

-billion of other stars.</p>

-

-<p>The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the

-little round disk on which they lived was the heart and

-center of the universe.</p>

-

-<p>It had been created for the special purpose of providing

-one particular group of people with a temporary home.

-The way in which this had been brought about was very

-simple and was fully described in the first chapter of

-Genesis.</p>

-

-<p>When it became necessary to decide just how long this

-group of predilected people had been on this earth, the

-problem became a little more complicated. On all sides

-there were evidences of great antiquity, of buried cities, of

-extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But these could

-be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out

-of existence. And after this had been done, it was a very

-simple matter to establish a fixed date for the beginning

-of time.</p>

-

-<p>In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which

-had begun at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155"></a>[155]</span>

-year, and would end at another certain hour of a certain

-day in a certain year, which existed for the exclusive benefit

-of one and only one denomination, in such a universe there

-was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians

-and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who

-only cared for general principles and juggled with the

-idea of eternity and unlimitedness both in the field of time

-and in the realm of space.</p>

-

-<p>True enough, many of those scientific people protested

-that at heart they were devout sons of the Church. But

-the true Christians knew better. No man, who was sincere

-in his protestations of love and devotion for the faith, had

-any business to know so much or to possess so many books.</p>

-

-<p>One book was enough.</p>

-

-<p>That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every

-comma, every semicolon and exclamation point had been

-written down by people who were divinely inspired.</p>

-

-<p>A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly

-amused if he had been told of a supposedly holy volume

-which contained scraps of ill-digested national history,

-doubtful love poems, the inarticulate visions of half-demented

-prophets and whole chapters devoted to the foulest

-denunciation of those who for some reason or another were

-supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s

-many tribal deities.</p>

-

-<p>But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble

-respect for the “written word” which to him was one of

-the great mysteries of civilization, and when this particular

-book, by successive councils of his Church, was recommended

-to him as being without error, flaw or slip, he willingly

-enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum

-total of everything that man had ever known, or ever

-could hope to know, and joined in the denunciation and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156"></a>[156]</span>

-persecution of those who defied Heaven by extending their

-researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and Isaiah.</p>

-

-<p>The number of people willing to die for their principles

-has always been necessarily limited.</p>

-

-<p>At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part

-of certain people is so irrepressible that some outlet must

-be found for their pent up energy. As a result of this

-conflict between curiosity and repression there grew up

-that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to

-be known as Scholasticism.</p>

-

-<p>It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was

-then that Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the

-Franks, gave birth to a son who has better claims to be

-considered the patron saint of the French nation than that

-good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of eight

-hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded

-his subjects’ loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their

-own.</p>

-

-<p>When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus,

-as you may see this very day at the bottom of many an

-ancient charter. The signature is a little clumsy. But

-Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As a boy

-he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took

-up writing, his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent

-fighting the Russians and the Moors that he had to give

-up the attempt and hired the best scribes of his day to act

-as his secretaries and do his writing for him.</p>

-

-<p>For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the

-fact that only twice within fifty years had he worn “city

-clothes” (the toga of a Roman nobleman), had a most genuine

-appreciation of the value of learning, and turned his

-court into a private university for the benefit of his own

-children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157"></a>[157]</span></p>

-

-<p>There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time,

-the new imperator of the west loved to spend his hours of

-leisure. And so great was his respect for academic democracy

-that he dropped all etiquette and as simple Brother

-David took an active share in the conversation and allowed

-himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.</p>

-

-<p>But when we come to examine the problems that interested

-this goodly company and the questions they discussed,

-we are reminded of the list of subjects chosen by

-the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.</p>

-

-<p>They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was

-true in the year 800 held equally good for 1400. This

-was not the fault of the medieval scholar, whose brain

-was undoubtedly quite as good as that of his successors

-of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the position

-of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete

-liberty of investigation, provided he does not say or do

-anything at variance with the chemical and medical information

-contained in the volumes of the first edition of

-the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when chemistry

-was practically an unknown subject and surgery was

-closely akin to butchery.</p>

-

-<p>As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the

-medieval scientist with his tremendous brain capacity and

-his very limited field of experimentation reminds one somewhat

-of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon the chassis of

-a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with

-a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove

-his strange contraption according to the rules and regulations

-of the road he became slightly ridiculous and wasted

-a terrible lot of energy without getting anywhere in particular.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158"></a>[158]</span></p>

-

-<p>Of course the best among these men were desperate at the

-rate of speed which they were forced to observe.</p>

-

-<p>They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting

-observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote

-ponderous volumes, trying to prove the exact opposite of

-what they held to be true, in order that they might give

-a hint of the things that were uppermost in their minds.</p>

-

-<p>They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus

-pocus; they wore strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles

-hanging from their ceilings; they displayed shelves

-full of bottled monsters and threw evil smelling herbs in

-the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors away

-from their front door and at the same time establish a

-reputation of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could

-be allowed to say whatever they liked without being held

-too closely responsible for their ideas. And gradually they

-developed such a thorough system of scientific camouflage

-that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they

-actually meant.</p>

-

-<p>That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves

-quite as intolerant towards science and literature

-as the Church of the Middle Ages had done is quite true,

-but it is beside the point.</p>

-

-<p>The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to

-their hearts’ content, but they were rarely able to turn

-their threats into positive acts of repression.</p>

-

-<p>The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed

-the power to crush its enemies but it made use of it, whenever

-the occasion presented itself.</p>

-

-<p>The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like

-to indulge in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values

-of tolerance and intolerance.</p>

-

-<p>But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159"></a>[159]</span>

-placed before the choice of a public recantation or an equally

-public flogging.</p>

-

-<p>And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what

-they held to be true, and preferred to waste their time on

-cross-word puzzles made up exclusively from the names of

-the animals mentioned in the Book of Revelations, let us not

-be too hard on them.</p>

-

-<p>I am quite certain that I never would have written the

-present volume, six hundred years ago.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160"></a>[160]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am

-rather like a man who has been trained to be a fiddler

-and then at the age of thirty-five is suddenly given

-a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of the

-Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in

-one sort of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different

-one. I was taught to look upon all events of the past in

-the light of a definitely established order of things; a universe

-more or less competently managed by emperors and

-kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by

-congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury.

-Furthermore, in the days of my youth, the good Lord was

-still tacitly recognized as the ex-officio head of everything,

-and a personage who had to be treated with great respect

-and decorum.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the war.</p>

-

-<p>The old order of things was completely upset, emperors

-and kings were abolished, responsible ministers were superseded

-by irresponsible secret committees, and in many parts

-of the world, Heaven was formally closed by an order in

-council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially

-proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient

-times.</p>

-

-<p>Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization

-several centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161"></a>[161]</span></p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will

-not be easy.</p>

-

-<p>Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in

-that Holy Land, some twenty years ago, fully one quarter

-of the pages of the foreign papers that reached us were

-covered with a smeary black substance, known technically

-as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which

-a careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.</p>

-

-<p>The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as

-an insufferable survival of the Dark Ages and we of the

-great republic of the west saved copies of the American

-comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks at home

-what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually

-were.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the great Russian revolution.</p>

-

-<p>For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist

-had howled that he was a poor, persecuted creature who

-enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as evidence thereof he had

-pointed to the strict supervision of all journals devoted to

-the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog

-turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the

-victorious friends of freedom abolish censorship of the press?

-By no means. They padlocked all papers and magazines

-which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the new

-masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia

-or Archangel (not much to choose) and in general showed

-themselves a hundred times more intolerant than the much

-maligned ministers and police sergeants of the Little White

-Father.</p>

-

-<p>It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community,

-which heartily believed in the motto of Milton that

-the “liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according

-to our own conscience, is the highest form of liberty.”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162"></a>[162]</span></p>

-

-<p>“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see

-the day when the Sermon on the Mount was declared to

-be a dangerous pro-German document which must not be

-allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million sovereign

-citizens and the publication of which would expose the

-editors and the printers to fines and imprisonment.</p>

-

-<p>In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to

-drop the further study of history and to take up short

-story writing or real estate.</p>

-

-<p>But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall

-stick to my job, trying to remember that in a well regulated

-state, every decent citizen is supposed to have the

-right to say and think and utter whatever he feels to be

-true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and

-comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners

-of polite society or break one of the rules of the local

-police.</p>

-

-<p>This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all

-official censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought

-to watch out for certain magazines and papers which are

-being printed for the purpose of turning pornography

-into private gain. But for the rest, I would let every one

-print whatever he liked.</p>

-

-<p>I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical

-person who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with

-the history of the last five hundred years. That period

-shows clearly that violent methods of suppression of the

-printed or spoken word have never yet done the slightest

-good.</p>

-

-<p>Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is

-contained in a small and hermetically closed space and subjected

-to a violent impact from without. A poor devil, full

-of half-baked economic notions, when left to himself will<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163"></a>[163]</span>

-attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and as a rule

-will be laughed at for his pains.</p>

-

-<p>The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate

-sheriff, dragged to jail and condemned to thirty-five years

-of solitary confinement, will become an object of great pity

-and in the end will be regarded and honored as a martyr.</p>

-

-<p>But it will be well to remember one thing.</p>

-

-<p>There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as

-martyrs for good causes. They are tricky people and one

-never can tell what they will do next.</p>

-

-<p>Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If

-they have anything to say that is good, we ought to know

-it, and if not, they will soon be forgotten. The Greeks

-seem to have felt that way, and the Romans did until the

-days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief

-of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine

-personage, a second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand

-miles removed from all ordinary mortals, this was

-changed.</p>

-

-<p>The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of

-“offering insult to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a

-purely political misdemeanor and from the time of Augustus

-until the days of Justinian, many people were sent to prison

-because they had been a little too outspoken in their opinions

-about their rulers. But if one let the person of the

-emperor alone, there was practically no other subject of

-conversation which the Roman must avoid.</p>

-

-<p>This happy condition came to an end when the world

-was brought under the domination of the Church. The

-line between good and bad, between orthodox and heretical,

-was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead more than

-a few years. During the second half of the first century,

-the apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164"></a>[164]</span>

-of Ephesus in Asia Minor, a place famous for its

-amulets and charms. He went about preaching and casting

-out devils, and with such great success that he convinced

-many people of the error of their heathenish ways.

-As a token of repentance they came together one fine day

-with all their books of magic and burned more than ten

-thousand dollars worth of secret formulae, as you may read

-in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.</p>

-

-<p>This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part

-of a group of repentant sinners and it is not stated that

-Paul made an attempt to forbid the other Ephesians from

-reading or owning similar books.</p>

-

-<p>Such a step was not taken until a century later.</p>

-

-<p>Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this

-same city of Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul

-was condemned and the faithful were admonished not to

-read it.</p>

-

-<p>During the next two hundred years, there was very little

-censorship. There also were very few books.</p>

-

-<p>But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian

-Church had become the official church of the Empire,

-the supervision of the written word became part of

-the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were absolutely

-forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the

-people were warned that they must read them at their own

-risk. Until authors found it more convenient to assure

-themselves of the approval of the authorities before they

-published their works and made it a rule to send their manuscripts

-to the local bishops for their approbation.</p>

-

-<p>Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his

-works would be allowed to exist. A book which one Pope

-had pronounced harmless might be denounced as blasphemous

-and indecent by his successor.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165"></a>[165]</span></p>

-

-<p>On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes

-quite effectively against the risk of being burned together

-with their parchment offspring and the system worked well

-enough as long as books were copied by hand and it took five

-whole years to get out an edition of three volumes.</p>

-

-<p>All this of course was changed by the famous invention

-of Johann Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.</p>

-

-<p>After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising

-publisher was able to produce as many as four or five hundred

-copies in less than two weeks’ time and in the short

-period between 1453 and 1500 the people of western and

-southern Europe were presented with not less than forty

-thousand different editions of books that had thus far been

-obtainable only in some of the better stocked libraries.</p>

-

-<p>The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the

-number of available books with very serious misgivings.

-It was difficult enough to catch a single heretic with a single

-home made copy of the Gospels. What then of twenty million

-heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited

-volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority

-and it was deemed necessary to appoint a special

-tribunal to inspect all forthcoming publications at their

-source and say which could be published and which must

-never see the light of day.</p>

-

-<p>Out of the different lists of books which from time to time

-were published by this committee as containing “forbidden

-knowledge” grew that famous Index which came to enjoy

-almost as nefarious a reputation as the Inquisition.</p>

-

-<p>But it would be unfair to create the impression that such

-a supervision of the printing-press was something peculiar

-to the Catholic Church. Many states, frightened by the

-sudden avalanche of printed material that threatened to

-upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their local<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166"></a>[166]</span>

-publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and

-had forbidden them to print anything that did not bear

-the official mark of approbation.</p>

-

-<p>But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued

-until today. And even there it has been greatly

-modified since the middle of the sixteenth century. It had

-to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously that even

-that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called

-Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to

-inspect all printed works, was soon years behind in its task.

-Not to mention the flood of rag-pulp and printers-ink which

-was poured upon the landscape in the form of newspapers

-and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however

-diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify,

-in less than a couple of thousand years.</p>

-

-<p>But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion

-how terribly this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon

-the rulers who force it upon their unfortunate subjects.</p>

-

-<p>Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman

-Empire, had declared himself against the persecution of

-authors as “a foolish thing which tended to advertise books

-which otherwise would never attract any public attention.”</p>

-

-<p>The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner

-had the Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden

-books was promoted to a sort of handy guide for those

-who wished to keep themselves thoroughly informed upon

-the subject of current literature. More than that. During

-the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany

-and in the Low Countries maintained special agents

-in Rome whose business it was to get hold of advance copies

-of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon as they had obtained

-these, they entrusted them to special couriers who raced

-across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167"></a>[167]</span>

-valuable information might be delivered to their patrons with

-the least possible loss of time. Then the German and the

-Dutch printing shops would set to work and would get out

-hastily printed special editions which were sold at an exorbitant

-profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory

-by an army of professional book-leggers.</p>

-

-<p>But the number of copies that could be carried across

-the frontier remained necessarily very small and in such

-countries as Italy and Spain and Portugal, where the Index

-was actually enforced until a short time ago, the results of

-this policy of repression became very noticeable.</p>

-

-<p>If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for

-progress, the reason was not difficult to find. Not only

-were the students in their universities deprived of all foreign

-text-books, but they were forced to use a domestic product

-of very inferior quality.</p>

-

-<p>And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from

-occupying themselves seriously with literature or science.

-For no man in his senses would undertake to write a book

-when he ran the risk of seeing his work “corrected” to

-pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond recognition

-by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial

-Board of Investigators.</p>

-

-<p>Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes

-in a wine-shop.</p>

-

-<p>Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his

-people, he wrote the story of Don Quixote.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168"></a>[168]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X<br>

-<span class="smaller">CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN

-GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend

-most eagerly to those who are tired of modern fiction,

-there occurs a stereotype sort of warning in many of

-the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his more

-timid friends.</p>

-

-<p>“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the

-Lutheran controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very

-careful how you handle it, because you might easily offend

-the Pope, who wishes you well.”</p>

-

-<p>Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge

-tells me that you are about to publish a book of

-short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do not incur the displeasure

-of the Emperor, who might be in a position to

-do you great harm.”</p>

-

-<p>Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England

-or the faculty of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor

-of theology in Cambridge who must be treated with

-special consideration, lest the author be deprived of his

-income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into

-the clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.</p>

-

-<p>Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion)

-is relegated to the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition

-has closed its doors these hundred years, protection is of

-little practical use in a career devoted to literature and the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169"></a>[169]</span>

-word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where historians

-come together.</p>

-

-<p>But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended

-to write a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort

-of letters of admonition and advice began to find their way

-to my cloistered cell.</p>

-

-<p>“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,”

-writes the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure

-that you mention this most regrettable fact in your forthcoming

-book.”</p>

-

-<p>Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has

-started to boycott a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic.

-You will want to say something about this in your

-story of tolerance.”</p>

-

-<p>And so on.</p>

-

-<p>No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly

-and altogether reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come

-within the jurisdiction of a volume on tolerance. They are

-merely manifestations of bad manners and a lack of decent

-public spirit. They are very different from that official

-form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the

-laws of the Church and the State and which made persecution

-a holy duty on the part of all good citizens.</p>

-

-<p>History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching

-by Rembrandt. It must cast a vivid light upon certain

-selected causes, on those which are best and most important,

-and leave all the rest in the shadow and unseen.</p>

-

-<p>Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the

-modern spirit of intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled

-in our news sheets, it is possible to discern signs of a

-more hopeful future.</p>

-

-<p>For nowadays many things which previous generations

-would have accepted as self-evident and which would have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170"></a>[170]</span>

-been passed by with the remark that “it has always been that

-way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often our neighbors

-rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded

-as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our

-fathers and our grandfathers and not infrequently they are

-successful in their warfare upon some particularly obnoxious

-demonstration of the mob spirit.</p>

-

-<p>This book must be kept very short.</p>

-

-<p>I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful

-pawn-brokers, the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic

-supremacy, the dark ignorance of backwoods evangelists,

-the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis. These

-good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.</p>

-

-<p>But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the

-State, they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized

-countries, such a possibility is entirely precluded.</p>

-

-<p>Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more

-discomfort in any given community than the combined efforts

-of measles, small-pox and a gossiping woman. But private

-intolerance does not possess executioners of its own. If,

-as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes

-the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law

-and becomes a proper subject for police supervision.</p>

-

-<p>Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot

-prescribe to an entire nation what it shall think and say and

-eat and drink. If it tries to do this, it creates such a terrific

-resentment among all decent folk, that the new ordinance

-becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out even

-in the District of Columbia.</p>

-

-<p>In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the

-indifference of the majority of the citizens of a free country

-will allow it to go, and no further. Whereas official

-intolerance is practically almighty.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171"></a>[171]</span></p>

-

-<p>It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.</p>

-

-<p>It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims

-of its meddlesome fury. It will listen to no argument.

-And ever again it backs up its decisions by an appeal to

-the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain the will

-of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were

-an exclusive possession of those who had been successful at

-the most recent elections.</p>

-

-<p>If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used

-in the sense of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention

-to the private variety, have patience with me.</p>

-

-<p>I can only do one thing at a time.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172"></a>[172]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI<br>

-<span class="smaller">RENAISSANCE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes

-pleasure in asking himself, what do billiard-balls

-and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles and boiled

-shirts and door-mats think of this world?</p>

-

-<p>But what I would like to know is the exact psychological

-reaction of the men who are ordered to handle the big modern

-siege guns. During the war a great many people performed

-a great many strange tasks, but was there ever a

-more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?</p>

-

-<p>All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.</p>

-

-<p>A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red

-glow whether he had hit the gas factory or not.</p>

-

-<p>The submarine commander could return after a couple

-of hours to judge by the abundance of flotsam in how far

-he had been successful.</p>

-

-<p>The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of

-realizing that by his mere continued presence in a particular

-trench he was at least holding his own.</p>

-

-<p>Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible

-object, could take down the telephone and could ask

-his colleague, hidden in a dead tree seven miles away, whether

-the doomed church tower was showing signs of deterioration

-or whether he should try again at a different angle.</p>

-

-<p>But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange

-and unreal world of their own. Even with the assistance<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173"></a>[173]</span>

-of a couple of full-fledged professors of ballistics, they were

-unable to foretell what fate awaited those projectiles which

-they shot so blithely into space. Their shells might actually

-hit the object for which they were destined. They

-might land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart

-of a fortress. But then again they might strike a

-church or an orphan asylum or they might bury themselves

-peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing

-any harm whatsoever.</p>

-

-<p>Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the

-siege-gunners. They too handle a sort of heavy artillery.

-Their literary missiles may start a revolution or a conflagration

-in the most unlikely spots. But more often they

-are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until

-they are used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand

-or a flower pot.</p>

-

-<p>Surely there never was a period in history when so much

-rag-pulp was consumed within so short a space as the era

-commonly known as the Renaissance.</p>

-

-<p>Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula,

-every Doctor Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and

-Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton plain rushed into

-print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention

-the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation

-of the Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the

-best pattern of their Roman grandfathers, and the countless

-lovers of coins, statuary, images, pictures, manuscripts

-and ancient armor who for almost three centuries kept themselves

-busy classifying, ordering, tabulating, listing, filing

-and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral

-ruins and who then published their collections in countless

-folios illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings

-and the most ponderous of wood-cuts.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174"></a>[174]</span></p>

-

-<p>This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for

-the Frobens and the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other

-new firms of printers who were making a fortune out of the

-invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but otherwise the

-literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly

-affect the state of that world in which the authors of the

-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves.

-The distinction of having contributed something

-new was restricted to only a very few heroes of the quill

-and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely

-discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had

-been successful and how much damage their writings had

-actually done. But first and last they managed to demolish

-a great many of the obstacles which stood in the way

-of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude

-for the thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of

-rubbish which otherwise would continue to clutter our intellectual

-front yard.</p>

-

-<p>Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily

-a forward-looking movement. It turned its back

-in disgust upon the recent past, called the works of its immediate

-predecessors “barbaric” (or “Gothic” in the language

-of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the same

-reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest

-upon those arts which seem to be pervaded with that

-curious substance known as the “classical spirit.”</p>

-

-<p>If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow

-for the liberty of conscience and for tolerance and for a

-better world in general, it was done in spite of the men

-who were considered the leaders of the new movement.</p>

-

-<p>Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there

-had been people who had questioned the rights of a Roman

-bishop to dictate to Bohemian peasants and to English yeomen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175"></a>[175]</span>

-in what language they should say their prayers, in

-what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much

-they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should

-read and how they should bring up their children. And

-all of them had been crushed by the strength of that super-state,

-the power of which they had undertaken to defy.

-Even when they had acted as champions and representatives

-of a national cause, they had failed.</p>

-

-<p>The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously

-into the river Rhine, were a warning to all the

-world that the Papal Monarchy still ruled supreme.</p>

-

-<p>The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner,

-told the humble peasants of Leicestershire that councils and

-Popes could reach beyond the grave.</p>

-

-<p>Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.</p>

-

-<p>The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully

-during fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could

-not be taken by assault. The scandals which had taken

-place within these hallowed enclosures; the wars between

-three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate and

-exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption

-of the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws

-were made for the purpose of being broken by those who

-were willing to pay for such favors; the utter demoralization

-of monastic life; the venality of those who used the

-recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to

-blackmail poor parents into paying large sums of money

-for the benefit of their dead children; all these things, although

-widely known, never really threatened the safety of

-the Church.</p>

-

-<p>But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and

-women who were not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters,

-who had no particular grievance against either pope or<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176"></a>[176]</span>

-bishop, these caused the damage which finally made the old

-edifice collapse.</p>

-

-<p>What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish

-with his high ideals of Christian virtue was brought

-about by a motley crowd of private citizens who had no

-other ambition than to live and die (preferably at a ripe

-old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of this world

-and faithful sons of the Mother Church.</p>

-

-<p>They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They

-represented every sort of profession and they would have

-been very angry, had an historian told them what they were

-doing.</p>

-

-<p>For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.</p>

-

-<p>We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen

-such wondrous sights that his neighbors, accustomed to the

-smaller scale of their western cities, called him “Million

-Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he told them

-of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls

-that would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black

-Sea.</p>

-

-<p>All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important

-rôle in the history of progress. He was not much

-of a writer. He shared the prejudice of his class and his

-age against the literary profession. A gentleman (even

-a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar with

-double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a

-goose-quill. Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to

-turn author. But the fortunes of war carried him into a

-Genoese prison. And there, to while away the tedious hours

-of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened

-to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout

-way the people of Europe learned many things about

-this world which they had never known before. For although<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177"></a>[177]</span>

-Polo was a simple-minded fellow who firmly believed

-that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor

-had been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who

-wanted to show the heathen “what true faith could do,”

-and who swallowed all the stories about people without heads

-and chickens with three legs which were so popular in his

-day, his report did more to upset the geographical theories

-of the Church than anything that had appeared during

-the previous twelve hundred years.</p>

-

-<p>Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the

-Church. He would have been terribly upset if any one

-had compared him with his near-contemporary, the famous

-Roger Bacon, who was an out and out scientist and paid

-for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of enforced

-literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.</p>

-

-<p>And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.</p>

-

-<p>For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could

-follow Bacon when he went chasing rainbows, and spun those

-fine evolutionary theories which threatened to upset all the

-ideas held sacred in his own time, every citizen who had

-been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the

-world was full of a number of things the existence of which

-the authors of the Old Testament had never even suspected.</p>

-

-<p>I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single

-book caused that rebellion against scriptural authority

-which was to occur before the world could gain a modicum

-of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever the result of

-centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and

-straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators

-and the travelers, understandable to all the people,

-did a great deal to bring about that spirit of scepticism which

-characterizes the latter half of the Renaissance and which

-allowed people to say and write things which only a few<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178"></a>[178]</span>

-years before would have brought them into contact with the

-agents of the Inquisition.</p>

-

-<p>Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio

-listened on the first day of their agreeable exile from

-Florence. All religious systems, so it told, were probably

-equally true and equally false. But if this were true, and

-they were all equally true and false, then how could people

-be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither

-be proven nor contradicted?</p>

-

-<p>Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar

-like Lorenzo Valla. He died as a highly respectable member

-of the government of the Roman Church. Yet in the

-pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly proven

-that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the

-provinces of the West,” which Constantine the Great was

-supposed to have made to Pope Sylvester (and upon which

-the Popes had ever since based their claims to be regarded

-as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but a clumsy

-fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the

-Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.</p>

-

-<p>Or to return to more practical questions, what were

-faithful Christians, carefully reared in the ideas of Saint

-Augustine who had taught that a belief in the presence

-of people on the other side of the earth was both blasphemous

-and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be

-able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had

-no reason to exist, what indeed were the good people of

-the year 1499 to think of this doctrine when Vasco da Gama

-returned from his first voyage to the Indies and described

-the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other

-side of this planet?</p>

-

-<p>What were these same simple folk, who had always been

-told that our world was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179"></a>[179]</span>

-the center of the universe, what were they to believe when

-the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage around the

-globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was

-shown to contain some rather serious errors?</p>

-

-<p>I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was

-not an era of conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual

-matters it often showed a most regrettable lack of real interest.

-Everything during these three hundred years was

-dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment. Even

-the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous

-doctrines of some of their subjects, were only too happy

-to invite those self-same rebels for dinner if they happened

-to be good conversationalists and knew something about

-printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue, like

-Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives

-as the bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked

-the fundaments of the Christian faith with a great

-deal more violence than good taste.</p>

-

-<p>But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest

-in the business of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe

-undercurrent of discontent with the existing order of society

-and the restrictions put upon the development of human

-reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.</p>

-

-<p>Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus,

-there is an interval of almost two centuries. During these

-two centuries, the copyist and the printer never enjoyed an

-idle moment. And outside of the books published by the

-Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important

-piece of work which did not contain some indirect reference

-to the sad plight into which the world had fallen when

-the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome had been superseded

-by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180"></a>[180]</span>

-western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant

-monks.</p>

-

-<p>The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’

-Medici were not particularly interested in ethics. They

-were practical men who made the best of a practical world.

-Outwardly they remained at peace with the Church because

-it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which

-was capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously

-took part in any of the several attempts at reform

-or questioned the institutions under which they lived.</p>

-

-<p>But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their

-continual search after new emotions, the very instability

-of their restless minds, caused a world which had been

-brought up in the conviction “We know” to ask the question

-“Do we really know?”</p>

-

-<p>And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future

-generations than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the

-assembled works of Raffael.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181"></a>[181]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE REFORMATION</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Modern psychology has taught us several useful

-things about ourselves. One of them is the fact

-that we rarely do anything actuated by one single

-motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university

-or refuse a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we

-proclaim that the true life of intellectual freedom can only

-be lived abroad or vow that we will never again leave the

-shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black

-white or white black, there are always a number of divergent

-reasons which have caused us to make our decision,

-and way down deep in our hearts we know this to be true.

-But as we would cut a sorry figure with the world in general

-if we should ever dare to be quite honest with ourselves

-or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable

-and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit

-for public consumption and then expose it for all the world

-to behold as “the reason why we did so and so.”</p>

-

-<p>But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that

-it is quite possible to fool most of the people most of the

-time, no one has as yet discovered a method by which the

-average individual can fool himself for more than a few

-minutes.</p>

-

-<p>We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing

-truth and therefore ever since the beginning of civilization

-people have tacitly agreed with each other that this should

-never under any circumstances be referred to in public.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182"></a>[182]</span></p>

-

-<p>What we think in private, that is our own business. As

-long as we maintain an outward air of respectability, we

-are perfectly satisfied with ourselves and merrily act upon

-the principle “You believe my fibs and I will believe yours.”</p>

-

-<p>Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception

-to this generous rule of conduct. As a result, nature is

-rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

-And as history thus far has been a pastime of the few, the

-poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull life, especially

-when we compare it to the career of many of her less respectable

-sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing

-and have been invited to every party ever since the beginning

-of time. This of course has been a source of great

-annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her own subtle

-way she has managed to get her revenge.</p>

-

-<p>A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one

-and ofttimes very expensive in the matter of human lives

-and property.</p>

-

-<p>For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that

-systematic lying, continued during the course of centuries,

-will eventually play hob with the peace and happiness of

-the entire world, our planet is at once enveloped in the

-smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry begin

-to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers

-commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And

-ere all these people have been safely returned to their respective

-homes or cemeteries, whole countries have been

-laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been drained

-down to the last kopek.</p>

-

-<p>Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn

-upon the members of our guild that history is a science as

-well as an art and is therefore subject to certain of the immutable

-laws of nature which thus far have only been respected<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183"></a>[183]</span>

-in chemical laboratories and astronomical observatories.

-And as a result we are now doing some very useful

-scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit

-to all coming generations.</p>

-

-<p>Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the

-head of this chapter, to wit: the Reformation.</p>

-

-<p>Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions

-regarding this great social and spiritual upheaval. It was

-either wholly good or wholly bad.</p>

-

-<p>According to the adherents of the former opinion it had

-been the result of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on

-the part of a number of noble theologians who, profoundly

-shocked by the wickedness and the venality of the papal

-super-state, had established a separate church of their own

-where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those

-who were seriously trying to be true Christians.</p>

-

-<p>Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.</p>

-

-<p>The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond

-the Alps, was the result of a damnable and most reprehensible

-conspiracy on the part of a number of despicable princes

-who wanted to get unmarried and who besides hoped to

-acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their

-Holy Mother the Church.</p>

-

-<p>As usual, both sides were right and both sides were

-wrong.</p>

-

-<p>The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with

-all sorts of motives. And it is only within very recent times

-that we have begun to realize how religious discontent played

-only a minor rôle in this great upheaval and that it was

-really an unavoidable social and economic revolution with

-a slightly theological background.</p>

-

-<p>Of course it is much easier to teach our children that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184"></a>[184]</span>

-good Prince Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took

-a profound personal interest in the reformed doctrines, than

-to explain to them the complicated machinations of an unscrupulous

-politician who willingly accepted the help of the

-infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In consequence

-whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years

-made a magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave

-who hoped to see the house of Hesse play the rôle thus

-far played by the rival house of Hapsburg.</p>

-

-<p>On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope

-Clement into a loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants

-of his declining strength trying to prevent his flocks

-from following false leaders, than to depict him as a typical

-prince of the house of Medici who regarded the Reformation

-as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks

-and used the power of the Church to further the interests

-of his own Italian fatherland, that we need feel no surprise

-if such a fabulous figure smiles at us from the pages of

-most Catholic text-books.</p>

-

-<p>But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe,

-we fortunate settlers in a new world are under no obligation

-to persist in the errors of our continental ancestors and are

-at liberty to draw a few conclusions of our own.</p>

-

-<p>Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter

-of Luther, was a man dominated by an enormous

-political ambition, it does not necessarily follow that he was

-insincere in his religious convictions.</p>

-

-<p>By no means.</p>

-

-<p>When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the

-year 1529, he knew as well as his fellow signers that they

-were about to “expose themselves to the violence of a terrible

-storm,” and might end their lives on the scaffold.

-If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185"></a>[185]</span>

-would never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually

-played.</p>

-

-<p>But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is

-exceedingly difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an

-historical character (or for that matter, any of our immediate

-neighbors) without a profound knowledge of all

-the many motives which have inspired him to do what he

-has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted

-to do.</p>

-

-<p>The French have a proverb that “to know everything is

-to forgive everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I

-would like to offer an amendment and change it as follows:

-“To know everything is to understand everything.” We

-can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who

-ages ago reserved that right to himself.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand”

-and that is more than enough for our limited human ability.</p>

-

-<p>And now let me return to the Reformation, which started

-me upon this slight detour.</p>

-

-<p>As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily

-a manifestation of a new spirit which had been born

-as a result of the economic and political development of

-the last three centuries and which came to be known as “nationalism”

-and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that

-foreign super-state into which all European countries had

-been forced during the course of the last five centuries.</p>

-

-<p>Without the common denominator of some such grievance,

-it would never have been possible to unite Germans

-and Finns and Danes and Swedes and Frenchmen and Englishmen

-and Norsemen into a single cohesive party, strong

-enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they

-had been held for such a long time.</p>

-

-<p>If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186"></a>[186]</span>

-had not been temporarily bound together by one great ideal,

-far surpassing their own private grudges and aspirations,

-the Reformation could never have succeeded.</p>

-

-<p>It would have degenerated into a series of small local

-uprisings, easily suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries

-and half a dozen energetic inquisitors.</p>

-

-<p>The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their

-followers would have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses

-and Albigenses had been slaughtered before them.

-And the Papal Monarchy would have scored another easy

-triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those

-guilty of a “breach of discipline.”</p>

-

-<p>Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded

-by the smallest of all possible margins. And as soon as

-the victory had been won and the menace which had threatened

-the existence of all the rebels had been removed, the

-Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number

-of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished

-scale to repeat all the errors of which their enemies had been

-guilty in the heyday of their power.</p>

-

-<p>A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten,

-but a very wise fellow) once said that we must learn

-to love humanity in spite of itself.</p>

-

-<p>To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries

-upon this era of great hope and even greater disappointment,

-to think of the sublime courage of so many

-men and women who wasted their lives on the scaffold and

-on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be realized,

-to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure

-citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to

-remember the utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as

-a movement towards a more liberal and more intelligent

-world, is to put one’s charity to a most severe test.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187"></a>[187]</span></p>

-

-<p>For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away

-from this world many things that were good and noble and

-beautiful and it added a great many others that were narrow

-and hateful and graceless. And instead of making the

-history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it

-made it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however,

-was not so much the fault of the Reformation as of

-certain inherent weaknesses in the mental habits of most

-people.</p>

-

-<p>They refuse to be hurried.</p>

-

-<p>They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their

-leaders.</p>

-

-<p>They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will

-all cross the bridge that leads into the newly discovered

-territory. But they will do so in their own good time and

-bringing with them as much of the ancestral furniture as

-they can possibly carry.</p>

-

-<p>As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish

-an entirely new relationship between the individual Christian

-and his God, which was to do away with all the prejudices

-and all the corruptions of a bygone era, became so

-thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its

-trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor

-backward and soon looked for all the world like a replica

-of that papal establishment which it held in such great

-abhorrence.</p>

-

-<p>For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion.

-It could not rise above the mean average of intelligence of

-the majority of its adherents.</p>

-

-<p>And as a result the people of western and northern Europe

-did not progress as much as might have been expected.</p>

-

-<p>Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188"></a>[188]</span>

-Reformation gave the world a book which was held to be

-infallible.</p>

-

-<p>Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose

-a thousand and one little potentates, each one of whom in

-his own way tried to rule supreme.</p>

-

-<p>Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined

-halves, the ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics,

-it created endless little groups of dissenters who had nothing

-in common but a most intense hatred for all those who failed

-to share their own opinions. Instead of establishing a reign

-of tolerance, it followed the example of the early Church

-and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched

-behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions,

-it declared bitter warfare upon those who dared to

-disagree with the officially established doctrines of the community

-in which they happened to live.</p>

-

-<p>All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.</p>

-

-<p>But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development

-of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.</p>

-

-<p>To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin,

-there exists only one word, and rather a terrible word,

-“colossal.”</p>

-

-<p>A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater

-college somewhere in the backwoods of the German

-hinterland, who boldly burns a Papal Bull and hammers

-his own rebellious opinions to the door of a church; a sickly

-French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a fortress

-which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy;

-such men present us with examples of fortitude so unique

-that the modern world can offer no adequate comparison.</p>

-

-<p>That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters,

-friends with a purpose of their own and supporters who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189"></a>[189]</span>

-hoped to fish successfully in troubled waters, all this is

-neither here nor there.</p>

-

-<p>When these men began to gamble with their lives for the

-sake of their conscience, they could not foresee that this

-would happen and that most of the nations of the north

-would eventually enlist under their banners.</p>

-

-<p>But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of

-their own making, they were obliged to go whither the current

-carried them.</p>

-

-<p>Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water

-took all of their strength. In far away Rome the Pope

-had at last learned that this contemptible disturbance was

-something more serious than a personal quarrel between a

-few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue

-on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great

-joy of his many creditors, he temporarily ceased building

-his pet cathedral and called together a council of war. The

-papal bulls and excommunications flew fast and furiously.

-Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the rebellion,

-with their backs against the wall, were forced to

-stand and fight.</p>

-

-<p>It was not the first time in history that great men in the

-midst of a desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion.

-The same Luther who at one time proclaims that it is

-“against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,” a few years

-later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of

-the wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have

-a leaning towards the ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems

-to have lost his reason.</p>

-

-<p>The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting

-that we must not force our own system of logic upon God,

-ends his days by burning an opponent whose power of

-reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190"></a>[190]</span></p>

-

-<p>The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters

-of tomorrow.</p>

-

-<p>And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has

-at last followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained

-faithful sons of the Middle Ages as long as they lived.</p>

-

-<p>Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to

-them in the light of a virtue. As long as they themselves

-were outcasts, they were willing to invoke the divine right

-of freedom of conscience that they might use it as an argument

-against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this

-trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the

-Protestant junk-room, already cluttered with so many other

-good intentions that had been discarded as unpractical.

-There it lay, forgotten and neglected, until a great many

-years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk full of

-old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off

-the rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different

-nature from those who had fought the good fight in

-the early days of the sixteenth century.</p>

-

-<p>And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly

-to the cause of tolerance. Not through what it accomplished

-directly. In that field the gain was small indeed.

-But indirectly the results of the Reformation were all on

-the side of progress.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible.

-The Church had never positively forbidden people to read

-the Bible, but neither had it encouraged the study of the

-sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at last every honest

-baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the holy

-work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and

-could draw his own conclusions without running the risk

-of being burned at the stake.</p>

-

-<p>Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191"></a>[191]</span>

-fear which we feel before the mysteries of the unknown.

-During the first two hundred years which followed immediately

-upon the Reformation, pious Protestants believed

-everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s

-ass to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a

-single comma (the “inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham

-Colovius!) knew better than to let their sceptical tittering

-be heard by the community at large. Not because

-they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant

-pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly

-unpleasant and the economic consequences of a public

-ministerial censure were often very serious, not to say disastrous.</p>

-

-<p>Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book

-which was really the national history of a small nation of

-shepherds and traders was to bear results which Luther

-and Calvin and the other reformers had never foreseen.</p>

-

-<p>If they had, I am certain they would have shared the

-Church’s dislike of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept

-the scriptures carefully out of the hands of the uninitiated.

-For in the end, an increasing number of serious students

-began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly

-interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling

-tales of cruelty, greed and murder that it could

-not possibly have been inspired and must, by the very nature

-of its contents, be the product of a people who had still lived

-in a state of semi-barbarism.</p>

-

-<p>After that, of course, it was impossible for many people

-to regard the Bible as the only font of all true wisdom.

-And once this obstacle to free speculation had been removed,

-the current of scientific investigation, dammed up for almost

-a thousand years, began to flow in its natural channel

-and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192"></a>[192]</span>

-philosophers were picked up where they had been left off

-twenty centuries before.</p>

-

-<p>And in the second place, and this is even more important

-from the point of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered

-northern and western Europe from the dictatorship

-of a power which under the guise of a religious organization

-had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and highly

-despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.</p>

-

-<p>With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly

-agree. But they too have reason to be grateful to a movement

-which was not only unavoidable, but which was to render

-a most salutary service to their own faith. For, thrown

-upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic effort

-to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once

-sacred name a byword for rapacity and tyranny.</p>

-

-<p>And she succeeded most brilliantly.</p>

-

-<p>After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias

-were tolerated in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before

-continued to be Italians. A deflection from this rule

-was practically impossible, as the Roman proletariat would

-have turned the city upside down if the cardinals entrusted

-with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German

-or a Frenchman or any other foreigner.</p>

-

-<p>The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care

-and only candidates of the highest character could hope

-to be considered. And these new masters, faithfully aided

-by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries, began a thorough

-house-cleaning.</p>

-

-<p>The sale of indulgences came to an end.</p>

-

-<p>Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth

-to obey) the rules laid down by their founders.</p>

-

-<p>Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized

-cities.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193"></a>[193]</span></p>

-

-<p>And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance

-was replaced by an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent

-in good deeds and in humble service towards those unfortunate

-people who were not strong enough to carry the

-burden of existence by themselves.</p>

-

-<p>Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been

-lost was never regained. Speaking with a certain geographical

-freedom, the northern half of Europe remained

-Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.</p>

-

-<p>But when we translate the result of the Reformation into

-the language of pictures, the actual changes which took

-place in Europe become more clearly revealed.</p>

-

-<p>During the Middle Ages there had been one universal

-spiritual and intellectual prison-house.</p>

-

-<p>The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building

-and out of part of the available material it had constructed

-a jail of its own.</p>

-

-<p>After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons,

-one reserved exclusively for the Catholics, the other for

-the Protestants.</p>

-

-<p>At least that had been the original plan.</p>

-

-<p>But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage

-of centuries of training along the lines of persecution and

-repression, failed to make their lockup dissenter-proof.</p>

-

-<p>Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large

-number of the unruly inmates escaped.</p>

-

-<p>Ere long the entire building was a wreck.</p>

-

-<p>At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads

-of stones and beams and iron bars which they used

-the next morning to build a little fortress of their own.

-But although this had the outward appearance of that original

-jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194"></a>[194]</span>

-the Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner

-strength.</p>

-

-<p>No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a

-new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates,

-than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled

-trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been

-deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication,

-torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were

-absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were

-forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such

-a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and

-proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their

-temporary convictions.</p>

-

-<p>This process was repeated so often that finally there

-developed a sort of spiritual no-man’s-land between the

-different lockups where curious souls could roam at random

-and where honest people could think whatever they

-pleased without hindrance or molestation.</p>

-

-<p>And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered

-to the cause of tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195"></a>[195]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII<br>

-<span class="smaller">ERASMUS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis.

-Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon

-other occasions it does not make itself manifest until

-the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book without

-a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles.

-There probably is something the matter with it.</p>

-

-<p>The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes

-ago, for I have now reached the point where the idea of

-a work upon the subject of tolerance in the year of grace

-1925 seems quite preposterous; where all the labor spent

-thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light of

-so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of

-all to make a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and

-Montaigne and White and use the carbon copies of my own

-work to light the stove.</p>

-

-<p>How to explain this?</p>

-

-<p>There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the

-inevitable feeling of boredom which overtakes an author

-when he has been living with his topic on a very intimate

-footing for too long a time. In the second place, the suspicion

-that books of this sort will not be of the slightest

-practical value. And in the third place the fear that the

-present volume will be merely used as a quarry from which

-our less tolerant fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts

-with which to bolster up their own bad causes.</p>

-

-<p>But apart from these arguments (which hold good for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196"></a>[196]</span>

-most serious books) there is in the present case the almost

-insurmountable difficulty of “system.”</p>

-

-<p>A story in order to be a success must have a beginning

-and an end. This book has a beginning, but can it ever

-have an end?</p>

-

-<p>What I mean is this.</p>

-

-<p>I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in

-the name of righteousness and justice, but really caused

-by intolerance.</p>

-

-<p>I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell

-when intolerance was elevated to the rank of one of the

-major virtues.</p>

-

-<p>I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers

-shout with one accord, “Down with this curse, and let us

-all be tolerant!”</p>

-

-<p>But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how

-this highly desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks

-which undertake to give us instruction in everything

-from after-dinner speaking to ventriloquism. In an advertisement

-of a correspondence course last Sunday I read

-of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which

-the institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange

-for a very small gratuity. But no one thus far has offered

-to explain in forty (or in forty thousand) lessons “how to

-become tolerant.”</p>

-

-<p>And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to

-so many secrets, refuses to be of any use in this emergency.</p>

-

-<p>Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to

-slavery or free trade or capital punishment or the growth

-and development of Gothic architecture, for slavery and

-free trade and capital punishment and Gothic architecture

-are very definite and concrete things. For lack of all other

-material we could at least study the lives of the men and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197"></a>[197]</span>

-women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery

-and capital punishment and Gothic architecture or those

-who had opposed them. And from the manner in which

-those excellent people had approached their subjects, from

-their personal habits, their associations, their preferences

-in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches

-they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about

-the ideals which they had so energetically espoused or so

-bitterly denounced.</p>

-

-<p>But there never were any professional protagonists of

-tolerance. Those who worked most zealously for the great

-cause did so incidentally. Their tolerance was a by-product.

-They were engaged in other pursuits. They were statesmen

-or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans.

-In the midst of the king business or their medical practice

-or making steel engravings they found time to say a few

-good words for tolerance, but the struggle for tolerance

-was not the whole of their careers. They were interested

-in it as they may have been interested in playing chess or

-fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted

-group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great

-and Thomas Jefferson and Montaigne as boon companions!)

-it is almost impossible to discover that common trait of

-character which as a rule is to be found in all those who

-are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing

-or delivering the world from sin.</p>

-

-<p>In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams.

-Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for

-every dilemma. But upon this particular subject, the Bible

-and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even old Benham

-leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote

-from memory) came nearest to the problem when he said

-that most men had just enough religion to hate their neighbors<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198"></a>[198]</span>

-but not quite enough to love them. Unfortunately that

-bright remark does not quite cover our present difficulty.

-There have been people possessed of as much religion as any

-one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors

-as cordially as the best of them. There have been

-others who were totally devoid of the religious instinct who

-squandered their affection upon all the stray cats and dogs

-and human beings of Christendom.</p>

-

-<p>No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And

-upon due cogitation (but with a feeling of great uncertainty)

-I shall now state what I suspect to be the truth.</p>

-

-<p>The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their

-differences, had all of them one thing in common; their

-faith was tempered by doubt; they might honestly believe

-that they themselves were right, but they never reached

-the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute

-conviction.</p>

-

-<p>In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic

-clamoring for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent

-that, it may be well to point to the lesson

-taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional

-aversion to any such ideal of standardization.</p>

-

-<p>Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who

-are apt to die because no one is present to take them out

-of the rain. Hundred-percent pure iron has long since

-been discarded for the composite metal called steel. No

-jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent

-pure gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must

-be made of six or seven different varieties of wood. And

-as for a meal composed entirely of a hundred-percent mush,

-I thank you, no!</p>

-

-<p>In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds

-and I see no reason why faith should be an exception.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199"></a>[199]</span>

-Unless the base of our “certainty” contains a certain

-amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith will sound as

-tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a trombone

-made of brass.</p>

-

-<p>It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set

-the heroes of tolerance apart from the rest of the world.</p>

-

-<p>As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction,

-unselfish devotion to duty and all the other household virtues,

-most of these men could have passed muster before

-a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would go further than

-that and state that at least half of them lived and died in

-such a way that they would now be among the saints, if

-their peculiar trend of conscience had not forced them to

-be the open and avowed enemies of that institution which

-has taken upon itself the exclusive right of elevating ordinary

-human beings to certain celestial dignities.</p>

-

-<p>But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.</p>

-

-<p>They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known

-before them) that the problem which faced them was so

-vast that no one in his right senses would ever expect it

-to be solved. And while they might hope and pray that

-the road which they had taken would eventually lead them

-to a safe goal, they could never convince themselves that

-it was the only right one, that all other roads were wrong

-and that the enchanting by-paths which delighted the

-hearts of so many simple people were evil thoroughfares

-leading to damnation.</p>

-

-<p>All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in

-most of our catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These

-preach the superior virtue of a world illuminated by the

-pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps so. But during

-those centuries when that flame was supposed to be

-burning at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200"></a>[200]</span>

-cannot be said to have been either particularly

-happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I don’t want to

-suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we

-might try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren

-of the tolerant guild have been in the habit of examining

-the affairs of the world. If that does not prove

-successful, we can always go back to the system of our

-fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable

-luster upon a society containing a little more kindness and

-forbearance, a community less beset by ugliness and greed

-and hatred, a good deal would have been gained and the

-expense, I am sure, would be quite small.</p>

-

-<p>And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth,

-I must go back to my history.</p>

-

-<p>When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the

-world (in the best and broadest sense of the word) perished.

-And it was a long time before society was once more

-placed upon such a footing of security that the old spirit

-of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been characteristic

-of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely

-return to this earth.</p>

-

-<p>That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.</p>

-

-<p>The revival of international commerce brought fresh

-capital to the poverty stricken countries of the west. New

-cities arose. A new class of men began to patronize the

-arts, to spend money upon books, to endow those universities

-which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity. And

-it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,”

-of those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind

-as their field of experiment, arose in rebellion against the

-narrow limitations of the old scholasticism and strayed

-away from the flock of the faithful who regarded their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201"></a>[201]</span>

-interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients

-as a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.</p>

-

-<p>Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small

-group of pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up

-the rest of this book, few deserve greater credit than that

-very timid soul who came to be known as Erasmus.</p>

-

-<p>For timid he was, although he took part in all the great

-verbal encounters of his day and successfully managed to

-make himself the terror of his enemies, by the precision

-with which he handled that most deadly of all weapons,

-the long-range gun of humor.</p>

-

-<p>Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of

-his wit were shot into the enemy’s country. And those

-Erasmian bombs were of a very dangerous variety. At

-a first glance they looked harmless enough. There was no

-sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance

-of an amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help

-those who took them home and allowed the children to play

-with them. The poison was sure to get into their little

-minds and it was of such a persistent nature that four centuries

-have not sufficed to make the race immune against

-the effects of the drug.</p>

-

-<p>It is strange that such a man should have been born

-in one of the dullest towns of the mudbanks which are situated

-along the eastern coast of the North Sea. In the

-fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet attained

-the glories of an independent and fabulously rich

-commonwealth. They formed a group of little insignificant

-principalities, somewhere on the outskirts of civilized society.

-They smelled forever of herring, their chief article

-of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it was some

-helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their

-dismal shores.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202"></a>[202]</span></p>

-

-<p>But the very horror of a childhood spent among such

-unpleasant surroundings may have spurred this curious infant

-into that fury of activity which eventually was to set

-him free and make him one of the best known men of his

-time.</p>

-

-<p>From the beginning of life, everything was against him.

-He was an illegitimate child. The people of the Middle

-Ages, being on an intimate and friendly footing both with

-God and with nature, were a great deal more sensible about

-such children than we are. They were sorry. Such things

-ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved.

-For the rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish

-a helpless creature in a cradle for a sin which most certainly

-was not of its own making. The irregularity of his

-birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in so far

-as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly

-muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling

-the situation and leaving their children to the care

-of relatives who were either boobs or scoundrels.</p>

-

-<p>These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do

-with their two little wards and after the mother had died,

-the children never had a home of their own. First of all

-they were sent to a famous school in Deventer, where several

-of the teachers belonged to the Society of the Brothers of

-the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters

-which Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were

-only “common” in a very different sense of the word. Next

-the two boys were separated and the younger was taken to

-Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate supervision

-of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also

-one of the three guardians appointed to administer his

-slender inheritance. If that school in the days of Erasmus

-was as bad as when I visited it four centuries later,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203"></a>[203]</span>

-I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make matters

-worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every

-penny of his money and in order to escape prosecution

-(for the old Dutch courts were strict upon such matters)

-they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed him into holy

-orders and bade him be happy because “now his future

-was secure.”</p>

-

-<p>The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this

-terrible experience into something of great literary value.

-But I hate to think of the many terrible years this sensitive

-youngster was forced to spend in the exclusive company

-of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics who during

-the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully

-half of all monasteries.</p>

-

-<p>Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted

-Erasmus to spend most of his time among the Latin manuscripts

-which a former abbot had collected and which lay

-forgotten in the library. He absorbed those volumes until

-he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical learning.

-In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever

-on the move, he rarely was within reach of a reference

-library. But that was not necessary. He could quote from

-memory. Those who have ever seen the ten gigantic folios

-which contain his collected works, or who have managed

-to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays)

-will appreciate what a “knowledge of the classics” meant

-in the fifteenth century.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old

-monastery. People like him are never influenced by circumstances.

-They make their own circumstances and they

-make them out of the most unlikely material.</p>

-

-<p>And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204"></a>[204]</span>

-restlessly after a spot where he might work without

-being disturbed by a host of admiring friends.</p>

-

-<p>But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to

-the “lieve God” of his childhood he allowed his soul to slip

-into the slumber of death, did he enjoy a moment of that

-“true leisure” which has always appeared as the highest

-good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates

-and Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.</p>

-

-<p>These peregrinations have often been described and I

-need not repeat them here in detail. Wherever two or more

-men lived together in the name of true wisdom, there Erasmus

-was sooner or later bound to make his appearance.</p>

-

-<p>He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost

-died of hunger and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He

-printed books in Basel. He tried (quite in vain) to carry

-a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold of orthodox

-bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent

-much of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor

-of Divinity in the University of Turin. He was familiar

-with the Grand Canal of Venice and cursed as familiarly

-about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those of Lombardy.

-The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome

-made such a profound impression upon him that even the

-waters of Lethe could not wash the Holy City out of his

-memory. He was offered a liberal pension if he would only

-move to Venice and whenever a new university was opened,

-he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair

-he wished to take or to no chair at all, provided he would

-grace the Campus with his occasional presence.</p>

-

-<p>But he steadily refused all such invitations because they

-seemed to contain a threat of permanence and dependency.

-Before all things he wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable

-room to a bad one, he preferred amusing companions<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205"></a>[205]</span>

-to dull ones, he knew the difference between the good

-rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red

-ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own

-terms and this he could not do if he had to call any man

-“master.”</p>

-

-<p>The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that

-of an intellectual search-light. No matter what object

-appeared above the horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus

-immediately let the brilliant rays of his intellect play

-upon it, did his best to make his neighbors see the thing

-as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of that

-“folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.</p>

-

-<p>That he was able to do this during the most turbulent

-period of our history, that he managed to escape the fury

-of the Protestant fanatics while keeping himself aloof from

-the fagots of his friends of the Inquisition, this is the one

-point in his career upon which he has been most often condemned.</p>

-

-<p>Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom

-as long as it applies to the ancestors.</p>

-

-<p>“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther

-and take his chance together with the other reformers?”

-has been a question which seems to have puzzled at least

-twelve generations of otherwise intelligent citizens.</p>

-

-<p>The answer is, “Why should he?”</p>

-

-<p>It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never

-regarded himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly

-lacked that sense of self-righteous assurance which

-is so characteristic of those who undertake to tell the world

-how the millennium ought to be brought about. Besides

-he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the old

-home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our

-quarters. Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206"></a>[206]</span>

-repairs. The drainage was old-fashioned. The garden was

-all cluttered up with dirt and odds and ends left behind

-by people who had moved out long before. But all this

-could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to

-his promises and would only spend some money upon immediate

-improvements. Beyond that, Erasmus did not wish

-to go. And although he was what his enemies sneeringly

-called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or

-more) than those out and out “radicals” who gave the

-world two tyrannies where only one had been before.</p>

-

-<p>Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems.

-He believed that the salvation of this world lies in our individual

-endeavors. Make over the individual man and

-you have made over the entire world!</p>

-

-<p>Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way

-of a direct appeal to the average citizen. And he did

-this in a very clever way.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters.

-He wrote them to kings and to emperors and to popes and

-to abbots and to knights and to knaves. He wrote them

-(and this in the days before the stamped and self-addressed

-envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach

-him and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for

-at least eight pages.</p>

-

-<p>In the second place, he edited a large number of classical

-texts which had been so often and so badly copied that

-they no longer made any sense. For this purpose he had

-been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts to get

-hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of

-the reasons why so many pious Catholics insisted that at

-heart he must be as bad as a real heretic. This of course

-sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the fifteenth century,

-respectable Christians would never have dreamed of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207"></a>[207]</span>

-trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue

-of evil repute like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek

-might lead a man into all sorts of difficulties. It might

-tempt him to compare the original gospels with those translations

-that had been given to him with the assurance that

-they were a true reproduction of the original. And that

-would only be the beginning. Soon he would make a descent

-into the Ghetto to get hold of a Hebrew grammar. From

-that point to open rebellion against the authority of the

-Church was only a step and for a long time the possession

-of a book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded

-as ipso facto evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.</p>

-

-<p>Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities

-in search of this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who

-were trying to eke out an existence by teaching their native

-tongue were not infrequently forced to leave the city

-in which they had found an asylum.</p>

-

-<p>In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had

-learned Greek and in the asides which he added to his editions

-of Cyprian and Chrysostom and the other Church

-fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current events

-which could never have been printed had they been the

-subject of a separate pamphlet.</p>

-

-<p>But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself

-in an entirely different sort of literature of which he was

-the inventor. I mean his famous collections of Greek and

-Latin proverbs which he had brought together in order

-that the children of his time might learn to write the classics

-with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are

-filled with clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative

-neighbors were by no means what one had the right<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208"></a>[208]</span>

-to expect of a man who enjoyed the friendship of the

-Pope.</p>

-

-<p>And finally he was the author of one of those strange little

-books which are born of the spirit of the moment, which

-are really a joke conceived for the benefit of a few friends

-and then assume the dignity of a great literary classic before

-the poor author quite realizes what he has done. It was

-called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how

-it came to be written.</p>

-

-<p>It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled

-by a pamphlet written so cleverly that no one could tell

-whether it was meant as an attack upon the friars or as a

-defense of the monastic life. No name appeared upon the

-title page, but those who knew what was what in the world

-of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one

-Ulrich von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented

-young man, poet laureate and town bum extraordinary,

-had taken no mean share in the production of this

-gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud of it.

-When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the

-famous champion of the New Learning in England, had

-spoken well of his work, he wrote to Erasmus and asked

-him for particulars.</p>

-

-<p>Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind

-(reflected in his orderly way of living) did not take kindly to

-those blowsy Teuton Ritters who spent their mornings and

-afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier for the cause

-of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house

-that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking

-endless bumpers of sour beer.</p>

-

-<p>But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of

-genius and Erasmus answered him civilly enough. Yea,

-as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon the virtues of his London<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209"></a>[209]</span>

-friend and depicted so charming a scene of domestic contentment

-that the household of Sir Thomas might well

-serve as a model for all other families until the end of time.

-It was in this letter that he mentions how More, himself

-a humorist of no small parts, had given him the original

-idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely it was the

-good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a

-veritable Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and

-daughters and sons-in-law and birds and dogs and a private

-zoo and private theatricals and bands of amateur fiddlers)

-which had inspired him to write that delightful piece of

-nonsense with which his name is forever associated.</p>

-

-<p>In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and

-Judy shows which for so many centuries were the only

-amusement of little Dutch children. Those Punch and

-Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their dialogue,

-invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness.

-The hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene.

-One by one the other actors were forced to appear before

-this ragged hero and give an account of themselves. And

-one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful audience,

-they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel

-and were thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.</p>

-

-<p>In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the

-age is carefully taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired

-Coroner, stands by and favors the public at large

-with her comments. No one is spared. The whole of

-Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters.

-And of course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars

-of salvation with all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their

-gross ignorance and the futile pomposity of their arguments,

-came in for a drubbing which was never forgotten and

-never forgiven.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210"></a>[210]</span></p>

-

-<p>But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous

-successors to the poverty stricken fishermen and

-carpenters from the land of Galilee, were also on the bill

-and held the stage for several chapters.</p>

-

-<p>The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial

-personage than the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous

-literature. Throughout this little book (as indeed

-throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel

-of his own which one might call the philosophy of

-tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence

-upon the spirit of the divine law rather than upon the

-commas and the semi-colons in the original version of that

-divine law; this truly human acceptance of religion as a

-system of ethics rather than as a form of government which

-made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh

-against Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all

-true religion who “slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions

-behind the funny phrases of a clever little book.</p>

-

-<p>This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did

-not have any effect. The little man with the long pointed

-nose, who lived until the age of seventy at a time when the

-addition or omission of a single word from an established

-text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking at all

-for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He

-expected nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses

-and knew only too well the risk the world was running when

-a minor theological dispute was allowed to degenerate into

-an international religious war.</p>

-

-<p>And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night

-to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which

-he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance

-and intolerance.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211"></a>[211]</span></p>

-

-<p>Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those

-floods of ill-will and hatred which were sweeping down from

-the mountains of Germany and the Alps, and a few years

-after his death his work had been completely washed away.</p>

-

-<p>But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage,

-thrown upon the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly

-good material for those irrepressible optimists who believe

-that some day we shall have a set of dykes that will actually

-hold.</p>

-

-<p>Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.</p>

-

-<p>His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the

-house of his publisher.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212"></a>[212]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV<br>

-<span class="smaller">RABELAIS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows.</p>

-

-<p>The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable

-book intended for the entire family. But

-to mention Rabelais in public is considered little short of

-a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this

-fellow that laws have been passed in our country to keep

-his wicked works out of the hands of our innocent children

-and that in many states copies of his books can only be obtained

-from the more intrepid among our book-leggers.</p>

-

-<p>This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have

-been forced upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average

-citizen of the twentieth century are about as dull reading

-as “Tom Jones” or “The House of the Seven Gables.” Few

-people ever get beyond the first interminable chapter.</p>

-

-<p>And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally

-suggestive in what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary

-of his time. That does not happen to be the common

-vernacular of our own day. But in the era of the

-bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived

-close to the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs

-were not “lady-dogs.”</p>

-

-<p>No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished

-surgeon go much deeper than a mere disapproval

-of his rich but somewhat outspoken collection of idioms.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213"></a>[213]</span>

-They are caused by the horror which many excellent people

-experience when they come face to face with the point of

-view of a man who point blank refuses to be defeated by

-life.</p>

-

-<p>The human race, as far as I can make out, is divided

-into two sorts of people; those who say “yes” unto life and

-those who say “no.” The former accept it and courageously

-they endeavor to make the best of whatever bargain fate has

-handed out to them.</p>

-

-<p>The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?)

-but they hold the gift in great contempt and fret about it

-like children who have been given a new little brother when

-they really wanted a puppy or a railroad train.</p>

-

-<p>But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing

-to accept their morose neighbors at their own valuation and

-tolerate them, and do not hinder them when they fill the

-landscape with their lamentations and the hideous monuments

-to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely

-extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.</p>

-

-<p>Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would

-immediately purge this planet of the “yeas.”</p>

-

-<p>As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands

-of their jealous souls by the incessant persecution

-of those who claim that the world belongs to the living and

-not to the dead.</p>

-

-<p>Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his

-patients or his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery.

-This, no doubt, was very regrettable, but we cannot all be

-grave-diggers. There have to be a few Poloniuses and a

-world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a terrible

-place of abode.</p>

-

-<p>As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very

-mysterious about it. The few details which are omitted<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214"></a>[214]</span>

-in the books written by his friends are found in the works

-of his enemies and as a result we can follow his career with

-a fair degree of accuracy.</p>

-

-<p>Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately

-upon Erasmus but he was born into a world still

-largely dominated by monks, nuns, deacons, and a thousand

-and one varieties of mendicant friars. He was born in

-Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer

-in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth

-century) and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send

-his son to a good school. There young François was thrown

-into the company of the scions of a famous local family

-called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their father,

-had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion

-they could fight well. They were men of the world in the

-good sense of that oft misunderstood expression. They were

-faithful servitors of their master the king, held endless public

-offices, became bishops and cardinals and ambassadors,

-translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill and

-ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services

-that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when

-a title condemned a man to a life of few pleasures and

-many duties and responsibilities.</p>

-

-<p>The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed

-upon Rabelais shows that he must have been something

-more than an amusing table companion. During

-the many ups and downs of his life he could always count

-upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates.

-Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors

-he found the door of their castle wide open and if

-perchance the soil of France became a little too hot for

-this blunt young moralist, there was always a du Bellay,

-conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215"></a>[215]</span>

-need of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician

-besides being a polished Latin scholar.</p>

-

-<p>This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed

-that the career of our learned doctor was about to come

-to an abrupt and painful end, the influence of his old friends

-saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne or from the anger

-of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted upon

-him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when

-he pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as

-mercilessly as he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of

-his erstwhile colleagues in Fontenay and Maillezais.</p>

-

-<p>Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the

-more dangerous. Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content,

-but outside of the narrow boundaries of a small Swiss

-canton, his lightning was as harmless as a fire-cracker.</p>

-

-<p>The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with

-the University of Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and

-the Old Learning, knew of no mercy when her authority

-was questioned and could always count upon the hearty coöperation

-of the king of France and his hangman.</p>

-

-<p>And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked

-man. Not because he liked to drink good wine and told

-funny stories about his fellow-monks. He had done much

-worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the wicked Greek

-tongue.</p>

-

-<p>When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his

-cloister, it was decided to search his cell. It was found to

-be full of literary contraband, a copy of Homer, one of

-the New Testament, one of Herodotus.</p>

-

-<p>This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great

-deal of wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends

-to get him out of this scrape.</p>

-

-<p>It was a curious period in the development of the Church.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216"></a>[216]</span></p>

-

-<p>Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been

-advance posts of civilization and both friars and nuns had

-rendered inestimable service in promoting the interest of the

-Church. More than one Pope, however, had foreseen the

-danger that might come from a too powerful development

-of the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just

-because every one knew that something ought to be done

-about these cloisters, nothing was ever done.</p>

-

-<p>Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that

-the Catholic Church is a placid institution which is run

-silently and almost automatically by a small body of

-haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those inner

-upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization

-composed of ordinary mortals.</p>

-

-<p>Nothing is further from the truth.</p>

-

-<p>Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been

-caused by the misinterpretation of a single word.</p>

-

-<p>A world addicted to democratic ideals is easily horrified

-at the idea of an “infallible” human being.</p>

-

-<p>“It must be easy,” so the popular argument runs, “to

-administer this big institution when it is enough for one

-man to say that a thing is so to have all the others fall upon

-their knees and shout amen and obey him.”</p>

-

-<p>It is extremely difficult for one brought up in Protestant

-countries to get a correct and fair view of this rather intricate

-subject. But if I am not mistaken, the “infallible”

-utterances of the supreme pontiff are as rare as constitutional

-amendments in the United States.</p>

-

-<p>Furthermore, such important decisions are never reached

-until the subject has been thoroughly discussed and the

-debates which precede the final verdict often rock the very

-body of the Church. Such pronunciamentos are therefore

-“infallible” in the sense that our own constitutional<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217"></a>[217]</span>

-amendments are infallible, because they are “final” and because

-all further argument is supposed to come to an end

-as soon as they have been definitely incorporated into the

-highest law of the land.</p>

-

-<p>If any one were to proclaim that it is an easy job to

-govern these United States because in case of an emergency

-all the people are found to stand firmly behind the Constitution,

-he would be just as much in error as if he were

-to state that all Catholics who in supreme matters of faith

-recognize the absolute authority of their pope are docile

-sheep and have surrendered every right to an opinion of

-their own.</p>

-

-<p>If this were true, the occupants of the Lateran and the

-Vatican palaces would have had an easy life. But even the

-most superficial study of the last fifteen hundred years

-will show the exact opposite. And those champions of the

-reformed faith who sometimes write as if the Roman authorities

-had been ignorant of the many evils which Luther

-and Calvin and Zwingli denounced with such great vehemence

-are either ignorant of the facts or are not quite fair

-in their zeal for the good cause.</p>

-

-<p>Such men as Adrian VI and Clement VII knew perfectly

-well that something very serious was wrong with their

-Church. But it is one thing to express the opinion that

-there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is

-quite a different matter to correct the evil, as even poor

-Hamlet was to learn.</p>

-

-<p>Nor was that unfortunate prince the last victim of the

-pleasant delusion that hundreds of years of misgovernment

-can be undone overnight by the unselfish efforts of an

-honest man.</p>

-

-<p>Many intelligent Russians knew that the old official structure<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218"></a>[218]</span>

-which dominated their empire was corrupt, inefficient

-and a menace to the safety of the nation.</p>

-

-<p>They made Herculean efforts to bring about reforms

-and they failed.</p>

-

-<p>How many of our citizens who have ever given the matter

-an hour’s thought fail to see that a democratic instead of

-a representative form of government (as intended by the

-founders of the Republic) must eventually lead to systematized

-anarchy?</p>

-

-<p>And yet, what can they do about it?</p>

-

-<p>Such problems, by the time they have begun to attract

-public attention, have become so hopelessly complicated that

-they are rarely solved except by a social cataclysm. And

-social cataclysms are terrible things from which most men

-shy away. Rather than run to such extremes, they try to

-patch up the old, decrepit machinery and meanwhile they

-pray that some miracle will occur which will make it work.</p>

-

-<p>An insolent religious and social dictatorship, set up and

-maintained by a number of religious orders, was one of the

-most flagrant evils of the out-going Middle Ages.</p>

-

-<p>For the so-many-eth time in history, the army was about

-to run away with the commander-in-chief. In plain words,

-the situation had grown entirely beyond the control of the

-popes. All they could do was to sit still, improve their own

-party organization, and meanwhile try to mitigate the fate

-of those who had incurred the displeasure of their common

-enemies, the friars.</p>

-

-<p>Erasmus was one of the many scholars who had frequently

-enjoyed the protection of the Pope. Let Louvain storm

-and the Dominicans rave, Rome would stand firm and woe

-unto him who disregarded her command, “Leave the old

-man alone!”</p>

-

-<p>And after these few introductory remarks, it will be no<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219"></a>[219]</span>

-matter of surprise that Rabelais, a mutinous soul but a

-brilliant mind withal, could often count upon the support

-of the Holy See when the superiors of his own order wished

-to punish him and that he readily obtained permission to

-leave his cloister when constant interference with his studies

-began to make his life unbearable.</p>

-

-<p>And so with a sigh of relief, he shook the dust of

-Maillezais off his feet and went to Montpellier and to Lyons

-to follow a course in medicine.</p>

-

-<p>Surely here was a man of extraordinary talents! Within

-less than two years the former Benedictine monk had become

-chief physician of the city hospital of Lyons. But

-as soon as he had achieved these new honors, his restless

-soul began to look for pastures new. He did not give up

-his powders and pills but in addition to his anatomical

-studies (a novelty almost as dangerous as the study of

-Greek) he took up literature.</p>

-

-<p>Lyons, situated in the center of the valley of the Rhone,

-was an ideal city for a man who cared for belles lettres.

-Italy was nearby. A few days easy travel carried the traveler

-to the Provence and although the ancient paradise of

-the Troubadours had suffered dreadfully at the hands of

-the Inquisition, the grand old literary tradition had not

-yet been entirely lost. Furthermore, the printing-presses

-of Lyons were famous for the excellence of their product

-and her book stores were well stocked with all the latest

-publications.</p>

-

-<p>When one of the master printers, Sebastian Gryphius by

-name, looked for some one to edit his collection of medieval

-classics, it was natural that he should bethink himself of

-the new doctor who was also known as a scholar. He hired

-Rabelais and set him to work. In rapid succession almanachs

-and chap-books followed upon the learned treatises<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220"></a>[220]</span>

-of Galen and Hippocrates. And out of these inconspicuous

-beginnings grew that strange tome which was to make

-its author one of the most popular writers of his time.</p>

-

-<p>The same talent for novelty which had turned Rabelais

-into a successful medical practitioner brought him his success

-as a novelist. He did what few people had dared to do

-before him. He began to write in the language of his

-own people. He broke with a thousand-year-old tradition

-which insisted that the books of a learned man must be

-in a tongue unknown to the vulgar multitude. He used

-French and, furthermore, he used the unadorned vernacular

-of the year 1532.</p>

-

-<p>I gladly leave it to the professors of literature to decide

-where and how and when Rabelais discovered his two pet

-heroes, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Maybe they were old

-heathenish Gods who, after the nature of their species, had

-managed to live through fifteen hundred years of Christian

-persecution and neglect.</p>

-

-<p>Then again, he may have invented them in an outburst

-of gigantic hilarity.</p>

-

-<p>However that be, Rabelais contributed enormously to the

-gayety of nations and greater praise no author can gain

-than that he has added something to the sum total of human

-laughter. But at the same time, his works were not

-funny books in the terrible modern sense of the word. They

-had their serious side and struck a bold blow for the cause

-of tolerance by their caricature of the people who were responsible

-for that clerical reign of terror which caused such

-untold misery during the first fifty years of the sixteenth

-century.</p>

-

-<p>Rabelais, a skillfully trained theologian, was able to avoid

-all such direct statements as might have got him into trouble,

-and acting upon the principle that one cheerful humorist out<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_221"></a>[221]</span>

-of jail is better than a dozen gloomy reformers behind the

-bars, refrained from a too brazen exposition of his highly

-unorthodox opinions.</p>

-

-<p>But his enemies knew perfectly well what he was trying

-to do. The Sorbonne condemned his books in unmistakable

-terms and the Parliament of Paris put him on their index

-and confiscated and burned all such copies of his works

-as could be found within their jurisdiction. But notwithstanding

-the activities of the hangman (who in those days

-was also the official book destroyer) the “Lives and Heroic

-Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and his Sonne Pantagruel”

-remained a popular classic. For almost four centuries it

-has continued to edify those who can derive pleasure from

-a clever mixture of good-natured laughter and bantering

-wisdom and it will never cease to irritate those others who

-firmly believe that the Goddess of Truth, caught with a

-smile on her lips, cannot possibly be a good woman.</p>

-

-<p>As for the author himself, he was and is a “man of one

-book.” His friends, the du Bellays, remained faithful to

-him until the end, but most of his life Rabelais practiced

-the virtue of discretion and kept himself at a polite distance

-from the residence of that Majesty by whose supposed

-“privilege” he published his nefarious works.</p>

-

-<p>He ventured however upon a visit to Rome and met with

-no difficulties, but on the contrary was received with every

-manifestation of a cordial welcome. In the year 1550 he

-returned to France and went to live in Meudon. Three

-years later he died.</p>

-

-<p>It is of course quite impossible to measure the exact and

-positive influence exercised by such a man. After all, he

-was a human being and not an electric current or a barrel

-of gasoline.</p>

-

-<p>It has been said that he was merely destructive.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_222"></a>[222]</span></p>

-

-<p>Perhaps so.</p>

-

-<p>But he was destructive in an age when there was a great

-and crying need for a social wrecking crew, headed by just

-such people as Erasmus and Rabelais.</p>

-

-<p>That many of the new buildings were going to be just

-as uncomfortable and ugly as the old ones which they

-were supposed to replace was something which no one was

-able to foresee.</p>

-

-<p>And, anyway, that was the fault of the next generation.</p>

-

-<p>They are the people we ought to blame.</p>

-

-<p>They were given a chance such as few people ever enjoyed

-to make a fresh start.</p>

-

-<p>May the Lord have mercy upon their souls for the way

-in which they neglected their opportunities.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_223"></a>[223]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV<br>

-<span class="smaller">NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large

-ocean upon which sailed many ships. Whenever

-these little vessels bumped against each other, they

-made a “wonderful music” which people call history.</p>

-

-<p>I would like to borrow Heine’s ocean, but for a purpose

-and a simile of my own. When we were children it was fun

-to drop pebbles into a pond. They made a nice splash and

-then the pretty little ripples caused a series of ever widening

-circles and that was very nice. If bricks were handy

-(which sometimes was the case) one could make an Armada

-of nutshells and matches and submit this flimsy fleet to a

-nice artificial storm, provided the heavy projectile did not

-create that fatal loss of equilibrium which sometimes overtakes

-small children who play too near the water’s edge and

-sends them to bed without their supper.</p>

-

-<p>In that special universe reserved for grown-ups, the same

-pastime is not entirely unknown, but the results are apt to

-be far more disastrous.</p>

-

-<p>Everything is placid and the sun is shining and the water-wigglers

-are skating merrily, and then suddenly a bold, bad

-boy comes along with a piece of mill-stone (Heaven only

-knows where he found it!) and before any one can stop

-him he has heaved it right into the middle of the old duck

-pond and then there is a great ado about who did it and

-how he ought to be spanked and some say, “Oh, let him go,”

-and others, out of sheer envy of the kid who is attracting all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_224"></a>[224]</span>

-the attention, pick up any old thing that happens to lie

-around and they dump it into the water and everybody gets

-splashed and one thing leading to another, the usual result is

-a free-for-all fight and a few million broken heads.</p>

-

-<p>Alexander was such a bold, bad boy.</p>

-

-<p>And Helen of Troy, in her own charming way, was such

-a bad, bold girl, and history is just full of them.</p>

-

-<p>But by far the worst offenders are those wicked citizens

-who play this game with ideas and use the stagnant pool

-of man’s spiritual indifference as their playground. And

-I for one don’t wonder that they are hated by all right-thinking

-citizens and are punished with great severity if ever

-they are unfortunate enough to let themselves be caught.</p>

-

-<p>Think of the damage they have done these last four hundred

-years.</p>

-

-<p>There were the leaders of the rebirth of the ancient world.

-The stately moats of the Middle Ages reflected the image of

-a society that was harmonious in both color and texture.

-It was not perfect. But people liked it. They loved to

-see the blending of the brick-red walls of their little homes

-with the somber gray of those high cathedral towers that

-watched over their souls.</p>

-

-<p>Came the terrible splash of the Renaissance and overnight

-everything was changed. But it was only a beginning. For

-just when the poor burghers had almost recovered from the

-shock, that dreadful German monk appeared with a whole

-cartload of specially prepared bricks and dumped them

-right into the heart of the pontifical lagoon. Really, that

-was too much. And no wonder that it took the world three

-centuries to recover from the shock.</p>

-

-<p>The older historians who studied this period often fell

-into a slight error. They saw the commotion and decided<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_225"></a>[225]</span>

-that the ripples had been started by a common cause, which

-they alternately called the Renaissance and the Reformation.</p>

-

-<p>Today we know better.</p>

-

-<p>The Renaissance and the Reformation were movements

-which professed to be striving after a common purpose.

-But the means by which they hoped to accomplish their

-ultimate object were so utterly different that Humanist and

-Protestant not infrequently came to regard each other with

-bitter hostility.</p>

-

-<p>They both believed in the supreme rights of man. During

-the Middle Ages the individual had been completely

-merged in the community. He did not exist as John Doe,

-a bright citizen who came and went at will, who sold and

-bought as he liked, who went to any one of a dozen churches

-(or to none at all, as suited his tastes and his prejudices).

-His life from the time of his birth to the hour of his death

-was lived according to a rigid handbook of economic and

-spiritual etiquette. This taught him that his body was a

-shoddy garment, casually borrowed from Mother Nature

-and of no value except as a temporary receptacle for his

-immortal soul.</p>

-

-<p>It trained him to believe that this world was a halfway

-house to future glory and should be regarded with that

-profound contempt which travelers destined for New York

-bestow upon Queenstown and Halifax.</p>

-

-<p>And now unto the excellent John, living happily in the

-best of all possible worlds (since it was the only world he

-knew), came the two fairy god-mothers, Renaissance and

-Reformation, and said: “Arise, noble citizen, from now on

-thou art to be free.”</p>

-

-<p>But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers

-greatly differed.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_226"></a>[226]</span></p>

-

-<p>“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance

-replied.</p>

-

-<p>“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished

-him.</p>

-

-<p>“Free to search the records of the past when the world

-was truly the realm of men. Free to realize those ideals

-which once filled the hearts of poets and painters and sculptors

-and architects. Free to turn the universe into thine

-eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her secrets,”

-was the promise of the Renaissance.</p>

-

-<p>“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find

-salvation for thy soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was

-the warning of the Reformation.</p>

-

-<p>And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe

-in the possession of a new freedom which was infinitely

-more embarrassing than the thralldom of his former days.</p>

-

-<p>Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made

-her peace with the established order of things. The successors

-of Phidias and Horace discovered that a belief in

-the established Deity and outward conformity to the rules

-of the Church were two very different things and that one

-could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets

-with complete impunity if one took the precaution to call

-Hercules, John the Baptist, and Hera, the Virgin Mary.</p>

-

-<p>They were like tourists who go to India and who obey

-certain laws which mean nothing to them at all in order

-that they may gain entrance to the temples and travel freely

-without disturbing the peace of the land.</p>

-

-<p>But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most

-trifling of details at once assumed enormous importance.

-An erroneous comma in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As

-for a misplaced full stop in the Apocalypse, it called for

-instant death.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_227"></a>[227]</span></p>

-

-<p>To people like these who took what they considered their

-religious convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise

-of the Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.</p>

-

-<p>As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company,

-never to meet again.</p>

-

-<p>Whereupon the Reformation, alone against all the world,

-buckled on the armor of righteousness and made ready to

-defend her holiest possessions.</p>

-

-<p>In the beginning, the army of revolt was composed almost

-exclusively of Germans. They fought and suffered with

-extreme bravery, but that mutual jealousy which is the

-bane and the curse of all northern nations soon lamed their

-efforts and forced them to accept a truce. The strategy

-which led to the ultimate victory was provided by a very

-different sort of genius. Luther stepped aside to make

-room for Calvin.</p>

-

-<p>It was high time.</p>

-

-<p>In that same French college where Erasmus had spent

-so many of his unhappy Parisian days, a black-bearded

-young Spaniard with a limp (the result of a Gallic gunshot)

-was dreaming of the day when he should march at

-the head of a new army of the Lord to rid the world of the

-last of the heretics.</p>

-

-<p>It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic.</p>

-

-<p>And only a man of granite, like Calvin, would have been

-able to defeat the plans of Loyola.</p>

-

-<p>Personally, I am glad that I was not obliged to live in

-Geneva in the sixteenth century. At the same time I am

-profoundly grateful that the Geneva of the sixteenth century

-existed.</p>

-

-<p>Without it, the world of the twentieth century would<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_228"></a>[228]</span>

-have been a great deal more uncomfortable and I for one

-would probably be in jail.</p>

-

-<p>The hero of this glorious fight, the famous Magister

-Joannes Calvinus (or Jean Calvini or John Calvin) was a

-few years younger than Luther. Date of birth: July 10,

-1509. Place of birth: the city of Noyon in northern France.

-Background: French middle class. Father: a small clerical

-official. Mother: the daughter of an inn-keeper. Family:

-five sons and two daughters. Characteristic qualities of

-early education: thrift, simplicity, and a tendency to do

-all things in an orderly manner, not stingily, but with minute

-and efficient care.</p>

-

-<p>John, the second son, was meant for the priesthood. The

-father had influential friends, and could eventually get him

-into a good parish. Before he was thirteen years old, he

-already held a small office in the cathedral of his home city.

-This gave him a small but steady income. It was used to

-send him to a good school in Paris. A remarkable boy.

-Every one who came in contact with him said, “Watch out

-for that youngster!”</p>

-

-<p>The French educational system of the sixteenth century

-was well able to take care of such a child and make the best

-of his many gifts. At the age of nineteen, John was allowed

-to preach. His future as a duly established deacon seemed

-assured.</p>

-

-<p>But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement

-in the Church was slow. The law offered better opportunities.

-Besides, it was a time of great religious excitement

-and the future was uncertain. A distant relative,

-a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible

-into French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time

-with his cousin. It would never do to have two heretics in

-one family. John was packed off to Orleans and was apprenticed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_229"></a>[229]</span>

-to an old lawyer that he might learn the business

-of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.</p>

-

-<p>Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the

-end of the year, the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching

-his less industrious fellow-students in the principles of

-jurisprudence. And soon he knew all there was to know

-and was ready to start upon that course which, so his father

-fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those

-famous avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single

-opinion and who drove in a coach and four when they were

-called upon to see the king in distant Compiègne.</p>

-

-<p>But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never

-practiced law.</p>

-

-<p>Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests

-and his pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of

-theological works and started in all seriousness upon that

-task which was to make him one of the most important historical

-figures of the last twenty centuries.</p>

-

-<p>The years, however, which he had spent studying the

-principles of Roman law put their stamp upon all his

-further activities. It was impossible for him to approach

-a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things and he

-felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers

-who had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had

-been condemned to be roasted to death over slow burning coal

-fires. In their helpless agony they are as fine a bit of writing

-as anything of which we have a record. And they show

-such a delicate understanding of human psychology that

-the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of

-the man whose teaching had brought them into their predicament.</p>

-

-<p>No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said,

-a man without a heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_230"></a>[230]</span></p>

-

-<p>And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself

-and with his God that he must first reduce every question

-to certain fundamental principles of faith and doctrine

-before he dared to expose it to the touchstone of human

-sentiment.</p>

-

-<p>When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked,

-“The power of that heretic lay in the fact that he was

-indifferent to money.” If His Holiness meant to pay his

-enemy the compliment of absolute personal disinterestedness,

-he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and refused

-to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness

-had made it impossible for him to earn that money as he

-should have done.”</p>

-

-<p>But his strength lay elsewhere.</p>

-

-<p>He was a man of one idea, his life centered around one

-all-overpowering impulse; the desire to find the truth of

-God as revealed in the Scriptures. When he finally had

-reached a conclusion that seemed proof against every possible

-form of argument and objection, then at last he incorporated

-it into his own code of life. And thereafter

-he went his way with such utter disregard for the consequences

-of his decision that he became both invincible and

-irresistible.</p>

-

-<p>This quality, however, was not to make itself manifest

-until many years later. During the first decade after his

-conversion he was obliged to direct all his energies toward

-the very commonplace problem of keeping alive.</p>

-

-<p>A short triumph of the “new learning” in the University

-of Paris, an orgy of Greek declensions, Hebrew irregular

-verbs and other forbidden intellectual fruit had been followed

-by the usual reaction. When it appeared that even

-the rector of that famous seat of learning had been contaminated

-with the pernicious new German doctrines, steps<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_231"></a>[231]</span>

-were taken to purge the institution of all those who in terms

-of our modern medical science might be considered “idea

-carriers.” Calvin, who, ’twas said, had given the rector

-the material for several of his most objectionable speeches,

-was among those whose names appeared at the top of the

-list of suspects. His rooms were searched. His papers

-were confiscated and an order was issued for his arrest.</p>

-

-<p>He heard of it and hid himself in the house of a friend.</p>

-

-<p>But storms in an academic tea-pot never last very long.

-All the same, a career in the Church of Rome had become

-an impossibility. The moment had arrived for a definite

-choice.</p>

-

-<p>In the year 1534 Calvin broke away from the old faith.

-Almost at the same moment, on the hills of Montmartre,

-high above the French capital, Loyola and a handful of

-his fellow students were taking that solemn vow which

-shortly afterwards was to be incorporated into the constitution

-of the Society of Jesus.</p>

-

-<p>Thereupon they both left Paris.</p>

-

-<p>Ignatius set his face towards the east, but remembering

-the unfortunate outcome of his first assault upon the Holy

-Land, he retraced his steps, went to Rome and there began

-those activities which were to carry his fame (or otherwise)

-to every nook and corner of our planet.</p>

-

-<p>John was of a different caliber. His Kingdom of God

-was bound to neither time nor place and he wandered forth

-that he might find a quiet spot and devote the rest of his

-days to reading, to contemplation and to the peaceful expounding

-of his ideas.</p>

-

-<p>He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the

-outbreak of a war between Charles V and Francis I forced

-him to make a detour through western Switzerland. In

-Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_232"></a>[232]</span>

-stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary

-from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons.

-Farel welcomed him with open arms, spoke to him

-of the wondrous things that might be accomplished in this

-little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin asked

-time to consider. Then he stayed.</p>

-

-<p>In this way did the chances of war decree that the New

-Zion should be built at the foot of the Alps.</p>

-

-<p>It is a strange world.</p>

-

-<p>Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles

-upon a new continent.</p>

-

-<p>Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend

-the rest of his days in study and holy meditation, wanders

-into a third-rate Swiss town and makes it the spiritual capital

-of those who soon afterwards turn the domains of

-their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant

-empire.</p>

-

-<p>Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves

-all purposes?</p>

-

-<p>I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has

-been preserved. But if it still exists, the volume will show

-considerable wear on that particular page which contains

-the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel. The French reformer

-was a modest man, but often he must have found

-consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of

-the living God who also had been cast into a den of lions

-and whose innocence had saved him from a gruesome and

-untimely death.</p>

-

-<p>Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city

-inhabited by respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took

-life seriously, but not quite so seriously as that new master

-who was now holding forth in the pulpit of their Saint

-Peter.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_233"></a>[233]</span></p>

-

-<p>And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the

-form of a Duke of Savoy. It was during one of their interminable

-quarrels with the house of Savoy that the descendants

-of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make common

-cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation.

-The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg

-was a marriage of convenience, an engagement

-based upon common interests rather than common affection.</p>

-

-<p>But no sooner had the news spread abroad that “Geneva

-had gone Protestant,” than all the eager apostles of half

-a hundred new and crazy creeds flocked to the shores of

-Lake Leman. With tremendous energy they began to

-preach some of the queerest doctrines ever conceived by

-mortal man.</p>

-

-<p>Calvin detested these amateur prophets with all his heart.

-He fully appreciated what a menace they would prove to

-the cause of which they were such ardent but ill-guided

-champions. And the first thing he did as soon as he had

-enjoyed a few months leisure was to write down as precisely

-and briefly as he could what he expected his new parishioners

-to hold true and what he expected them to hold

-false. And that no man might claim the ancient and time-worn

-excuse, “I did not know the law,” he, together with

-his friend Farel, personally examined all Genevans in batches

-of ten and allowed only those to the full rights of citizenship

-who swore the oath of allegiance to this strange religious

-constitution.</p>

-

-<p>Next he composed a formidable catechism for the benefit

-of the younger generation.</p>

-

-<p>Next he prevailed upon the Town Council to expel all

-those who still clung to their old erroneous opinions.</p>

-

-<p>Then, having cleared the ground for further action, he

-set about to found him a state along the lines laid down<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_234"></a>[234]</span>

-by the political economists of the books of Exodus and

-Deuteronomy. For Calvin, like so many other of the great

-reformers, was really much more of an ancient Jew than a

-modern Christian. His lips did homage to the God of

-Jesus, but his heart went out to the Jehovah of Moses.</p>

-

-<p>This, of course, is a phenomenon often observed during

-periods of great emotional stress. The opinions of the

-humble Nazarene carpenter upon the subject of hatred

-and strife are so definite and so clear cut that no compromise

-has ever been found possible between them and

-those violent methods by which nations and individuals

-have, during the last two thousand years, tried to accomplish

-their ends.</p>

-

-<p>Hence, as soon as a war breaks out, by silent consent

-of all concerned, we temporarily close the pages of the

-Gospels and cheerfully wallow in the blood and thunder

-and the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the Old Testament.</p>

-

-<p>And as the Reformation was really a war and a very

-atrocious one, in which no quarter was asked and very little

-quarter was given, it need not surprise us that the state

-of Calvin was in reality an armed camp in which all semblance

-of personal liberty was gradually suppressed.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, all this was not accomplished without tremendous

-opposition, and in the year 1538 the attitude of

-the more liberal elements in the community became so

-threatening that Calvin was forced to leave the city. But

-in 1541 his adherents returned to power. Amidst the ringing

-of many bells and the loud hosannas of the deacons,

-Magister Joannes returned to his citadel on the river Rhone.

-Thereafter he was the uncrowned King of Geneva and the

-next twenty-three years he devoted to the establishment and

-the perfection of a theocratic form of government, the like<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_235"></a>[235]</span>

-of which the world had not seen since the days of Ezekiel

-and Ezra.</p>

-

-<p>The word “discipline” according to the Oxford Concise

-Dictionary, means “to bring under control, to train to obedience

-and order, to drill.” It expresses best the spirit which

-permeated the entire political-clerical structure of Calvin’s

-dreams.</p>

-

-<p>Luther, after the nature of most Germans, had been a

-good deal of a sentimentalist. The Word of God alone,

-so it seemed to him, would show a man the way to the life

-everlasting.</p>

-

-<p>This was much too indefinite to suit the taste of the great

-French reformer. The Word of God might be a beacon

-light of hope, but the road was long and dark and many

-were the temptations that made people forget their true

-destination.</p>

-

-<p>The minister, however, could not go astray. He was a

-man set apart. He knew all pitfalls. He was incorruptible.

-And if perchance he felt inclined to wander from the straight

-path, the weekly meetings of the clergy, at which these

-worthy gentlemen were invited to criticize each other freely,

-would speedily bring him back to a realization of his duties.

-Hence he was the ideal held before all those who truly

-aspired after salvation.</p>

-

-<p>Those of us who have ever climbed mountains know that

-professional guides can upon occasion be veritable tyrants.

-They know the perils of a pile of rocks, the hidden dangers

-of an innocent-looking snowfield. Wherefore they assume

-complete command of the party that has entrusted itself

-to their care and profanity raineth richly upon the head

-of the foolish tourist who dares to disobey their orders.</p>

-

-<p>The ministers of Calvin’s ideal state had a similar conception

-of their duties. They were ever delighted to extend<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_236"></a>[236]</span>

-a helping hand to those who stumbled and asked that they

-be supported. But when willful people purposely left the

-beaten track and wandered away from the flock, then that

-hand was withdrawn and became a fist which meted out

-punishment that was both quick and terrible.</p>

-

-<p>In many other communities the dominies would have been

-delighted to exercise a similar power. But the civil authorities,

-jealous of their own prerogatives, rarely allowed the

-clergy to compete with the courts and the executioners.

-Calvin knew this and within his own bailiwick he established

-a form of church discipline which practically superseded the

-laws of the land.</p>

-

-<p>Among the curious historical misconceptions which have

-gained such popularity since the days of the great war,

-none is more surprising than the belief that the French

-people (in contrast to their Teuton neighbors) are a liberty-loving

-race and detest all regimentation. The French have

-for centuries submitted to the rule of a bureaucracy quite

-as complicated and infinitely less efficient than the one

-which existed in Prussia in the pre-war days. The officials

-are a little less punctual about their office hours and the

-spotlessness of their collars and they are given to sucking

-a particularly vile sort of cigarette. Otherwise they are

-quite as meddlesome and as obnoxious as those in the eastern

-republic, and the public accepts their rudeness with a meekness

-that is astonishing in a race so addicted to rebellion.</p>

-

-<p>Calvin was the ideal Frenchman in his love for centralization.

-In some details he almost approached the perfection

-for detail which was the secret of Napoleon’s success. But

-unlike the great emperor, he was utterly devoid of all personal

-ambition. He was just a dreadfully serious man with

-a weak stomach and no sense of humor.</p>

-

-<p>He ransacked the Old Testament to discover what would<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_237"></a>[237]</span>

-be agreeable to his particular Jehovah. And then the

-people of Geneva were asked to accept this interpretation

-of the Jewish chronicles as a direct revelation of the divine

-will.</p>

-

-<p>Almost over night the merry city on the Rhone became

-a community of rueful sinners. A civic inquisition composed

-of six ministers and twelve elders watched night and

-day over the private opinions of all citizens. Whosoever

-was suspected of an inclination towards “forbidden heresies”

-was cited to appear before an ecclesiastic tribunal

-that he might be examined upon all points of doctrine and

-explain where, how and in what way he had obtained the

-books which had given him the pernicious ideas which had

-led him astray. If the culprit showed a repentant spirit,

-he might escape with a sentence of enforced attendance at

-Sunday School. But in case he showed himself obstinate,

-he must leave the city within twenty-four hours and never

-again show himself within the jurisdiction of the Genevan

-commonwealth.</p>

-

-<p>But a proper lack of orthodox sentiment was not the

-only thing that could get a man into trouble with the

-so-called Consistorium. An afternoon spent at a bowling-alley

-in a nearby village, if properly reported (as such

-things invariably are), could be reason enough for a severe

-admonition. Jokes, both practical and otherwise, were considered

-the height of bad form. An attempt at wit during

-a wedding ceremony was sufficient cause for a jail sentence.</p>

-

-<p>Gradually the New Zion was so encumbered with laws,

-edicts, regulations, rescripts and decrees that life became

-a highly complicated affair and lost a great deal of its old

-flavor.</p>

-

-<p>Dancing was not allowed. Singing was not allowed.

-Card playing was not allowed. Gambling, of course, was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_238"></a>[238]</span>

-not allowed. Birthday parties were not allowed. County

-fairs were not allowed. Silks and satins and all manifestations

-of external splendor were not allowed. What was allowed

-was going to church and going to school. For Calvin

-was a man of positive ideas.</p>

-

-<p>The verboten sign could keep out sin, but it could not

-force a man to love virtue. That had to come through

-an inner persuasion. Hence the establishment of excellent

-schools and a first-rate university and the encouragement

-of all learning. And the establishment of a rather interesting

-form of communal life which absorbed a good deal

-of the surplus energy of the community and which made

-the average man forget the many hardships and restrictions

-to which he was submitted. If it had been entirely

-lacking in human qualities, the system of Calvin could

-never have survived and it certainly would not have played

-such a very decisive rôle in the history of the last three

-hundred years. All of which however belongs in a book

-devoted to the development of political ideas. This time

-we are interested in the question of what Geneva did for

-tolerance and we come to the conclusion that the Protestant

-Rome was not a whit better than its Catholic namesake.</p>

-

-<p>The extenuating circumstances I have enumerated a few

-pages back. In a world which was forced to stand by and

-witness such bestial occurrences as the massacre of St.

-Bartholomew and the wholesale extermination of scores of

-Dutch cities, it was unreasonable to expect that one side

-(the weaker one at that) should practice a virtue which was

-equivalent to a self-imposed sentence of death.</p>

-

-<p>This, however, does not absolve Calvin from the crime of

-having aided and abetted in the legal murder of Gruet and

-Servetus.</p>

-

-<p>In the case of the former, Calvin might have put up the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_239"></a>[239]</span>

-excuse that Jacques Gruet was seriously suspected of having

-incited his fellow citizens to riot and that he belonged to

-a political party which was trying to bring about the downfall

-of the Calvinists. But Servetus could hardly be called

-a menace to the safety of the community, as far as Geneva

-was concerned.</p>

-

-<p>He was what the modern passport regulations call a

-“transient.” Another twenty-four hours and he would have

-been gone. But he missed his boat. And so he came to

-lose his life, and it is a pretty terrible story.</p>

-

-<p>Miguel Serveto, better known as Michael Servetus, was

-a Spaniard. His father was a respectable notary-public

-(a semi-legal position in Europe and not just a young man

-with a stamping machine who charges you a quarter for

-witnessing your signature) and Miguel was also destined

-for the law. He was sent to the University of Toulouse,

-for in those happy days when all lecturing was done in

-Latin learning was international and the wisdom of the entire

-world was open to those who had mastered five declensions

-and a few dozen irregular verbs.</p>

-

-<p>At the French university Servetus made the acquaintance

-of one Juan de Quintana who shortly afterwards became

-the confessor of the Emperor Charles V.</p>

-

-<p>During the Middle Ages, an imperial coronation was a

-good deal like a modern international exhibition. When

-Charles was crowned in Bologna in the year 1530, Quintana

-took his friend Michael with him as his secretary and the

-bright young Spaniard saw all there was to be seen. Like

-so many men of his time, he was of an insatiable curiosity

-and he spent the next ten years dabbling in an infinite

-variety of subjects, medicine, astronomy, astrology, Hebrew,

-Greek, and, most fatal of all, theology. He was a very

-competent doctor and in the pursuit of his theological<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_240"></a>[240]</span>

-studies he hit upon the idea of the circulation of the blood.

-It is to be found in the fifteenth chapter of the first one of

-his books against the doctrine of the Trinity. It shows the

-one-sidedness of the theological mind of the sixteenth century

-that none of those who examined the works of Servetus

-ever discovered that this man had made one of the greatest

-discoveries of all ages.</p>

-

-<p>If only Servetus had stuck to his medical practice! He

-might have died peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age.</p>

-

-<p>But he simply could not keep away from the burning

-questions of his day, and having access to the printing

-shops of Lyons, he began to give vent to his opinions upon

-sundry subjects.</p>

-

-<p>Nowadays a generous millionaire can persuade a college

-to change its name from Trinity College to that of a popular

-brand of tobacco and nothing happens. The press says,

-“Isn’t it good of Mr. Dingus to be so generous with his

-money!” and the public at large shouts “Amen!”</p>

-

-<p>In a world which seems to have lost all capacity for being

-shocked by such a thing as blasphemy, it is not easy to

-write of a time when the mere suspicion that one of its

-fellow citizens had spoken disrespectfully of the Trinity

-would throw an entire community into a state of panic. But

-unless we fully appreciate this fact, we shall never be able

-to understand the horror in which Servetus was held by

-all good Christians of the first half of the sixteenth century.</p>

-

-<p>And yet he was by no means a radical.</p>

-

-<p>He was what today we would call a liberal.</p>

-

-<p>He rejected the old belief in the Trinity as held both by

-the Protestants and the Catholics, but he believed so sincerely

-(one feels inclined to say, so naïvely) in the correctness

-of his own views, that he committed the grave error of

-writing letters to Calvin suggesting that he be allowed to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_241"></a>[241]</span>

-visit Geneva for a personal interview and a thorough discussion

-of the entire problem.</p>

-

-<p>He was not invited.</p>

-

-<p>And, anyway, it would have been impossible for him to

-accept. The Inquisitor General of Lyons had already taken

-a hand in the affair and Servetus was in jail. This inquisitor

-(curious readers will find a description of him in the

-works of Rabelais who refers to him as Doribus, a pun upon

-his name, which was Ory) had got wind of the Spaniard’s

-blasphemies through a letter which a private citizen

-of Geneva, with the connivance of Calvin, had sent to his

-cousin in Lyons.</p>

-

-<p>Soon the case against him was further strengthened by

-several samples of Servetus’ handwriting, also surreptitiously

-supplied by Calvin. It really looked as if Calvin

-did not care who hanged the poor fellow as long as he got

-hung, but the inquisitors were negligent in their sacred

-duties and Servetus was able to escape.</p>

-

-<p>First he seems to have tried to reach the Spanish frontier.

-But the long journey through southern France would have

-been very dangerous to a man who was so well known and

-so he decided to follow the rather round-about route via

-Geneva, Milan, Naples and the Mediterranean Sea.</p>

-

-<p>Late one Saturday afternoon in August of the year 1553

-he reached Geneva. He tried to find a boat to cross to the

-other side of the lake, but boats were not supposed to sail

-so shortly before the Sabbath day and he was told to wait

-until Monday.</p>

-

-<p>The next day was Sunday. As it was a misdemeanor

-for both natives and strangers to stay away from divine

-service, Servetus went to church. He was recognized and

-arrested. By what right he was put into jail was never

-explained. Servetus was a Spanish subject and was not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_242"></a>[242]</span>

-accused of any crime against the laws of Geneva. But he

-was a liberal in the matter of doctrine, a blasphemous and

-profane person who dared to have opinions of his own upon

-the subject of the Trinity. It was absurd that such a person

-should invoke the protection of the law. A common

-criminal might do so. A heretic, never! And without further

-ado he was locked up in a filthy and damp hole, his

-money and his personal belongings were confiscated and

-two days later he was taken to court and was asked to answer

-a questionnaire containing thirty-eight different points.</p>

-

-<p>The trial lasted two months and twelve days.</p>

-

-<p>In the end he was found guilty of “heresies against the

-foundations of the Christian religion.” The answers which

-he had given during the discussions of his opinions had exasperated

-his judges. The usual punishment for cases of

-his sort, especially if the accused were a foreigner, was perpetual

-banishment from the territory of the city of Geneva.

-In the case of Servetus an exception was made. He was

-condemned to be burned alive.</p>

-

-<p>In the meantime the French tribunal had re-opened the

-case of the fugitive and the officials of the Inquisition had

-come to the same conclusion as their Protestant colleagues.

-They too had condemned Servetus to death and had dispatched

-their sheriff to Geneva with the request that the

-culprit be surrendered to him and be brought back to France.</p>

-

-<p>This request was refused.</p>

-

-<p>Calvin was able to do his own burning.</p>

-

-<p>As for that terrible walk to the place of execution, with

-a delegation of arguing ministers surrounding the heretic

-upon his last journey, the agony which lasted for more than

-half an hour and did not really come to an end until the

-crowd, in their pity for the poor martyr, had thrown a fresh

-supply of fagots upon the flames, all this makes interesting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_243"></a>[243]</span>

-reading for those who care for that sort of thing, but it had

-better be omitted. One execution more or less, what difference

-did it make during a period of unbridled religious

-fanaticism?</p>

-

-<p>But the case of Servetus really stands by itself. Its consequences

-were terrible. For now it was shown, and shown

-with brutal clearness, that those Protestants who had

-clamored so loudly and persistently for “the right to their

-own opinions” were merely Catholics in disguise, that they

-were just as narrow-minded and cruel to those who did not

-share their own views as their enemies and that they were

-only waiting for the opportunity to establish a reign of

-terror of their own.</p>

-

-<p>This accusation is a very serious one. It cannot be dismissed

-by a mere shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, what

-would you expect?”</p>

-

-<p>We possess a great deal of information upon the trial

-and know in detail what the rest of the world thought of

-this execution. It makes ghastly reading. It is true that

-Calvin, in an outburst of generosity, suggested that Servetus

-be decapitated instead of burned. Servetus thanked him

-for his kindness, but offered still another solution. He

-wanted to be set free. Yea, he insisted (and the logic was

-all on his side) that the court had no jurisdiction over him,

-that he was merely an honest man in search for the truth

-and that therefore he had the right to be heard in open

-debate with his opponent, Dr. Calvin.</p>

-

-<p>But of this Calvin would not hear.</p>

-

-<p>He had sworn that this heretic, once he fell into his

-hands, should never be allowed to escape with his life, and

-he was going to be as good as his word. That he could not

-get a conviction without the coöperation of his arch-enemy,

-the Inquisition, made no difference to him. He would have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_244"></a>[244]</span>

-made common cause with the pope if His Holiness had been

-in the possession of some documents that would further incriminate

-the unfortunate Spaniard.</p>

-

-<p>But worse was to follow.</p>

-

-<p>On the morning of his death, Servetus asked to see Calvin

-and the latter came to the dark and filthy dungeon that

-had served his enemy as a prison.</p>

-

-<p>Upon this occasion at least he might have been generous;

-more, he might have been human.</p>

-

-<p>He was neither.</p>

-

-<p>He stood in the presence of a man who within another

-hour would be able to plead his case before the throne of

-God and he argued. He debated and sputtered, grew green

-and lost his temper. But not a word of pity, of charity, or

-kindliness. Not a word. Only bitterness and hatred, the

-feeling of “Serve you right, you obstinate scoundrel. Burn

-and be damned!”</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>All this happened many, many years ago.</p>

-

-<p>Servetus is dead.</p>

-

-<p>All our statues and memorial tablets will not bring him

-back to life again.</p>

-

-<p>Calvin is dead.</p>

-

-<p>A thousand volumes of abuse will not disturb the ashes

-of his unknown grave.</p>

-

-<p>They are all of them dead, those ardent reformers who

-during the trial had shuddered with fear lest the blasphemous

-scoundrel be allowed to escape, those staunch pillars

-of the Church who after the execution broke forth into

-paeans of praise and wrote each other, “All hail to Geneva!

-The deed is done.”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_245"></a>[245]</span></p>

-

-<p>They are all of them dead, and perhaps it were best they

-were forgotten too.</p>

-

-<p>Only let us have a care.</p>

-

-<p>Tolerance is like liberty.</p>

-

-<p>No one ever gets it merely by asking for it. No one

-keeps it except by the exercise of eternal care and vigilance.</p>

-

-<p>For the sake of some future Servetus among our own

-children, we shall do well to remember this.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_246"></a>[246]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE ANABAPTISTS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Every generation has a bogey-man all its own.</p>

-

-<p>We have our “Reds.”</p>

-

-<p>Our fathers had their Socialists.</p>

-

-<p>Our grandfathers had their Molly Maguires.</p>

-

-<p>Our great-great-grandfathers had their Jacobins.</p>

-

-<p>And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not

-a bit better off.</p>

-

-<p>They had their Anabaptists.</p>

-

-<p>The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth

-century was a certain “World Book” or chronicle, which

-Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler, prohibitionist and author, living

-in the good city of Ulm, published in the year 1534.</p>

-

-<p>Sebastian knew the Anabaptists. He had married into

-an Anabaptist family. He did not share their views, for

-he was a confirmed free-thinker. But this is what he wrote

-about them: “that they taught nothing but love and faith

-and the crucifixion of the flesh, that they manifested patience

-and humility under all suffering, assisted one another with

-true helpfulness, called each other brother and believed in

-having all things in common.”</p>

-

-<p>It is surely a curious thing that people of whom all those

-nice things could be truthfully said should for almost a

-hundred years have been hunted down like wild animals,

-and should have been exposed to all the most cruel punishments

-of the most bloodthirsty of centuries.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_247"></a>[247]</span></p>

-

-<p>But there was a reason and in order to appreciate it you

-must remember certain facts about the Reformation.</p>

-

-<p>The Reformation really settled nothing.</p>

-

-<p>It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book

-infallible in the place of a man and established (or rather,

-tried to establish) a rule by black garbed ministers instead

-of white garbed priests.</p>

-

-<p>Such meager results after half a century of struggle and

-sacrifice had filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate

-disappointment. They had expected a millennium

-of social and religious righteousness and they were not at

-all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and economic

-slavery.</p>

-

-<p>They had been ready for a great adventure. Then something

-had happened. They had slipped between the wall

-and the ship. And they had been obliged to strike out for

-themselves and keep above water as best they could.</p>

-

-<p>They were in a terrible position. They had left the old

-church. Their conscience did not allow them to join the

-new faith. Officially they had, therefore, ceased to exist.

-And yet they lived. They breathed. They were sure that

-they were God’s beloved children. As such it was their

-duty to keep on living and breathing, that they might save

-a wicked world from its own folly.</p>

-

-<p>Eventually they survived, but do not ask how!</p>

-

-<p>Deprived of their old associations, they were forced to

-form groups of their own, to look for a new leadership.</p>

-

-<p>But what man in his senses would take up with these

-poor fanatics?</p>

-

-<p>As a result, shoemakers with second sight and hysterical

-midwives with visions and hallucinations assumed the rôle

-of prophets and prophetesses and they prayed and preached

-and raved until the rafters of their dingy meeting places<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_248"></a>[248]</span>

-shook with the hosannas of the faithful and the tip-staffs of

-the village were forced to take notice of the unseemly disturbance.</p>

-

-<p>Then half a dozen men and women were sent to jail

-and their High and Mightinesses, the town councilors, began

-what was good-naturedly called “an investigation.”</p>

-

-<p>These people did not go to the Catholic Church. They

-did not worship in the Protestant kirk. Then would they

-please explain who they were and what they believed?</p>

-

-<p>To give the poor councilors their due, they were in a

-difficult predicament. For their prisoners were the most

-uncomfortable of all heretics, people who took their religious

-convictions absolutely seriously. Many of the most respectable

-reformers were of this earth earthy and willingly

-made such small compromises as were absolutely necessary,

-if one hoped to lead an agreeable and respectable existence.</p>

-

-<p>Your true Anabaptist was of a different caliber. He

-frowned upon all half-way measures. Jesus had told his

-followers to turn the other cheek when smitten by an enemy,

-and had taught that all those who take the sword shall

-perish by the sword. To the Anabaptists this meant a positive

-ordinance to use no violence. They did not care to

-dilly-dally with words and murmur that circumstances alter

-cases, that, of course, they were against war, but that this

-was a different kind of a war and that therefore they felt

-that for this once God would not mind if they threw a few

-bombs or fired an occasional torpedo.</p>

-

-<p>A divine ordinance was a divine ordinance, and that was

-all there was to it.</p>

-

-<p>And so they refused to enlist and refused to carry arms

-and in case they were arrested for their pacifism (for that

-is what their enemies called this sort of applied Christianity)

-they went willingly forth to meet their fate and recited<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_249"></a>[249]</span>

-Matthew xxvi: 52 until death made an end to their suffering.</p>

-

-<p>But anti-militarism was only a small detail in their program

-of queerness. Jesus had preached that the Kingdom

-of God and the Kingdom of Caesar were two entirely different

-entities and could not and should not be reconciled.

-Very well. These words were clear. Henceforth all good

-Anabaptists carefully abstained from taking part in their

-country’s government, refused to hold public office and

-spent the time which other people wasted upon politics,

-reading and studying the holy scriptures.</p>

-

-<p>Jesus had cautioned his disciples against unseemly quarrels

-and the Anabaptists would rather lose their rightful

-possessions than submit a difference of opinion to a law

-court.</p>

-

-<p>There were several other points which set these peculiar

-people apart from the rest of the world, but these few examples

-of their odd behavior will explain the suspicion and

-detestation in which they were held by their fat and happy

-neighbors who invariably mixed their piety with a dose of

-that comfortable doctrine which bids us live and let live.</p>

-

-<p>Even so, the Anabaptists, like the Baptists and many

-other dissenters, might in the end have discovered a way

-to placate the authorities, if only they had been able to

-protect themselves from their own friends.</p>

-

-<p>Undoubtedly there are many honest Bolshevists who

-dearly love their fellow proletarians and who spend their

-waking hours trying to make this world a better and happier

-place. But when the average person hears the word

-“Bolshevik,” he thinks of Moscow and of a reign of terror

-established by a handful of scholarly cut-throats, of jails

-full of innocent people and firing squads jeering at the victims

-they are about to shoot. This picture may be slightly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_250"></a>[250]</span>

-unfair, but it is no more than natural that it should be

-part of the popular myth after the unspeakable things which

-have happened in Russia during the last seven years.</p>

-

-<p>The really good and peaceful Anabaptists of the sixteenth

-century suffered from a similar disadvantage. As

-a sect they were suspected of many strange crimes, and

-with good reason. In the first place, they were inveterate

-Bible readers. This, of course, is not a crime at all, but let

-me finish my sentence. The Anabaptists studied the scriptures

-without any discrimination and that is a very dangerous

-thing when one has a strong predilection for the Book

-of Revelation.</p>

-

-<p>This strange work which even as late as the fifth century

-was rejected as a bit of “spurious writing” was just the

-sort of thing to appeal to people who lived during a period

-of intense emotional passions. The exile of Patmos spoke

-a language which these poor, hunted creatures understood.

-When his impotent rage drove him into hysterical prophecies

-anent the modern Babylon, all the Anabaptists shouted amen

-and prayed for the speedy coming of the New Heaven

-and the New Earth.</p>

-

-<p>It was not the first time that weak minds gave way under

-the stress of a great excitement. And almost every persecution

-of the Anabaptists was followed by violent outbursts

-of religious insanity. Men and women would rush naked

-through the streets, announcing the end of the world, trying

-to indulge in weird sacrifices that the fury of God

-might be appeased. Old hags would enter the divine services

-of some other sect and break up the meeting, stridently

-shrieking nonsense about the coming of the Dragon.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, this sort of affliction (in a mild degree) is

-always with us. Read the daily papers and you will see

-how in some remote hamlet of Ohio or Iowa or Florida a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_251"></a>[251]</span>

-woman has butchered her husband with a meat cleaver because

-“she was told to do so” by the voice of an angel; or

-how an otherwise reasonable father has just killed his wife

-and eight children in anticipation of the sounding of the

-Seven Trumpets. Such cases, however, are rare exceptions.

-They can be easily handled by the local police and they

-really do not have great influence upon the life or the

-safety of the Republic.</p>

-

-<p>But what had happened in the year 1534 in the good

-town of Münster was something very different. There the

-New Zion, upon strictly Anabaptist principles, had actually

-been proclaimed.</p>

-

-<p>And people all over northern Europe shuddered when

-they thought of that terrible winter and spring.</p>

-

-<p>The villain in the case was a good-looking young tailor

-by the name of Jan Beukelszoon. History knows him as

-John of Leiden, for Jan was a native of that industrious

-little city and had spent his childhood along the banks

-of the sluggish old Rhine. Like all other apprentices of

-that day, he had traveled extensively and had wandered far

-and wide to learn the secrets of his trade.</p>

-

-<p>He could read and write just enough to produce an occasional

-play, but he had no real education. Neither was

-he possessed of that humility of spirit which we so often

-find in people who are conscious of their social disadvantages

-and their lack of knowledge. But he was a very good-looking

-young man, endowed with unlimited cheek and as

-vain as a peacock.</p>

-

-<p>After a long absence in England and Germany, he went

-back to his native land and set up in the cloak and suit

-business. At the same time he went in for religion and

-that was the beginning of his extraordinary career. For

-he became a disciple of Thomas Münzer.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_252"></a>[252]</span></p>

-

-<p>This man Münzer, a baker by profession, was a famous

-character. He was one of the three Anabaptist prophets

-who, in the year 1521, had suddenly made their appearance

-in Wittenberg that they might show Luther how to find

-the true road to salvation. Although they had acted with

-the best of intentions, their efforts had not been appreciated

-and they had been chased out of the Protestant stronghold

-with the request that never again they show their unwelcome

-selves within the jurisdiction of the Dukes of Saxony.</p>

-

-<p>Came the year 1534 and the Anabaptists had suffered so

-many defeats that they decided to risk everything on one

-big, bold stroke.</p>

-

-<p>That they selected the town of Münster in Westphalia as

-the spot for their final experiment surprised no one. Franz

-von Waldeck, the prince-bishop of that city, was a drunken

-bounder who for years had lived openly with a score of

-women and who ever since his sixteenth year had offended

-all decent people by the outrageous bad taste of his private

-conduct. When the town went Protestant, he compromised.

-But being known far and wide for a liar and a cheat, his

-treaty of peace did not give his Protestant subjects that

-feeling of personal security without which life is indeed a

-very uncomfortable experience. In consequence whereof

-the inhabitants of Münster remained in a state of high agitation

-until the next elections. These brought a surprise.

-The city government fell into the hands of the Anabaptists.

-The chairman became one Bernard Knipperdollinck, a cloth

-merchant by day and a prophet after dark.</p>

-

-<p>The bishop took one look at his new councilors and fled.</p>

-

-<p>It was then that John of Leiden appeared upon the scene.

-He had come to Münster as the apostle of a certain Jan

-Matthysz, a Haarlem baker who had started a new sect of

-his own and was regarded as a very holy man. And when<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_253"></a>[253]</span>

-he heard of the great blow that had been struck for the

-good cause, he remained to help celebrate the victory and

-purge the bishopric of all popish contamination. The

-Anabaptists were nothing if not thorough. They turned

-the churches into stone quarries. They confiscated the convents

-for the benefit of the homeless. All books except the

-Bible were publicly burned. And as a fitting climax, those

-who refused to be re-baptized after the Anabaptist fashion

-were driven into the camp of the Bishop, who decapitated

-them or drowned them on the general principle that they

-were heretics and small loss to the community.</p>

-

-<p>That was the prologue.</p>

-

-<p>The play itself was no less terrible.</p>

-

-<p>From far and wide the high priests of half a hundred

-new creeds hastened to the New Jerusalem. There they

-were joined by all those who believed themselves possessed

-of a call for the great uplift, honest and sincere citizens,

-but as innocent as babes when it came to politics or statecraft.</p>

-

-<p>The siege of Münster lasted five months and during that

-time, every scheme, system and program of social and spiritual

-regeneration was tried out; every new-fangled prophet

-had his day in court.</p>

-

-<p>But, of course, a little town chuck full of fugitives, pestilence

-and hunger, was not a fit place for a sociological

-laboratory and the dissensions and quarrels between the

-different factions lamed all the efforts of the military

-leaders. During that crisis John the tailor stepped forward.</p>

-

-<p>The short hour of his glory had come.</p>

-

-<p>In that community of starving men and suffering children,

-all things were possible. John began his régime by

-introducing an exact replica of that old theocratic form of

-government of which he had read in his Old Testament.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_254"></a>[254]</span>

-The burghers of Münster were divided into the twelve tribes

-of Israel and John himself was chosen to be their king.

-He had already married the daughter of one prophet, Knipperdollinck.

-Now he married the widow of another, the

-wife of his former master, John Matthysz. Next he remembered

-Solomon and added a couple of concubines. And

-then the ghastly farce began.</p>

-

-<p>All day long John sat on the throne of David in the

-market place and all day long the people stood by while

-the royal court chaplain read the latest batch of ordinances.

-These came fast and furiously, for the fate of the city

-was daily growing more desperate and the people were

-in dire need.</p>

-

-<p>John, however, was an optimist and thoroughly believed

-in the omnipotence of paper decrees.</p>

-

-<p>The people complained that they were hungry. John

-promised that he would tend to it. And forthwith a royal

-ukase, duly signed by His Majesty, ordained that all wealth

-in the city be divided equally among the rich and the poor,

-that the streets be broken up and used as vegetable gardens,

-that all meals be eaten in common.</p>

-

-<p>So far so good. But there were those who said that some

-of the rich people had hidden part of their treasures. John

-bade his subjects not to worry. A second decree proclaimed

-that all those who broke a single law of the community

-would be immediately decapitated. And, mind you, such a

-warning was no idle threat. For this royal tailor was as

-handy with his sword as with his scissors and frequently

-undertook to be his own executioner.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the period of hallucinations when the populace

-suffered from a diversity of religious manias; when

-the market place was crowded day and night with thousands<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_255"></a>[255]</span>

-of men and women, awaiting the trumpet blasts of the angel

-Gabriel.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the period of terror, when the prophet kept

-up the courage of his flock by a constant orgy of blood

-and cut the throat of one of his own queens.</p>

-

-<p>And then came the terrible day of retribution when two

-citizens in their despair opened the gates to the soldiers

-of the bishop and when the prophet, locked in an iron cage,

-was shown at all the Westphalian country fairs and was

-finally tortured to death.</p>

-

-<p>A weird episode, but of terrible consequence to many a

-God-fearing and simple soul.</p>

-

-<p>From that moment on, all Anabaptists were outlawed.

-Such leaders as had escaped the carnage of Münster were

-hunted down like rabbits and were killed wherever found.

-From every pulpit, ministers and priests fulminated against

-the Anabaptists and with many curses and anathemas they

-denounced them as communists and traitors and rebels,

-who wanted to upset the existing order of things and deserved

-less mercy than wolves or mad dogs.</p>

-

-<p>Rarely has a heresy hunt been so successful. As a sect,

-the Anabaptists ceased to exist. But a strange thing happened.

-Many of their ideas continued to live, were picked

-up by other denominations, were incorporated into all sorts

-of religious and philosophic systems, became respectable,

-and are today part and parcel of everybody’s spiritual

-and intellectual inheritance.</p>

-

-<p>It is a simple thing to state such a fact. To explain

-how it actually came about, that is quite a different story.</p>

-

-<p>Almost without exception the Anabaptists belonged to

-that class of society which regards an inkstand as an unnecessary

-luxury.</p>

-

-<p>Anabaptist history, therefore, was writ by those who regarded<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_256"></a>[256]</span>

-the sect as a particularly venomous land of denominational

-radicalism. Only now, after a century of

-study, are we beginning to understand the great rôle the

-ideas of these humble peasants and artisans have played

-in the further development of a more rational and more

-tolerant form of Christianity.</p>

-

-<p>But ideas are like lightning. One never knows where

-they will strike next. And what is the use of lightning rods

-in Münster, when the storm breaks loose over Sienna?</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_257"></a>[257]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE SOZZINI FAMILY</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In Italy the Reformation had never been successful.

-It could not be. In the first place, the people of the

-south did not take their religion seriously enough to

-fight about it and in the second place, the close proximity

-of Rome, the center of a particularly well equipped office

-of the Inquisition, made indulgence in private opinions a

-dangerous and costly pastime.</p>

-

-<p>But, of course, among all the thousands of humanists

-who populated the peninsula, there were bound to be a few

-black sheep who cared a great deal more for the good opinion

-of Aristotle than for that of Saint Chrysostom. Those

-good people, however, were given many opportunities to get

-rid of their surplus spiritual energy. There were clubs

-and coffee-houses and discreet salons where men and women

-could give vent to their intellectual enthusiasm without upsetting

-empires. All of which was very pleasant and restful.

-And besides, wasn’t all life a compromise? Hadn’t it always

-been a compromise? Would it not in all likelihood be a

-compromise until the end of time?</p>

-

-<p>Why get excited about such a small detail as one’s faith?</p>

-

-<p>After these few introductory remarks, the reader will

-surely not expect to hear a loud fanfaronade or the firing

-of guns when our next two heroes make their appearance.

-For they are soft-spoken gentlemen, and go about their

-business in a dignified and pleasant way.</p>

-

-<p>In the end, they are to do more to upset the dogmatic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_258"></a>[258]</span>

-tyranny under which the world had suffered for such a

-long time than a whole army of noisy reformers. But that

-is one of those curious things which no one can foresee.

-They happen. We are grateful. But how it comes about,

-that, alas, is something which we do not fully understand.</p>

-

-<p>The name of these two quiet workmen in the vineyard

-of reason was Sozzini.</p>

-

-<p>They were uncle and nephew.</p>

-

-<p>For some unknown reason, the older man, Lelio Francesco,

-spelled his name with one “z” and the younger,

-Fausto Paolo, spelled his with two “zs.” But as they are

-both of them much better known by the Latinized form of

-their name, Socinius, than by the Italian Sozzini, we can

-leave that detail to the grammarians and etymologists.</p>

-

-<p>As far as their influence was concerned, the uncle was

-much less important than the nephew. We shall, therefore,

-deal with him first and speak of the nephew afterwards.</p>

-

-<p>Lelio Sozini was a Siennese, the descendant of a race of

-bankers and judges and himself destined for a career at

-the bar, via the University of Bologna. But like so many

-of his contemporaries, he allowed himself to slip into theology,

-stopped reading law, played with Greek and Hebrew

-and Arabic and ended (as so often happens with

-people of his type) as a rationalistic mystic—a man who

-was at once very much of this world and yet never quite of

-it. This sounds complicated. But those who understand

-what I mean will understand without any further explanation,

-and the others would not understand, no matter what

-I said.</p>

-

-<p>His father, however, seems to have had a suspicion that

-the son might amount to something in the world of letters.

-He gave his boy a check and bade him go forth and see

-whatever there was to be seen. And so Lelio left Sienna<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_259"></a>[259]</span>

-and during the next ten years, he traveled from Venice

-to Geneva and from Geneva to Zürich and from Zürich to

-Wittenberg and then to London and then to Prague and then

-to Vienna and then to Cracow, spending a few months or

-years in every town and hamlet where he hoped to find interesting

-company and might be able to learn something new

-and interesting. It was an age when people talked religion

-just as incessantly as today they talk business. Lelio must

-have collected a strange assortment of ideas and by keeping

-his ears open he was soon familiar with every heresy between

-the Mediterranean and the Baltic.</p>

-

-<p>When, however, he carried himself and his intellectual

-luggage to Geneva, he was received politely but none too

-cordially. The pale eyes of Calvin looked upon this Italian

-visitor with grave suspicion. He was a distinguished young

-man of excellent family and not a poor, friendless wanderer

-like Servetus. It was said, however, that he had Servetian

-inclinations. And that was most disturbing. The case for

-or against the Trinity, so Calvin thought, had been definitely

-settled when the Spanish heretic was burned. On

-the contrary! The fate of Servetus had become a subject

-of conversation from Madrid to Stockholm, and serious-minded

-people all over the world were beginning to take

-the side of the anti-trinitarian. But that was not all. They

-were using Gutenberg’s devilish invention to spread their

-views broadcast and being at a safe distance from Geneva

-they were often far from complimentary in their remarks.</p>

-

-<p>Only a short while before a very learned tract had appeared

-which contained everything the fathers of the Church

-had ever said or written upon the subject of persecuting

-and punishing heretics. It had an instantaneous and enormous

-sale among those who “hated God,” as Calvin said,

-or who “hated Calvin,” as they themselves protested. Calvin<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_260"></a>[260]</span>

-had let it be known that he would like to have a personal

-interview with the author of this precious booklet. But

-the author, anticipating such a request, had wisely omitted

-his name from the title-page.</p>

-

-<p>It was said that he was called Sebastian Castellio, that

-he had been a teacher in one of the Geneva high schools

-and that his moderate views upon diverse theological enormities

-had gained him the hatred of Calvin and the approbation

-of Montaigne. No one, however, could prove this.

-It was mere hearsay. But where one had gone before, others

-might follow.</p>

-

-<p>Calvin, therefore, was distantly polite to Sozzini, but

-suggested that the mild air of Basel would suit his Siennese

-friend much better than the damp climate of Savoy and

-heartily bade him Godspeed when he started on his way

-to the famous old Erasmian stronghold.</p>

-

-<p>Fortunately for Calvin, the Sozzini family soon afterwards

-fell under the suspicion of the Inquisition, Lelio was

-deprived of his funds and falling ill of a fever, he died in

-Zürich at the age of only thirty-seven.</p>

-

-<p>Whatever joy his untimely demise may have caused in

-Geneva, it was short-lived.</p>

-

-<p>For Lelio, besides a widow and several trunks of notes,

-left a nephew, who not only fell heir to his uncle’s unpublished

-manuscripts but soon gained for himself the reputation

-of being even more of a Servetus enthusiast than his

-uncle had been.</p>

-

-<p>During his younger years, Faustus Socinius had traveled

-almost as extensively as the older Lelio. His grandfather

-had left him a small estate and as he did not marry

-until he was nearly fifty, he was able to devote all his time

-to his favorite subject, theology.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_261"></a>[261]</span></p>

-

-<p>For a short while he seems to have been in business in

-Lyons.</p>

-

-<p>What sort of a salesman he made, I do not know, but his

-experience in buying and selling and dealing in concrete

-commodities rather than spiritual values seems to have

-strengthened him in his conviction that very little is ever

-gained by killing a competitor or losing one’s temper if the

-other man has the better of a deal. And as long as he lived,

-he showed himself possessed of that sober common sense

-which is often found in a counting-house but is very rarely

-part of the curriculum of a religious seminary.</p>

-

-<p>In the year 1563 Faustus returned to Italy. On his way

-home he visited Geneva. It does not appear that he ever

-paid his respects to the local patriarch. Besides, Calvin

-was a very sick man at that time. The visit from a member

-of the Sozzini family would only have disturbed him.</p>

-

-<p>The next dozen years, young Socinius spent in the service

-of Isabella de’ Medici. But in the year 1576 this lady, after

-a few days of matrimonial bliss, was murdered by her husband,

-Paolo Orsini. Thereupon Socinius resigned, left Italy

-for good and went to Basel to translate the Psalms into colloquial

-Italian and write a book on Jesus.</p>

-

-<p>Faustus, so it appeared from his writings, was a careful

-man. In the first place, he was very deaf and such people

-are by nature cautious.</p>

-

-<p>In the second place, he derived his income from certain

-estates situated on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan

-authorities had given him a hint that it might be just as well

-for one suspected of “Lutheran leanings” not to be too bold

-while dealing with subjects which were held in disfavor by

-the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms

-and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by

-a number of friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_262"></a>[262]</span></p>

-

-<p>Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the

-Index. It also happened that a copy of his life of Jesus

-was carried all the way to Transylvania and there fell into

-the hands of another liberal-minded Italian, the private

-physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine ladies who

-had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.</p>

-

-<p>Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe.

-A wilderness until the early part of the twelfth century,

-it had been used as a convenient home for the surplus population

-of Germany. The hard working Saxon peasants had

-turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well regulated

-little country with cities and schools and an occasional university.

-But it remained a country far removed from the

-main roads of travel and trade. Hence it had always been

-a favorite place of residence for those who for one reason

-or another preferred to keep a few miles of marsh and mountain

-between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.</p>

-

-<p>As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many

-centuries been associated with the general idea of reaction

-and jingoism that it will come as an agreeable surprise to

-many of my readers when I tell them that during the first

-half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum for

-all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account

-of their religious convictions.</p>

-

-<p>This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about

-in a typically Polish fashion.</p>

-

-<p>That the Republic for quite a long time had been the

-most scandalously mismanaged country of the entire continent

-was even then a generally known fact. The extent,

-however, to which the higher clergy had neglected their duties

-was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when

-dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common

-affliction of all western nations.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_263"></a>[263]</span></p>

-

-<p>But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was

-noticed that the number of Polish students in the different

-German universities was beginning to increase at a rate of

-speed which caused great concern among the authorities of

-Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask questions.

-And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of

-Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed

-to fall into such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders

-were forced to go abroad for their education or do

-without. A little later, when the Teuton universities fell

-under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young men

-from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally

-followed suit.</p>

-

-<p>And when they returned to their home towns, they did so

-as full-fledged Lutherans.</p>

-

-<p>At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been

-quite easy for the king and the nobility and the clergy to

-stamp out this epidemic of erroneous opinions. But such

-a step would have obliged the rulers of the republic to unite

-upon a definite and common policy and that of course was

-directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of

-this strange country where a single dissenting vote could

-upset a law which had the support of all the other members

-of the diet.</p>

-

-<p>And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared

-that the religion of the famous Wittenberg professor carried

-with it a by-product of an economic nature, consisting of

-the confiscation of all Church property, the Boleslauses and

-the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts, barons,

-princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between

-the Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning

-towards a faith which meant money in their pockets.</p>

-

-<p>The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_264"></a>[264]</span>

-upon the discovery caused one of those famous “interims”

-with which the Poles, since time immemorial, have

-tried to stave off the day of reckoning. During such periods

-all authority came to a standstill and the Protestants made

-such a good use of their opportunity that in less than a year

-they had established churches of their own in every part

-of the kingdom.</p>

-

-<p>Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling

-of the new ministers drove the peasants back into the arms

-of the Church and Poland once more became one of the

-strongholds of a most uncompromising form of Catholicism.

-But during the latter half of the sixteenth century, the country

-enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics

-and Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination

-upon the Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion

-that the survivors should flee eastward and should

-eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula and

-it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’

-book on Jesus and expressed a wish to make the author’s

-acquaintance.</p>

-

-<p>Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man

-of parts. He had graduated at the University of Montpellier

-and had been remarkably successful as a woman’s

-specialist. First and last he was a good deal of a scoundrel,

-but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think

-of Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as

-a neurologist and frequently played one rôle out against the

-other. For example, he cured the Queen Dowager of Poland,

-Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund), so successfully of

-the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were wrong,

-that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed

-those who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.</p>

-

-<p>The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_265"></a>[265]</span>

-lovers) but two of her daughters had married local noblemen

-and as their medical adviser, Blandrata exercised a great

-deal of influence upon the politics of his adopted land. He

-knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that it would

-happen very soon unless something be done to make an end

-to the everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to

-work to bring about a truce between the different opposing

-sects. But for this purpose he needed some one more skilled

-in the intricacies of a religious debate than he was himself.

-Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life of Jesus

-was his man.</p>

-

-<p>He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the

-private life of Blandrata had just led to so grave a public

-scandal that the Italian had been forced to resign and leave

-for parts unknown. Socinius, however, remained in this far

-away land, married a Polish girl and died in his adopted

-country in the year 1604.</p>

-

-<p>These last two decades of his life proved to be the most

-interesting period of his career. For it was then that he

-gave a concrete expression to his ideas upon the subject

-of tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of

-Rakow,” a document which Socinius composed as a sort of

-common constitution for all those who meant well by this

-world and wished to make an end to future sectarian strife.</p>

-

-<p>The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of

-catechism, confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People

-were writing them in Germany and in Switzerland and in

-France and in Holland and in Denmark. But everywhere

-these carelessly printed little booklets gave expression to the

-ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained the real<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_266"></a>[266]</span>

-Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty

-of all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to

-uphold this one particular form of Truth with a great big

-capital T to punish with the sword and the gallows and the

-stake those who willfully remained faithful to a different

-sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and

-therefore was of an inferior quality).</p>

-

-<p>The Socinian confession of faith breathed an entirely different

-spirit. It began by the flat statement that it was not

-the intention of those who had signed this document to quarrel

-with anybody else.</p>

-

-<p>“With good reason,” it continued, “many pious people

-complain that the various confessions and catechisms which

-have hitherto been published and which the different churches

-are now publishing are apples of discord among the Christians

-because they all try to impose certain principles upon

-people’s conscience and to consider those who disagree with

-them as heretics.”</p>

-

-<p>Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was

-the intention of the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any

-one else on account of his religious convictions and turning

-to humanity in general, it made the following appeal:</p>

-

-<p>“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for

-this is the rule set forth by the New Testament and by the

-example of the earliest church. Who are we, miserable people,

-that we would smother and extinguish in others the fire

-of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have any

-of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures?

-Why do we not remember that our only master is Jesus

-Christ and that we are all brothers and that to no one has

-been given power over the souls of others? It may be that

-one of our brothers is more learned than the others, yet in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_267"></a>[267]</span>

-regard to liberty and the relationship with Christ we are all

-equal.”</p>

-

-<p>All this was very fine and very wonderful, but it was said

-three hundred years ahead of the times. Neither the Socinians

-nor any of the other Protestant sects could in the long

-run hope to hold their own in this turbulent part of the world.

-The counter-reformation had begun in all seriousness.

-Veritable hordes of Jesuit fathers were beginning to be

-turned loose upon the lost provinces. While they worked,

-the Protestants quarreled. Soon the people of the eastern

-frontier were back within the fold of Rome. Today the

-traveler who visits these distant parts of civilized Europe

-would hardly guess that, once upon a time, they were a

-stronghold of the most advanced and liberal thought of the

-age. Nor would he suspect that somewhere among those

-dreary Lithuanian hills there lies a village where the world

-was for the first time presented with a definite program

-for a practical system of tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>Driven by idle curiosity, I took a morning off recently

-and went to the library and read through the index of all

-our most popular text-books out of which the youth of our

-country learns the story of the past. Not a single one mentioned

-Socinianism or the Sozzinis. They all jumped from

-Social Democrats to Sophia of Hanover and from Sobieski

-to Saracens. The usual leaders of the great religious revolution

-were there, including Oecolampadius and the lesser

-lights.</p>

-

-<p>One volume only contained a reference to the two great

-Siennese humanists but they appeared as a vague appendix

-to something Luther or Calvin had said or done.</p>

-

-<p>It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion

-that in the popular histories of three hundred years

-hence, all this will have been changed and that the Sozzinis<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_268"></a>[268]</span>

-shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter of their own and

-that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be relegated

-to the bottom of the page.</p>

-

-<p>They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing

-in footnotes.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_269"></a>[269]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII<br>

-<span class="smaller">MONTAIGNE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made

-for freedom.</p>

-

-<p>That was true.</p>

-

-<p>A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely

-at baron and priest.</p>

-

-<p>A little later, when conditions upon the European continent

-had improved so much that international commerce

-was once more becoming a possibility, another historical phenomenon

-began to make itself manifest.</p>

-

-<p>Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes

-for tolerance.”</p>

-

-<p>You can verify this statement any day of the week and

-most of all on Sunday in any part of our country.</p>

-

-<p>Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux

-Klan, but New York cannot. If the people of New York

-should ever start a movement for the exclusion of all Jews

-and all Catholics and all foreigners in general, there would

-be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the

-labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the

-hope of repair.</p>

-

-<p>The same held true during the latter half of the Middle

-Ages. Moscow, the seat of a small grand ducal count, might

-rage against the pagans, but Novgorod, the international

-trading post, must be careful lest she offend the Swedes and

-Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants

-who visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_270"></a>[270]</span></p>

-

-<p>A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its

-peasantry with a series of festive autos da fé. But if the

-Venetians or the Genoese or the people of Bruges had started

-a pogrom among the heathen within their walls, there would

-have been an immediate exodus of all those who represented

-foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of

-capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.</p>

-

-<p>A few countries which were constitutionally unable to

-learn from experience (like Spain and the papal dominions

-and certain possessions of the Habsburgs), actuated by a

-sentiment which they proudly called “loyalty to their convictions,”

-ruthlessly expelled the enemies of the true faith.

-As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or dwindled

-down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.</p>

-

-<p>Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed

-by men who have a profound respect for established

-facts, who know on which side their bread is buttered, and

-who therefore maintain such a state of spiritual neutrality

-that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Chinese

-customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful

-to their own particular religion.</p>

-

-<p>For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass

-a law against the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was

-careful to explain to their gendarmes that this decree must

-not be taken too seriously and that unless the heretics actually

-tried to get hold of San Marco and convert it into a

-meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must

-be allowed to worship as they saw fit.</p>

-

-<p>Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every

-Sunday their ministers fulminated against the sins of the

-“Scarlet Woman.” But in the next block the terrible Papists

-were quietly saying mass in some inconspicuous looking

-house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police stood watch<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_271"></a>[271]</span>

-lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to

-break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable

-French and Italian visitors away.</p>

-

-<p>This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people

-in Venice or Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their

-respective churches. They were as good Catholics or Protestants

-as they had ever been. But they remembered that the

-good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg or

-Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of

-a dozen shabby clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted

-accordingly.</p>

-

-<p>It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened

-and liberal opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne

-with the fact that his father and grandfather had

-been in the herring business and that his mother was of

-Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these commercial

-antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s

-general point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism

-and bigotry which characterized his entire career as a

-soldier and statesman had originated in a little fish-shop

-somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.</p>

-

-<p>Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had

-been able to make this statement to his face. For when he

-was born, all vestiges of mere “trade” had been carefully

-wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.</p>

-

-<p>His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne

-and had spent money lavishly that his son might be

-brought up as a gentleman. Before he was fairly able to

-walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little head full of

-Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to

-high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And

-before he was twenty he was a full-fledged member of the

-Bordeaux town council.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_272"></a>[272]</span></p>

-

-<p>Then followed a career in the army and a period at court,

-until at the age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father,

-he retired from all active business and spent the last twenty-one

-years of his life, (with the exception of a few unwilling

-excursions into politics), among his horses and his dogs and

-his books and learned as much from the one as he did from

-the other.</p>

-

-<p>Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered

-from several weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain

-affections and mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s

-grandson, believed to be a part of true gentility. Until the

-end of his days he protested that he was not really a writer

-at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled

-away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random

-ideas upon subjects of a slightly philosophic nature.

-All this was pure buncombe. If ever a man put his heart

-and his soul and his virtues and his vices and everything

-he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the

-immortal d’Artagnan.</p>

-

-<p>And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these

-vices were the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices

-of an essentially generous, well-bred and agreeable person,

-the sum total of Montaigne’s works has become something

-more than literature. It has developed into a definite philosophy

-of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary practical

-variety of decency.</p>

-

-<p>Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic,

-and in his younger years he was an active member of that

-League of Catholic Noblemen which was formed among the

-French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.</p>

-

-<p>But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572

-when news reached him of the joy with which Pope Gregory

-XIII had celebrated the murder of thirty thousand French<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_273"></a>[273]</span>

-Protestants, he turned away from the Church for good. He

-never went so far as to join the other side. He continued

-to go through certain formalities that he might keep his

-neighbors’ tongues from wagging, but those of his chapters

-written after the night of Saint Bartholomew might just as

-well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus

-or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And

-in one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,”

-he spoke as if he had been a contemporary of

-Pericles rather than a servant of Her Majesty Catherine

-de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the Apostate

-as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might

-hope to accomplish.</p>

-

-<p>It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and

-you will find it in part nineteen of the second book.</p>

-

-<p>Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy

-of both Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of

-absolute freedom, which (under the existing circumstances)

-could only provoke a new outbreak of civil war. But when

-circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and Catholics no

-longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath

-their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep

-away as much as possible from interfering with other people’s

-consciences and should permit all of its subjects to love

-God as best suited the happiness of their own particular

-souls.</p>

-

-<p>Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman

-who had hit upon this idea or had dared to express it in public.

-As early as the year 1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former

-chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici and a graduate of half

-a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally suspected of

-being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that

-heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_274"></a>[274]</span>

-had based his somewhat startling opinion upon the ground

-that conscience being what it was, it could not possibly be

-changed by force, and two years later he had been instrumental

-in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration which

-had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their

-own, to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and

-in general to behave as if they were a free and independent

-denomination and not merely a tolerated little sect.</p>

-

-<p>Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen

-(the man who had defended the rights of private property

-against the communistic tendencies expressed in Thomas

-More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar vein when he

-denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving

-their subjects to this or that church.</p>

-

-<p>But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises

-of political philosophers very rarely make best sellers.

-Whereas Montaigne was read and translated and discussed

-wherever civilized people came together in the name of intelligent

-company and good conversation and continued to

-be read and translated and discussed for more than three

-hundred years.</p>

-

-<p>His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote

-for the fun of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular

-with large numbers of people who otherwise would never

-dream of buying (or borrowing) a book that was officially

-classified under “philosophy.”</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_275"></a>[275]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX<br>

-<span class="smaller">ARMINIUS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict

-between “organized society” which places the

-continued safety of the “group” ahead of all other

-considerations and those private citizens of unusual intelligence

-or energy who hold that such improvement as the world

-has thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts

-of the individual and not due to the efforts of the mass

-(which by its very nature is distrustful of all innovations)

-and that therefore the rights of the individual are far more

-important than those of the mass.</p>

-

-<p>If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows

-that the amount of tolerance in any given country must be

-in direct proportion to the degree of individual liberty enjoyed

-by the majority of its inhabitants.</p>

-

-<p>Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally

-enlightened ruler spake unto his children and

-said, “I firmly believe in the principle of live and let live.

-I expect all my beloved subjects to practice tolerance towards

-their neighbors or bear the consequences.”</p>

-

-<p>In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in

-a supply of the official buttons bearing the proud inscription,

-“Tolerance first.”</p>

-

-<p>But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His

-Majesty’s hangman, were rarely of a lasting nature and only

-bore fruit if the sovereign accompanied his threat by an intelligent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_276"></a>[276]</span>

-system of gradual education along the lines of practical

-every day politics.</p>

-

-<p>Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred

-in the Dutch Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth

-century.</p>

-

-<p>In the first place the country consisted of several thousand

-semi-independent towns and villages and these for the greater

-part were inhabited by fishermen, sailors and traders, three

-classes of people who are accustomed to a certain amount

-of independence of action and who are forced by the nature

-of their trade to make quick decisions and to judge the casual

-occurrences of the day’s work upon their own merits.</p>

-

-<p>I would not for a moment claim that, man for man, they

-were a whit more intelligent or broadminded than their

-neighbors in other parts of the world. But hard work and

-tenacity of purpose had made them the grain and fish carriers

-of all northern and western Europe. They knew that

-the money of a Catholic was just as good as that of a Protestant

-and they preferred a Turk who paid cash to a Presbyterian

-who asked for six months’ credit. An ideal country

-therefore to start a little experiment in tolerance and furthermore

-the right man was in the right place and what is

-infinitely more important the right man was in the right

-place at the right moment.</p>

-

-<p>William the Silent was a shining example of the old maxim

-that “those who wish to rule the world must know the world.”

-He began life as a very fashionable and rich young man, enjoying

-a most enviable social position as the confidential

-secretary of the greatest monarch of his time. He wasted

-scandalous sums of money upon dinners and dances, married

-several of the better known heiresses of his day and lived

-gayly without a care for the day of tomorrow. He was not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_277"></a>[277]</span>

-a particularly studious person and racing charts interested

-him infinitely more than religious tracts.</p>

-

-<p>The social unrest which followed in the wake of the Reformation

-did not at first impress him as anything more

-serious than still another quarrel between capital and labor,

-the sort of thing that could be settled by the use of a little

-tact and the display of a few brawny police constables.</p>

-

-<p>But once he had grasped the true nature of the issue that

-had arisen between the sovereign and his subjects, this amiable

-grand seigneur was suddenly transformed into the exceedingly

-able leader of what, to all intents and purposes,

-was the prime lost cause of the age. The palaces and horses,

-the gold plate and the country estates were sold at short

-notice (or confiscated at no notice at all) and the sporting

-young man from Brussels became the most tenacious and

-successful enemy of the house of Habsburg.</p>

-

-<p>This change of fortune, however, did not affect his private

-character. William had been a philosopher in the days

-of plenty. He remained a philosopher when he lived in a

-couple of furnished rooms and did not know how to pay for

-Saturday’s clean wash. And just as in the olden days he

-had worked hard to frustrate the plans of a cardinal who

-had expressed the intention of building a sufficient number

-of gallows to accommodate all Protestants, he now made it

-a point to bridle the energy of those ardent Calvinists who

-wished to hang all Catholics.</p>

-

-<p>His task was wellnigh hopeless.</p>

-

-<p>Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already

-been killed, the prisons of the Inquisition were full of new

-candidates for martyrdom and in far off Spain new armies

-were being recruited to smash the rebellion before it should

-spread to other parts of the Empire.</p>

-

-<p>To tell people who were fighting for their lives that they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_278"></a>[278]</span>

-must love those who had just hanged their sons and brothers

-and uncles and grandfathers was out of the question. But

-by his personal example, by his conciliatory attitude towards

-those who opposed him, William was able to show his followers

-how a man of character can invariably rise superior

-to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for

-a tooth.</p>

-

-<p>In this campaign for public decency he enjoyed the support

-of a very remarkable man. In the church of Gouda

-you may this very day read a curious monosyllabic epitaph

-which enumerates the virtues of one Dirck Coornhert, who

-lies buried there. This Coornhert was an interesting fellow.

-He was the son of well-to-do people and had spent many

-years of his youth traveling in foreign lands and getting

-some first hand information about Germany, Spain and

-France. As soon as he had returned home from this trip

-he fell in love with a girl who did not have a cent. His careful

-Dutch father had forbidden the marriage. When his

-son married the girl just the same, he did what those ancestral

-patriarchs were supposed to do under the circumstances;

-he talked about filial ingratitude and disinherited the boy.</p>

-

-<p>This was inconvenient, in so far as young Coornhert was

-now obliged to go to work for a living. But he was a young

-man of parts, learned a trade and set up as a copper-engraver.</p>

-

-<p>Alas! once a Dutchman, always a dominie. When evening

-came, he hastily dropped the burin, picked up the goose-quill

-and wrote articles upon the events of the day. His style

-was not exactly what one would nowadays call “amusing.”

-But his books contained a great deal of that amiable common

-sense which had distinguished the work of Erasmus and they

-made him many friends and brought him into contact with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_279"></a>[279]</span>

-William the Silent who thought so highly of his abilities

-that he employed him as one of his confidential advisers.</p>

-

-<p>Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate.

-King Philip, aided and abetted by the Pope, was trying to

-rid the world of the enemy of the human race (to wit, his

-own enemy, William) by a standing offer of twenty-five

-thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and forgiveness

-of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder

-the arch-heretic. William, who had already lived

-through five attempts upon his life, felt it his duty to refute

-the arguments of good King Philip in a series of pamphlets

-and Coornhert assisted him.</p>

-

-<p>That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments

-were intended, should thereby be converted to tolerance was

-of course an idle hope. But as all the world was watching

-the duel between William and Philip, those little pamphlets

-were translated and read everywhere and they caused a

-healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never

-before dared to mention above a whisper.</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the

-ninth of July of the year 1584 a young French Catholic

-gained that reward of twenty-five thousand ducats and six

-years later Coornhert died before he had been able to finish

-the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch

-vernacular.</p>

-

-<p>As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the

-noise of battle that even the fulminations of the different

-theologians went unheard. And when finally the enemy had

-been driven from the territory of the new republic, there

-was no William to take hold of internal affairs and three

-score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary

-but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large

-number of Spanish mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_280"></a>[280]</span></p>

-

-<p>Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel

-but who ever heard of a theologian without a grievance?</p>

-

-<p>In the University of Leiden there were two professors

-who disagreed. That was nothing either new or unusual.

-But these two professors disagreed upon the question of the

-freedom of the will and that was a very serious matter. At

-once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion

-and within less than a month the entire country was divided

-into two hostile camps.</p>

-

-<p>On the one side, the friends of Arminius.</p>

-

-<p>On the other, the followers of Gomarus.</p>

-

-<p>The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all

-his life in Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton

-system of pedagogy. He possessed immense learning

-combined with a total absence of ordinary horse-sense. His

-mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but his

-heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.</p>

-

-<p>His opponent, Arminius, was a very different sort of man.

-He was born in Oudewater, a little city not far away from

-that cloister Steyn where Erasmus had spent the unhappy

-years of his early manhood. As a child he had won the

-friendship of a neighbor, a famous mathematician and professor

-of astronomy in the University of Marburg. This

-man, Rudolf Snellius, had taken Arminius back with him

-to Germany that he might be properly educated. But when

-the boy went home for his first vacation he found that his

-native town had been sacked by the Spaniards and that all

-his relatives had been murdered.</p>

-

-<p>That seemed to end his career but fortunately some rich

-people with kind hearts heard of the sad plight of the young

-orphan and they put up a purse and sent him to Leiden to

-study theology. He worked hard and after half a dozen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_281"></a>[281]</span>

-years he had learned all there was to be learned and looked

-for fresh intellectual grazing grounds.</p>

-

-<p>In those days, brilliant students could always find a patron

-willing to invest a few dollars in their future. Soon

-Arminius, provided with a letter of credit issued by certain

-guilds of Amsterdam, was merrily trotting southward in

-search of future educational opportunities.</p>

-

-<p>As behooved a respectable candidate of theology, he went

-first of all to Geneva. Calvin was dead, but his man Friday,

-the learned Theodore Beza, had succeeded him as shepherd

-of the seraphic flock. The fine nose of this old heresy

-hunter at once detected a slight odor of Ramism in the

-doctrines of the young Dutchman and the visit of Arminius

-was cut short.</p>

-

-<p>The word Ramism means nothing to modern readers. But

-three hundred years ago it was considered a most dangerous

-religious novelty, as those who are familiar with the assembled

-works of Milton will know. It had been invented

-or originated (or what you please) by a Frenchman, a certain

-Pierre de la Ramée. As a student, de la Ramée had

-been so utterly exasperated by the antiquated methods of his

-professors that he had chosen as subject for his doctor’s

-dissertation the somewhat startling text, “Everything ever

-taught by Aristotle is absolutely wrong.”</p>

-

-<p>Needless to say this subject did not gain him the good will

-of his teachers. When a few years afterwards he elaborated

-his idea in a number of learned volumes, his death was a

-foregone conclusion. He fell as one of the first victims of

-the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.</p>

-

-<p>But his books, those pesky books which refuse to be assassinated

-together with their authors, had survived and

-Ramée’s curious system of logic had gained great popularity

-throughout northern and western Europe. Truly pious people<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_282"></a>[282]</span>

-however believed that Ramism was the password to

-Hades and Arminius was advised to go to Basel where “libertines”

-(a sixteenth century colloquialism meaning

-“liberals”) had been considered good form ever since that

-unfortunate city had fallen under the spell of the quizzical

-Erasmus.</p>

-

-<p>Arminius, thus forewarned, traveled northward and then

-decided upon something quite unusual. He boldly invaded

-the enemy’s territory, studied for a few semesters in the

-University of Padua and paid a visit to Rome. This made

-him a dangerous person in the eyes of his fellow countrymen

-when he returned to his native country in the year 1587.

-But as he seemed to develop neither horns nor a tail, he

-was gradually taken back into their good favor and was

-allowed to accept a call as minister to Amsterdam.</p>

-

-<p>There he made himself not only useful but he gained quite

-a reputation as a hero during one of the many outbreaks of

-the plague. Soon he was held in such genuine esteem that

-he was entrusted with the task of reorganizing the public

-school system of that big city and when in the year 1603

-he was called to Leiden as a full-fledged professor of theology,

-he left the capital amidst the sincere regrets of the

-entire population.</p>

-

-<p>If he had known beforehand what was awaiting him in

-Leiden, I am sure he would never have gone. He arrived

-just when the battle between the Infralapsarians and the

-Supralapsarians was at its height.</p>

-

-<p>Arminius was both by nature and education an Infralapsarian.

-He tried to be fair to his colleague, the Supralapsarian

-Gomarus. But alas, the differences between the

-Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians were such as allowed

-of no compromise. And Arminius was forced to declare

-himself an out and out Infralapsarian.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_283"></a>[283]</span></p>

-

-<p>Of course, you will ask me what Supra- and Infralapsarians

-were. I don’t know, and I seem unable to learn such

-things. But as far as I can make out, it was the age-old

-quarrel between those who believed (as did Arminius) that

-man is to a certain extent possessed of a free will and able

-to shape his own destinies and those who like Sophocles and

-Calvin and Gomarus taught that everything in our lives has

-been pre-ordained ages before we were born and that our

-fate therefore depends upon a throw of the divine dice at

-the hour of creation.</p>

-

-<p>In the year 1600 by far the greater number of the people

-of northern Europe were Supralapsarians. They loved to

-listen to sermons which doomed the majority of their neighbors

-to eternal perdition and those few ministers who dared

-to preach a gospel of good will and charity were at once

-suspected of criminal weakness, fit rivals of those tender

-hearted doctors who fail to prescribe malodorous medicines

-and kill their patients by their kindness.</p>

-

-<p>As soon as the gossiping old women of Leiden had discovered

-that Arminius was an Infralapsarian, his usefulness

-had come to an end. The poor man died under the torrent

-of abuse that was let loose upon him by his former friends

-and supporters. And then, as seemed unavoidable during

-the seventeenth century, Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism

-made their entrance into the field of politics and

-the Supralapsarians won at the polls and the Infralapsarians

-were declared enemies of the public order and traitors to

-their country.</p>

-

-<p>Before this absurd quarrel had come to an end, Oldenbarnevelt,

-the man who next to William the Silent had been

-responsible for the foundation of the Republic, lay dead

-with his head between his feet; Grotius, whose moderation

-had made him the first great advocate of an equitable system<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_284"></a>[284]</span>

-of international law, was eating the bread of charity at the

-court of the Queen of Sweden; and the work of William the

-Silent seemed entirely undone.</p>

-

-<p>But Calvinism did not gain the triumph it had hoped.</p>

-

-<p>The Dutch Republic was a republic only in name. It was

-really a sort of merchants’ and bankers’ club, ruled by a

-few hundred influential families. These gentlemen were not

-at all interested in equality and fraternity, but they did believe

-in law and order. They recognized and supported the

-established church. On Sundays with a great display of

-unction they proceeded to the large white-washed sepulchers

-which in former days had been Catholic Cathedrals and

-which now were Protestant lecture halls. But on Monday,

-when the clergy paid its respects to the Honorable Burgomaster

-and Town Councilor, with a long list of grievances

-against this and that and the other person, their lordships

-were “in conference” and unable to receive the reverend gentlemen.

-If the reverend gentlemen insisted, and induced (as

-frequently happened) a few thousand of their loyal parishioners

-to “demonstrate” in front of the town hall, then their

-lordships would graciously deign to accept a neatly written

-copy of the reverend gentlemen’s complaints and suggestions.

-But as soon as the door had been closed upon the last

-of the darkly garbed petitioners, their lordships would use

-the document to light their pipes.</p>

-

-<p>For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of

-“once is enough and too many” and they were so horrified

-by what had happened during the terrible years of the great

-Supralapsarian civil war that they uncompromisingly suppressed

-all further forms of religious frenzy.</p>

-

-<p>Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of

-the ledger. Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their

-private property and did not always differentiate with sufficient<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_285"></a>[285]</span>

-nicety between the interests of their fatherland and

-those of their own firm. They lacked that broad vision which

-goes with empire and almost invariably they were penny-wise

-and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves

-our hearty commendation. They turned their country

-into an international clearing-house where all sorts of people

-with all sorts of ideas were given the widest degree of liberty

-to say, think, write and print whatever pleased them.</p>

-

-<p>I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there,

-under a threat of ministerial disapprobation, the Town

-Councilors were sometimes obliged to suppress a secret society

-of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets printed by

-a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as

-long as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the

-market place to denounce the doctrine of predestination or

-carry a big rosary into a public dining-hall or deny the

-existence of God in the South Side Methodist Church of

-Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity which

-for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable

-haven of rest for all those who in other parts of the

-world were persecuted for the sake of their opinions.</p>

-

-<p>Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad.

-And during the next two hundred years, the print shops

-and the coffee-houses of Holland were filled with a motley

-crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a strange new army

-of spiritual liberation.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_286"></a>[286]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX<br>

-<span class="smaller">BRUNO</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that

-the Great War was a war of non-commissioned officers.</p>

-

-<p>While the generals and the colonels and the three-star

-strategists sat in solitary splendor in the halls of some

-deserted château and contemplated miles of maps until they

-could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to give them half

-a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand

-men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals,

-aided and abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did

-the so-called “dirty work” and eventually brought about

-the collapse of the German line of defense.</p>

-

-<p>The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought

-along similar lines.</p>

-

-<p>There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half

-a million soldiers.</p>

-

-<p>There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s

-gunners with an easy and agreeable target.</p>

-

-<p>I might go even further and say that the vast majority

-of the people never knew that there was any fighting at all.

-Now and then, curiosity may have compelled them to ask

-who was being burned that morning or who was going to be

-hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered

-that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain

-principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants

-disapproved most heartily. But I doubt whether

-such information affected them beyond the point of mild<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_287"></a>[287]</span>

-regret and the comment that it must be very sad for their

-poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible

-end.</p>

-

-<p>It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually

-accomplish for the cause for which they give their

-lives cannot possibly be reduced to mathematical formulae

-or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.</p>

-

-<p>Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may

-read carefully through the assembled works of Giordano

-Bruno and by the patient collection of all sentences containing

-such sentiments as “the state has no right to tell people

-what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword

-those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he

-may be able to write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano

-Bruno (1549-1600) and the principles of religious

-freedom.”</p>

-

-<p>But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters

-must approach the subject from a different angle.</p>

-

-<p>There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number

-of devout men who were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism

-of their day, by the yoke under which the people of

-all countries were forced to exist, that they rose in revolt.

-They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the

-cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a

-place to sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up

-and down the land they traveled, talking and writing, drawing

-the learned professors of learned academies into learned

-disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country folk in

-humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good

-will, of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and

-down the land they traveled in their shabby clothes with

-their little bundles of books and pamphlets until they died

-of pneumonia in some miserable village in the hinterland<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_288"></a>[288]</span>

-of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a

-Scotch hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial

-borough of France.</p>

-

-<p>And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not

-mean to imply that he was the only one of his kind. But

-his life, his ideas, his restless zeal for what he held to be

-true and desirable, were so typical of that entire group of

-pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.</p>

-

-<p>The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an

-average Italian boy of no particular promise, followed the

-usual course and went into a monastery. Later he became

-a Dominican monk. He had no business in that order for

-the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms

-of persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their

-contemporaries called them. And they were clever. It was

-not necessary for a heretic to have his ideas put into print

-to be nosed out by one of those eager detectives. A single

-glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the shoulders were

-often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into contact

-with the Inquisition.</p>

-

-<p>How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning

-obedience, turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures

-for the works of Zeno and Anaxagoras, I do not know. But

-before this strange novice had finished his course of prescribed

-studies, he was expelled from the Dominican order

-and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.</p>

-

-<p>He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before

-him had braved the dangers of those ancient mountain passes

-that they might find freedom in the mighty fortress which

-the new faith had erected at the junction of the Rhone

-and the Arve!</p>

-

-<p>And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted

-when they discovered that here as there it was the inner<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_289"></a>[289]</span>

-spirit which guided the hearts of men and that a change of

-creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart and mind.</p>

-

-<p>Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months.

-The town was full of Italian refugees. These brought their

-fellow-countryman a new suit of clothes and found him a

-job as proof-reader. In the evenings he read and wrote.

-He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at

-last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed

-too that the world could not progress until the tyranny

-of the medieval text-books was broken. Bruno did not go

-as far as his famous French teacher and did not believe that

-everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But

-why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by

-words and sentences that were written in the fourth century

-before the birth of Christ? Why indeed?</p>

-

-<p>“Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of

-the orthodox faith answered him.</p>

-

-<p>“What have we to do with our grandfathers and what

-have they to do with us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the

-young iconoclast answered.</p>

-

-<p>And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and

-suggested that he had better pack his satchels and try his

-luck elsewhere.</p>

-

-<p>Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in

-search of a place where he might live and work in some

-degree of liberty and security. He never found it. From

-Geneva he went to Lyons and then to Toulouse. By that

-time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had become

-an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a

-dangerous step in an age when all the contemporary Bryans

-brayed, “The world turning around the sun! The world

-a commonplace little planet turning around the sun! Ho-ho

-and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_290"></a>[290]</span></p>

-

-<p>Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France,

-walking to Paris. And next to England as private secretary

-to a French ambassador. But there another disappointment

-awaited him. The English theologians were no better

-than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps.

-In Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when

-he committed an error against the teachings of Aristotle.

-They fined him ten shillings.</p>

-

-<p>Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly

-dangerous bits of prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political

-nature in which the entire existing order of things

-was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a minute but none

-too flattering examination.</p>

-

-<p>And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject,

-astronomy.</p>

-

-<p>But college authorities rarely smile upon professors who

-please the hearts of their students. Bruno once more found

-himself invited to leave. And so back again to France and

-then to Marburg, where not so long before Luther and

-Zwingli had debated upon the true nature of the transubstantiation

-in the castle of pious Elisabeth of Hungary.</p>

-

-<p>Alas! his reputation as a “Libertine” had preceded him.

-He was not even allowed to lecture. Wittenberg proved

-more hospitable. That old stronghold of the Lutheran

-faith, however, was beginning to be overrun by the disciples

-of Dr. Calvin. After that there was no further room for

-a man of Bruno’s liberal tendencies.</p>

-

-<p>Southward he wended his way to try his luck in the land

-of John Huss. Further disappointment awaited him.

-Prague had become a Habsburg capital and where the Habsburg

-entered, freedom went out by the city gates. Back to

-the road and a long, long walk to Zürich.</p>

-

-<p>There he received a letter from an Italian youth, Giovanni<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_291"></a>[291]</span>

-Mocenigo, who asked him to come to Venice. What made

-Bruno accept, I do not know. Perhaps the Italian peasant

-in him was impressed by the luster of an old patrician name

-and felt flattered by the invitation.</p>

-

-<p>Giovanni Mocenigo, however, was not made of the stuff

-which had enabled his ancestors to defy both Sultan and

-Pope. He was a weakling and a coward and did not move

-a finger when officers of the Inquisition appeared at his

-house and took his guest to Rome.</p>

-

-<p>As a rule, the government of Venice was terribly jealous

-of its rights. If Bruno had been a German merchant or a

-Dutch skipper, they would have protested violently and

-they might even have gone to war when a foreign power

-dared to arrest some one within their own jurisdiction. But

-why incur the hostility of the pope on account of a vagabond

-who had brought nothing to their city but his ideas?</p>

-

-<p>It was true he called himself a scholar. The Republic

-was highly flattered, but she had scholars enough of her own.</p>

-

-<p>And so farewell to Bruno and may San Marco have mercy

-upon his soul.</p>

-

-<p>Seven long years Bruno was kept in the prison of the Inquisition.</p>

-

-<p>On the seventeenth of February of the year 1600 he was

-burned at the stake and his ashes were blown to the winds.</p>

-

-<p>He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who

-know Italian may therein find inspiration for a pretty little

-allegory.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_292"></a>[292]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI<br>

-<span class="smaller">SPINOZA</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>There are certain things in history which I have

-never been able to understand and one of these is

-the amount of work done by some of the artists and

-literary men of bygone ages.</p>

-

-<p>The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters

-and dictaphones and secretaries and fountain pens,

-can turn out between three and four thousand words a day.

-How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs to distract

-his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill,

-manage to write thirty-seven plays?</p>

-

-<p>Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible

-Armada and a busy man all his life, find the necessary ink

-and paper for eighteen hundred comedies and five hundred

-essays?</p>

-

-<p>What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister,

-Johann Sebastian Bach, who in a little house filled with the

-noise of twenty children found time to compose five oratorios,

-one hundred and ninety church cantatas, three wedding

-cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses, three

-fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would

-have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano

-and orchestra, three concertos for two pianos, two concertos

-for three pianos, thirty orchestral scores and enough

-pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the organ, the bull-fiddle

-and the French horn to keep the average student of

-music busy for the rest of his days.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_293"></a>[293]</span></p>

-

-<p>Or again, by what process of industry and application

-could painters like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture

-or an etching at the rate of almost four a month during

-more than thirty years? How could an humble citizen

-like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty

-fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?</p>

-

-<p>I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising

-all these plots, hearing all these melodies, seeing all those

-diversified combinations of color and line, choosing all this

-wood. I am just wondering at the physical part of it.

-How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed? Didn’t

-they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards?

-Were they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?</p>

-

-<p>Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full

-of that sort of people. They defied all the laws of hygiene,

-ate and drank everything that was bad for them, were totally

-unconscious of their high destinies as members of the glorious

-human race, but they had an awfully good time and

-their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific.</p>

-

-<p>And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally

-true of such finicky subjects as theology.</p>

-

-<p>Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred

-years and you will find their cellars and attics filled with

-tracts and homilies and discussions and refutations and digests

-and commentaries in duodecimo and octodecimo and

-octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in paper, all

-of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception

-containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.</p>

-

-<p>The subjects of which they treated and many of the words

-they used have lost all meaning to our modern ears. But

-somehow or other these moldy compilations served a very

-useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing else, they at<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_294"></a>[294]</span>

-least cleared the air. For they either settled the questions

-they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned,

-or they convinced their readers that those particular problems

-could not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic

-and argument and might therefore just as well be dropped

-right then and there.</p>

-

-<p>This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I

-hope that critics of the thirtieth century shall be just as

-charitable when they wade through the remains of our own

-literary and scientific achievements.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow

-the fashion of his time in the matter of quantity. His

-assembled works consist of three or four small volumes and

-a few bundles of letters.</p>

-

-<p>But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical

-solution of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy

-would have staggered any normally healthy man.

-It killed the poor consumptive who had undertaken to reach

-God by way of the table of multiplication.</p>

-

-<p>Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered

-the indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had

-settled down in the Spanish peninsula when that part of

-the world was a Moorish province. After the reconquest

-and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for the Spaniard”

-which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy,

-the Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They

-had sailed for the Netherlands, had bought a small house

-in Amsterdam, had worked hard, had saved their money

-and soon were known as one of the most respectable families

-of the “Portuguese colony.”</p>

-

-<p>If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewish<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_295"></a>[295]</span>

-origin, this was due more to the training he received in

-his Talmud school than to the gibes of his little neighbors.

-For the Dutch Republic was so chock full of class prejudice

-that there was little room left for mere race prejudice and

-therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all the

-alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the

-North and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic

-bits of Dutch life which contemporary travelers

-never failed to omit from their “Souvenirs de Voyage” and

-with good reason.</p>

-

-<p>In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the

-relation between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from

-satisfactory. What made the quarrel between the two races

-so hopeless was the fact that both sides were equally right

-and equally wrong and that both sides could justly claim

-to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice.

-In the light of the theory put forward in this book

-that intolerance is merely a form of self-protection of the

-mob, it becomes clear that as long as they were faithful to

-their own respective religions, the Christian and the Jew

-must have conceded each other as enemies. In the first place,

-they both of them maintained that their God was the only

-true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations

-were false. In the second place, they were each other’s most

-dangerous commercial rival. The Jews had come to western

-Europe as they had originally come to Palestine, as immigrants

-in search of a new home. The labor unions of that

-day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take

-up a trade. They had therefore been obliged to content

-themselves with such economic makeshifts as pawnbroking

-and banking. In the Middle Ages these two professions,

-which closely resembled each other, were not thought fit

-occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_296"></a>[296]</span>

-days of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards

-money (except in the form of taxes) and should have regarded

-the taking of interest as a crime, is hard to understand.

-Usury, of course, was something no government

-could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty centuries

-before, had passed drastic laws against the money

-changers who tried to make a profit out of other people’s

-money. In several chapters of the Old Testament, written

-two thousand years later, we read how Moses too had expressly

-forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant

-rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later,

-the great Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato,

-had given expression to their great disapproval of money

-that was born of other money. The Church fathers had

-been even more explicit upon this subject. All during the

-Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt.

-Dante even provided a special little alcove in his

-Hell for the exclusive benefit of his banker friends.</p>

-

-<p>Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker

-and his colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were

-undesirable citizens and that the world would be better off

-without them. At the same time, as soon as the world had

-ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was found to be quite

-impossible to transact even the simplest business operations

-without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had

-become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the

-views of the Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation

-any way, was urged to occupy himself with a trade which

-was necessary but which no respectable man would touch.</p>

-

-<p>In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into

-certain unpleasant trades which made them the natural

-enemy of both the rich and the poor, and then, as soon as

-they had established themselves, these same enemies turned<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_297"></a>[297]</span>

-against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest

-part of the city and in moments of great emotional

-stress, hanged them as wicked unbelievers or burned them

-as renegade Christians.</p>

-

-<p>It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid.

-These endless annoyances and persecutions did not make

-the Jews any fonder of their Christian neighbors. And

-as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate intelligence

-was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright

-young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce

-and science and the arts, wasted their brains and

-energy upon the useless study of certain old books filled with

-abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting syllogisms and millions

-of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead stunted

-lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to

-their elders who told them that they were God’s chosen

-people who would surely inherit the earth and all the wealth

-thereof, and on the other hand being frightened to death

-by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to inform

-them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or

-the wheel.</p>

-

-<p>To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under

-such adverse circumstances shall retain a normal outlook

-upon life is to demand the impossible.</p>

-

-<p>Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate

-act by their Christian compatriots and then, when white

-with rage, they turned upon their oppressors, they were

-called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains” and were subjected

-to further humiliations and restrictions. But these

-restrictions had only one result. They increased the number

-of Jews who had a grievance, turned the others into

-nervous wrecks and generally made the Ghetto a ghastly

-abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_298"></a>[298]</span></p>

-

-<p>Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the

-misery which was the birthright of most of his relatives.

-He went first of all to the school maintained by his synagogue

-(appropriately called “the Tree of Life”) and as

-soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to

-the learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who

-was to drill him in Latin and in the sciences.</p>

-

-<p>Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic

-origin. Rumor had it that he was a graduate of the University

-of Louvain and if one were to believe the best informed

-deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in disguise

-and a very dangerous person. This however was

-nonsense. Van den Ende in his youth had actually spent

-a few years at a Catholic seminary. But his heart was

-not in his work and he had left his native city of Antwerp,

-had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private

-school of his own.</p>

-

-<p>He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods

-that would make his pupils like their classical lessons, that

-heedless of the man’s popish past, the Calvinistic burghers

-of Amsterdam willingly entrusted their children to his care

-and were very proud of the fact that the pupils of his school

-invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the little boys

-of all other local academies.</p>

-

-<p>Van den Ende taught little Baruch his Latin, but being

-an enthusiastic follower of all the latest discoveries in the

-field of science and a great admirer of Giordano Bruno,

-he undoubtedly taught the boy several things which as a

-rule were not mentioned in an orthodox Jewish household.</p>

-

-<p>For young Spinoza, contrary to the customs of the times,

-did not board with the other boys, but lived at home. And

-he so impressed his family by his profound learning that all

-the relations proudly pointed to him as the little professor<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_299"></a>[299]</span>

-and liberally supplied him with pocket money. He did not

-waste it upon tobacco. He used it to buy books on

-philosophy.</p>

-

-<p>One author especially fascinated him.</p>

-

-<p>That was Descartes.</p>

-

-<p>René Descartes was a French nobleman born in that region

-between Tours and Poitiers where a thousand years before

-the grandfather of Charlemagne had stopped the Mohammedan

-conquest of Europe. Before he was ten years old he

-had been sent to the Jesuits to be educated and he spent

-the next decade making a nuisance of himself. For this

-boy had a mind of his own and accepted nothing without

-“being shown.” The Jesuits are probably the only people

-in the world who know how to handle such difficult children

-and who can train them successfully without breaking their

-spirit. The proof of the educational pudding is in the eating.

-If our modern pedagogues would study the methods

-of Brother Loyola, we might have a few Descartes of our

-own.</p>

-

-<p>When he was twenty years old, René entered military

-service and went to the Netherlands where Maurice of Nassau

-had so thoroughly perfected his military system that

-his armies were the post-graduate school for all ambitious

-young men who hoped to become generals. Descartes’ visit

-to the headquarters of the Nassau prince was perhaps a

-little irregular. A faithful Catholic taking service with a

-Protestant chieftain! It sounds like high treason. But

-Descartes was interested in problems of mathematics and

-artillery but not of religion or politics. Therefore as soon

-as Holland had concluded a truce with Spain, he resigned

-his commission, went to Munich and fought for a while

-under the banner of the Catholic Duke of Bavaria.</p>

-

-<p>But that campaign did not last very long. The only fighting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_300"></a>[300]</span>

-of any consequence then still going on was near La

-Rochelle, the city which the Huguenots were defending

-against Richelieu. And so Descartes went back to France

-that he might learn the noble art of siege-craft. But camp

-life was beginning to pall upon him. He decided to give

-up a military career and devote himself to philosophy and

-science.</p>

-

-<p>He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to

-marry. His wishes were few. He anticipated a quiet and

-happy life and he had it.</p>

-

-<p>Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not

-know. But it was a country full of printers and publishers

-and bookshops and as long as one did not openly attack

-the established form of government or religion, the existing

-law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore,

-as he never learned a single word of the language of his

-adopted country (a trick not difficult to a true Frenchman),

-Descartes was able to avoid undesirable company and

-futile conversations and could give all of his time (some

-twenty hours per day) to his own work.</p>

-

-<p>This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been

-a soldier. But Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems

-that he was perfectly contented with his self-inflicted exile.

-He had during the course of years become convinced that

-the world was still plunged in a profound gloom of abysmal

-ignorance; that what was then being called science had not

-even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no

-general progress would be possible until the whole ancient

-fabric of error and falsehood had first of all been razed

-to the ground. No small order, this. Descartes however

-was possessed of endless patience and at the age of thirty

-he set to work to give us an entirely new system of philosophy.

-Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomy<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_301"></a>[301]</span>

-and physics to his original program and he performed

-his task with such noble impartiality of mind that

-the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and the Calvinists

-cursed him for an atheist.</p>

-

-<p>This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him

-in the least. He quietly continued his researches and died

-peacefully in the city of Stockholm, whither he had gone

-to talk philosophy with the Queen of Sweden.</p>

-

-<p>Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism

-(the name under which his philosophies became known)

-made quite as much of a stir as Darwinism was to make

-among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be a Cartesian

-in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something

-almost indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the

-established order of society, a Socinian, a low fellow who

-by his own confession had set himself apart from the companionship

-of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent

-the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting

-Cartesianism as readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers

-accepted Darwinism. But among the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam,

-such subjects were never even mentioned. Cartesianism

-was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah.

-Hence it did not exist. And when it became apparent that

-it existed just the same in the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza,

-it was a foregone conclusion that said Baruch de Spinoza

-would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities of

-the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and

-take official action.</p>

-

-<p>The Amsterdam synagogue had at that moment passed

-through a severe crisis. When little Baruch was fifteen years

-old, another Portuguese exile by the name of Uriel Acosta

-had arrived in Amsterdam, had forsworn Catholicism,

-which he had accepted under a threat of death, and had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_302"></a>[302]</span>

-returned to the faith of his fathers. But this fellow Acosta

-had not been an ordinary Jew. He was a gentleman accustomed

-to carry a feather in his hat and a sword at his side.

-To him the arrogance of the Dutch rabbis, trained in the

-German and Polish schools of learning, had come as a most

-unpleasant surprise, and he had been too proud and too indifferent

-to hide his opinions.</p>

-

-<p>In a small community like that, such open defiance could

-not possibly be tolerated. A bitter struggle had followed.

-On the one side a solitary dreamer, half prophet, half hidalgo.

-On the other side the merciless guardians of the law.</p>

-

-<p>It had ended in tragedy.</p>

-

-<p>First of all Acosta had been denounced to the local police

-as the author of certain blasphemous pamphlets which denied

-the immortality of the soul. This had got him into

-trouble with the Calvinist ministers. But the matter had

-been straightened out and the charge had been dropped.

-Thereupon the synagogue had excommunicated the stiff-necked

-rebel and had deprived him of his livelihood.</p>

-

-<p>For months thereafter the poor man had wandered

-through the streets of Amsterdam until destitution and loneliness

-had driven him back to his own flock. But he was

-not re-admitted until he had first of all publicly apologized

-for his evil conduct and had then suffered himself to be

-whipped and kicked by all the members of the congregation.

-These indignities had unbalanced his mind. He had

-bought a pistol and had blown his brains out.</p>

-

-<p>This suicide had caused a tremendous lot of talk among

-the principal citizens of Amsterdam. The Jewish community

-felt that it could not risk the chance of another public

-scandal. When it became evident that the most promising

-pupil of the “Tree of Life” had been contaminated by the

-new heresies of Descartes, a direct attempt was made to hush<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_303"></a>[303]</span>

-things up. Baruch was approached and was offered a fixed

-annual sum if he would give his word that he would be good,

-would continue to show himself in the synagogue and would

-not publish or say anything against the law.</p>

-

-<p>Now Spinoza was the last man to consider such a compromise.

-He curtly refused to do anything of the sort.

-In consequence whereof he was duly read out of his own

-church according to that famous ancient Formula of Damnation

-which leaves very little to the imagination and goes

-back all the way to the days of Jericho to find the appropriate

-number of curses and execrations.</p>

-

-<p>As for the victim of these manifold maledictions, he remained

-quietly in his room and read about the occurrence in

-next day’s paper. Even when an attempt was made upon

-his life by an over zealous follower of the law, he refused

-to leave town.</p>

-

-<p>This came as a great blow to the prestige of the Rabbis

-who apparently had invoked the names of Joshua and Elisha

-in vain and who saw themselves publicly defied for the second

-time in less than half a dozen years. In their anxiety

-they went so far as to make an appeal to the town hall.

-They asked for an interview with the Burgomasters and

-explained that this Baruch de Spinoza whom they had just

-expelled from their own church was really a most dangerous

-person, an agnostic who refused to believe in God and

-who therefore ought not to be tolerated in a respectable

-Christian community like the city of Amsterdam.</p>

-

-<p>Their lordships, after their pleasant habit, washed their

-hands of the whole affair and referred the matter to a sub-committee

-of clergymen. The sub-committee studied the

-question, discovered that Baruch de Spinoza had done nothing

-that could be construed as an offense against the ordinances

-of the town, and so reported to their lordships. At<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_304"></a>[304]</span>

-the same time they considered it to be good policy for members

-of the cloth to stand together and therefore they suggested

-that the Burgomasters ask this young man, who

-seemed to be so very independent, to leave Amsterdam for a

-couple of months and not to return until the thing had

-blown over.</p>

-

-<p>From that moment on the life of Spinoza was as quiet

-and uneventful as the landscape upon which he looked from

-his bedroom windows. He left Amsterdam and hired a small

-house in the village of Rijnsberg near Leiden. He spent his

-days polishing lenses for optical instruments and at night

-he smoked his pipe and read or wrote as the spirit moved

-him. He never married. There was rumor of a love affair

-between him and a daughter of his former Latin teacher,

-van den Ende. But as the child was ten years old when

-Spinoza left Amsterdam, this does not seem very likely.</p>

-

-<p>He had several very loyal friends and at least twice a

-year they offered to give him a pension that he might devote

-all his time to his studies. He answered that he appreciated

-their good intentions but that he preferred to

-remain independent and with the exception of an allowance

-of eighty dollars a year from a rich young Cartesian, he

-never touched a penny and spent his days in the respectable

-poverty of the true philosopher.</p>

-

-<p>He had a chance to become a professor in Germany, but

-he declined. He received word that the illustrious King of

-Prussia would be happy to become his patron and protector,

-but he answered nay and remained faithful to the quiet routine

-of his pleasant exile.</p>

-

-<p>After a number of years in Rijnsberg he moved to the

-Hague. He had never been very strong and the particles

-of glass from his half-finished lenses had affected his lungs.</p>

-

-<p>He died quite suddenly and alone in the year 1677.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_305"></a>[305]</span></p>

-

-<p>To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than

-six private carriages belonging to prominent members of

-the court followed the “atheist” to his grave. And when

-two hundred years later a statue was unveiled to his memory,

-the police reserves had to be called out to protect the

-participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of

-a rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists.</p>

-

-<p>So much for the man. What about his influence? Was

-he merely another of those industrious philosophers who fill

-endless books with endless theories and speak a language

-which drove even Omar Khayyam to an expression of exasperated

-annoyance?</p>

-

-<p>No, he was not.</p>

-

-<p>Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of

-his wit or the plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was

-great mainly by force of his courage. He belonged to a race

-that knew only one law, a set of hard and fast rules laid

-down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten past,

-a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a

-class of professional priests who had taken it upon themselves

-to interpret this sacred code.</p>

-

-<p>He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom

-was almost synonymous with political anarchy.</p>

-

-<p>He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews

-and Gentiles.</p>

-

-<p>But he never wavered.</p>

-

-<p>He approached all problems as universal problems. He

-regarded them without exception as the manifestation of

-an omnipresent will and believed them to be the expression

-of an ultimate reality which would hold good on Doomsday

-as it had held good at the hour of creation.</p>

-

-<p>And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of

-human tolerance.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_306"></a>[306]</span></p>

-

-<p>Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow

-boundaries laid down by the older forms of religion and

-boldly built himself a new system of thought based upon

-the rocks of a million stars.</p>

-

-<p>By so doing he made man what man had not been since

-the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen

-of the universe.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_307"></a>[307]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE NEW ZION</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>There was little reason to fear that the works of

-Spinoza would ever be popular. They were as amusing

-as a text-book on trigonometry and few people

-ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given

-chapter.</p>

-

-<p>It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas

-among the mass of the people.</p>

-

-<p>In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation

-had come to an end as soon as the country had

-been turned into an absolute monarchy.</p>

-

-<p>In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed

-in the wake of the Thirty Years War had killed all

-personal initiative for at least two hundred years.</p>

-

-<p>During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore,

-England was the only one among the larger countries

-of Europe where further progress along the lines of independent

-thought was still possible and the prolonged quarrel

-between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element

-of instability which proved to be of great help to the

-cause of personal freedom.</p>

-

-<p>First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For

-years these unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil

-of Catholicism and the deep sea of Puritanism.</p>

-

-<p>Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many

-faithful Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome)<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_308"></a>[308]</span>

-were forever clamoring for a return to that happy era when

-the British kings had been vassals of the pope.</p>

-

-<p>Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye

-firmly glued upon the example of Geneva, dreamed of the

-day when there should be no king at all and England

-should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away

-in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.</p>

-

-<p>But that was not all.</p>

-

-<p>The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland

-and their Scottish subjects, when it came to religion, knew

-exactly what they wanted. And so thoroughly were they

-convinced that they themselves were right that they were

-firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They

-thought it wicked that other denominations should be suffered

-to exist and to worship freely within the confines of

-their own Protestant land. And they insisted not only that

-all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the British

-Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians,

-in short all those who did not share their own views upon

-the existence of a living God, be hanged.</p>

-

-<p>This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected

-result. It forced the men who were obliged to keep

-peace between those mutually hostile parties to be much more

-tolerant than they would have been otherwise.</p>

-

-<p>If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of

-their careers insisted upon equal rights for all denominations,

-and history tells us they did, they were most certainly not

-animated by a love for Presbyterians or High Churchmen,

-or vice versa. They were merely making the best of a very

-difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened in

-the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect

-finally became all powerful, show us what would have been

-the fate of England if any one of the many contending<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_309"></a>[309]</span>

-factions had been able to establish an absolute dictatorship

-over the entire country.</p>

-

-<p>Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able

-to do as he liked. But the Lord Protector was a very wise

-man. He knew that he ruled by the grace of his iron

-brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct or

-of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make

-common cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning

-tolerance did not go.</p>

-

-<p>As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned

-Socinians and Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles

-of the divine right of the individual human being, their lives

-were just as difficult as before.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous

-advantage. They lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six

-hours of sickness separated them from the safe asylum of

-the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these cities were

-turning out most of the contraband literature of southern

-and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really

-meant a voyage to one’s publisher and gave the enterprising

-traveler a chance to gather in his royalties and see what

-were the latest additions to the literature of intellectual

-protest.</p>

-

-<p>Among those who at one time or another availed themselves

-of this convenient opportunity for quiet study and

-peaceful reflection, no one has gained a more deserving fame

-than John Locke.</p>

-

-<p>He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like

-Spinoza (indeed like most independent thinkers) he was the

-product of an essentially pious household. The parents of

-Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John were

-orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well

-by their children when they trained them in the strict doctrines<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_310"></a>[310]</span>

-of their own respective creeds. But such an education

-either breaks a boy’s spirit or it turns him into a rebel.

-Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever surrenders,

-gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.</p>

-

-<p>At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there

-for the first time heard of Descartes. But among the dusty

-book-stalls of St. Catherine Street he found certain other

-volumes that were much to his taste. For example, there

-were the works of Thomas Hobbes.</p>

-

-<p>An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen

-College, a restless person who had visited Italy and had

-held converse with Galileo, who had exchanged letters with

-the great Descartes himself and who had spent the greater

-part of his life on the continent, an exile from the fury of

-the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous

-book which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable

-subject and which bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or

-the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical

-and Civil.”</p>

-

-<p>This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was

-in his Sophomore year. It was so outspoken upon the nature

-of princes, their rights and most especially their duties,

-that even the most thorough going Cromwellian must approve

-of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans felt inclined

-to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged

-royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume

-that weighed not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes

-was the sort of person whom it has never been easy to classify.

-His contemporaries called him a Latitudinarian. That

-meant that he was more interested in the ethics of the Christian

-religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the

-Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_311"></a>[311]</span>

-of “latitude” in their attitude upon those questions

-which they regarded as non-essential.</p>

-

-<p>Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too

-remained within the Church until the end of his life but he

-was heartily in favor of a most generous interpretation both

-of life and of faith. What was the use, Locke and his friends

-argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who wore a

-golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power

-by another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why

-renounce allegiance to one set of priests and then the next

-day accept the rule of another set of priests who were

-fully as overbearing and arrogant as their predecessors?

-Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of view

-could not possibly be popular among those who would have

-lost their livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful

-and had changed a rigid social system into an ethical

-debating society?</p>

-

-<p>And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of

-great personal charm, had influential friends who could protect

-him against the curiosity of the sheriffs, the day was

-soon to come when he would no longer be able to escape the

-suspicion of being an atheist.</p>

-

-<p>That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke

-thereupon went to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for

-half a dozen years, but the intellectual atmosphere of the

-Dutch capital continued to be decidedly liberal and Locke

-was given a chance to study and write without the slightest

-interference on the part of the authorities. He was an industrious

-fellow and during the four years of his exile he

-composed that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes

-him one of the heroes of our little history. In this letter

-(which under the criticism of his opponents grew into three

-letters) he flatly denied that the state had the right to interfere<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_312"></a>[312]</span>

-with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and in this

-he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name

-of Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time

-composing his incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia),

-the state was merely a sort of protective organization which a

-certain number of people had created and continued to maintain

-for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such an organization

-should presume to dictate what the individual

-citizens should believe and what not—that was something

-which Locke and his disciples failed to understand. The

-state did not undertake to tell them what to eat or drink.

-Why should it force them to visit one church and keep away

-from another?</p>

-

-<p>The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted

-victory of Protestantism, was an era of strange religious

-compromises.</p>

-

-<p>The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make

-an end to all religious warfare had laid down the principle

-that “all subjects shall follow the religion of their ruler.”

-Hence in one six-by-nine principality all citizens were Lutherans

-(because the local grand duke was a Lutheran) and

-in the next they were all Catholics (because the local baron

-happened to be a Catholic).</p>

-

-<p>“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate

-to the people concerning the future weal of their souls,

-then one-half of the people are foreordained to perdition,

-for since both religions cannot possibly be true (according

-to article I of their own catechisms) it follows that those

-who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound for

-Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound

-for Hell and in this way the geographical accident of birth

-decides one’s future salvation.”</p>

-

-<p>That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_313"></a>[313]</span>

-tolerance is regrettable, but understandable. To the average

-Britisher of the seventeenth century Catholicism was not

-a form of religious conviction but a political party which

-had never ceased to plot against the safety of the English

-state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of

-gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly

-friendly nation.</p>

-

-<p>Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights

-which he was willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies

-and asked that they continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s

-domains, but solely on the ground of their dangerous

-political activities and not because they professed a different

-faith.</p>

-

-<p>One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such

-sentiments. Then a Roman emperor had laid down the

-famous principle that religion was an affair between the

-individual man and his God and that God was quite capable

-of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity

-had been injured.</p>

-

-<p>The English people who had lived and prospered through

-four changes of government within less than sixty years

-were inclined to see the fundamental truth of such an ideal

-of tolerance based upon common sense.</p>

-

-<p>When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the

-year 1688, Locke followed him on the next ship, which carried

-the new Queen of England. Henceforth he lived a

-quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at the ripe

-old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author

-and no longer feared as a heretic.</p>

-

-<p>Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage.

-It clears the atmosphere.</p>

-

-<p>The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had

-completely consumed the superfluous energy of the English<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_314"></a>[314]</span>

-nation and while the citizens of other countries continued

-to kill each other for the sake of the Trinity and prenatal

-damnation, religious persecution in Great Britain came

-to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the

-established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant

-contact with the law, but the author of “Robinson

-Crusoe” was pilloried because he was a humorist rather

-than an amateur theologian and because the Anglo-Saxon

-race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of

-irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance,

-he would have escaped with a reprimand. When he turned

-his attack upon the tyranny of the church into a semi-humorous

-pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,”

-he showed that he was a vulgar person without a

-decent sense of the proprieties and one who deserved no

-better than the companionship of the pickpockets of Newgate

-Prison.</p>

-

-<p>Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended

-his travels beyond the confines of the British Isles.

-For intolerance having been driven from the mother country

-had found a most welcome refuge in certain of the colonies

-on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so

-much to the character of the people who had moved into

-these recently discovered regions as to the fact that the new

-world offered infinitely greater economic advantages than

-the old one.</p>

-

-<p>In England itself, a small island so densely populated

-that it offered standing room only to the majority of her

-people, all business would soon have come to an end if the

-people had not been willing to practice the ancient and

-honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a

-country of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_315"></a>[315]</span>

-inhabited by a mere handful of farmers and workmen,

-no such compromise was necessary.</p>

-

-<p>And so it happened that a small communist settlement

-on the shores of Massachusetts Bay could develop into such

-a stronghold of self-righteous orthodoxy that the like of it

-had not been seen since the happy days when Calvin exercised

-the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High Executioner

-in western Switzerland.</p>

-

-<p>The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly

-regions of the Charles River usually goes to a small group

-of people who are referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A

-Pilgrim, in the usual sense of the word, is one who “journeys

-to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” The

-passengers of the <i>Mayflower</i> were not pilgrims in that

-sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and

-tailors and cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights

-who had left their country to escape certain of those hated

-“poperies” which continued to cling to the worship in most

-of the churches around them.</p>

-

-<p>First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to

-Holland where they arrived at a moment of great economic

-depression. Our school-books continue to ascribe their

-desire for further travel to their unwillingness to let their

-children learn the Dutch language and otherwise to see

-them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It seems

-very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of

-such shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most

-reprehensible course of hyphenation. The truth is that

-most of the time they were forced to live in the slums,

-that they found it very difficult to make a living in an

-already over-populated country, and that they expected a

-better revenue from tobacco planting in America than

-from wool-carding in Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_316"></a>[316]</span>

-but having been thrown by adverse currents and bad seamanship

-upon the shores of Massachusetts, they decided

-to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of

-another voyage in their leaky tub.</p>

-

-<p>But although they had now escaped the dangers of

-drowning and seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous

-position. Most of them came from small cities in the heart

-of England and had little aptitude for a life of pioneering.

-Their communistic ideas were shattered by the cold, their

-civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and their

-wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food.

-And, finally, the few who survived the first three winters,

-good-natured people accustomed to the rough and ready

-tolerance of the home country, were entirely swamped by

-the arrival of thousands of new colonists who without exception

-belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety

-of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was

-to remain for several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles

-River.</p>

-

-<p>Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land,

-forever on the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever

-inclined to find an excuse for everything they thought and

-did within the pages of the Old Testament. Cut off from

-polite human society and books, they began to develop

-a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes

-they had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon

-and soon became veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors

-of the west. They had nothing to reconcile them to

-their lives of hardship and drudgery except the conviction

-that they were suffering for the sake of the only true faith.

-Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other

-people must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of

-those who failed to share their own views, who suggested<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_317"></a>[317]</span>

-by implication that the Puritan way of doing and thinking

-was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from

-their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully

-flogged and then driven into the wilderness or

-suffered the loss of their ears and tongues unless they were

-fortunate enough to find a refuge in one of the neighboring

-colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the Dutch.</p>

-

-<p>No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this

-colony achieved nothing except in that roundabout and

-involuntary fashion which is so common in the history of

-human progress. The very violence of their religious despotism

-brought about a reaction in favor of a more liberal

-policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny,

-there arose a new generation which was the open and

-avowed enemy of all forms of priest-rule, which believed

-profoundly in the desirability of the separation of state

-and church and which looked askance upon the ancestral

-admixture of religion and politics.</p>

-

-<p>By a stroke of good luck this development came about

-very slowly and the crisis did not occur until the period

-immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between Great

-Britain and her American colonies. As a result, the Constitution

-of the United States was written by men who

-were either freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned

-Calvinism and who incorporated into this document

-certain highly modern principles which have proved

-of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance

-of our republic.</p>

-

-<p>But ere this happened, the new world had experienced

-a most unexpected development in the field of tolerance

-and curiously enough it took place in a Catholic community,

-in that part of America now covered by the free

-state of Maryland.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_318"></a>[318]</span></p>

-

-<p>The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting

-experiment, were of Flemish origin, but the father had

-moved to England and had rendered very distinguished services

-to the house of Stuart. Originally they had been

-Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and

-general utility man to King James I, had become so utterly

-disgusted with the futile theological haggling of his contemporaries

-that he returned to the old faith. Good, bad

-or indifferent, it called black, black and white, white and

-did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine

-to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.</p>

-

-<p>This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts.

-His back-sliding (a very serious offense in those days!)

-did not lose him the favor of his royal master. On the

-contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore and

-was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to

-establish a little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted

-Catholics. First, he tried his luck in Newfoundland.

-But his settlers were frozen out of house and home and

-his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square miles

-in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian,

-would have naught of such dangerous neighbors and

-Baltimore then asked for a slice of that wilderness which

-lay between Virginia and the Dutch and Swedish possessions

-of the north. Ere he received his charter he died.

-His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the

-winter of 1633-1634 two little ships, the <i>Ark</i> and the <i>Dove</i>,

-under command of Leonard Calvert, brother to George,

-crossed the ocean, and in March of 1634 they safely landed

-their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The

-new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor

-of Mary, daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose

-plans for a European League of Nations had been cut<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_319"></a>[319]</span>

-short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife to that

-English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head

-at the hands of his Puritan subjects.</p>

-

-<p>This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its

-Indian neighbors and offered equal opportunities to both

-Catholics and Protestants passed through many difficult

-years. First of all it was overrun by Episcopalians who

-tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans in

-Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried

-to escape the fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia.

-And the two groups of fugitives, with the usual

-arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard to introduce

-their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth

-that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which

-might give rise to religious passions” were expressly forbidden

-on Maryland territory, the older colonists were entirely

-within their right when they bade both Episcopalians

-and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards

-war broke out in the home country between the

-Cavaliers and the Roundheads and the Marylanders feared

-that, no matter who should win, they would lose their old

-freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly

-after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them,

-and at the direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed

-their famous Act of Tolerance which, among other things,

-contained this excellent passage:</p>

-

-<p>“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of

-religion has often produced very harmful results in those

-communities in which it was exercised, for the more tranquil

-and pacific government in this province and for the

-better preservation of mutual love and unity among its inhabitants,

-it is hereby decided that nobody in this province

-who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_320"></a>[320]</span>

-or persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his

-religion or the free exercise thereof.”</p>

-

-<p>That such an act could be passed in a country in which

-the Jesuits occupied a favorite position shows that the

-Baltimore family was possessed of remarkable political

-ability and of more than ordinary courage. How profoundly

-this generous spirit was appreciated by some of

-their guests was shown in the same year when a number of

-Puritan exiles overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished

-the Act of Tolerance and replaced it by an “Act Concerning

-Religion” of their own which granted full religious

-liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians “with

-the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”</p>

-

-<p>This period of reaction fortunately did not last long.

-In the year 1660 the Stuarts returned to power and once

-more the Baltimores reigned in Maryland.</p>

-

-<p>The next attack upon their policy came from the other

-side. The Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the

-mother country and they insisted that henceforth their

-church should be the official church of all the colonies. The

-Calverts continued to fight but they found it impossible

-to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which

-lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.</p>

-

-<p>Protestantism triumphed.</p>

-

-<p>So did intolerance.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_321"></a>[321]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE SUN KING</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The eighteenth century is usually referred to as an

-era of despotism. And in an age which believes

-in the dogma of democracy, despotism, however enlightened,

-is not apt to be regarded as a desirable form of

-government.</p>

-

-<p>Historians who mean well by the human race are very

-apt to point the finger of scorn at that great monarch Louis

-XIV and ask us to draw our own conclusions. When this

-brilliant sovereign came to the throne, he inherited a country

-in which the forces of Catholicism and Protestantism

-were so evenly balanced that the two parties, after a century

-of mutual assassination (with the odds heavily in favor

-of the Catholics), had at last concluded a definite peace

-and had promised to accept each other as unwelcome but

-unavoidable neighbors and fellow citizens. The “perpetual

-and irrevocable” Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 which

-contained the terms of agreement, stated that the Catholic

-religion was the official religion of the state but that the

-Protestants should enjoy complete liberty of conscience and

-should not suffer any persecution on account of their belief.

-They were furthermore allowed to build churches of their

-own and to hold public office. And as a token of good faith,

-the Protestants were allowed to hold two hundred fortified

-cities and villages within the realm of France.</p>

-

-<p>This, of course, was an impossible arrangement. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_322"></a>[322]</span>

-Huguenots were no angels. To leave two hundred of the

-most prosperous cities and villages of France in the hands

-of a political party which was the sworn enemy of the government

-was quite as absurd as if we should surrender

-Chicago and San Francisco and Philadelphia to the Democrats

-to make them accept a Republican administration, or

-vice versa.</p>

-

-<p>Richelieu, as intelligent a man as ever ruled a country,

-recognized this. After a long struggle he deprived the

-Protestants of their political power, but although a cardinal

-by profession, he scrupulously refrained from any interference

-with their religious freedom. The Huguenots could

-no longer conduct independent diplomatic negotiations with

-the enemies of their own country, but otherwise they enjoyed

-the same privileges as before and could sing psalms

-and listen to sermons or not as pleased them.</p>

-

-<p>Mazarin, the next man to rule France in the real sense

-of the word, had followed a similar policy. But he died in

-the year 1661. Then young Louis XIV personally undertook

-to rule his domains, and there was an end to the era

-of good will.</p>

-

-<p>It seems most unfortunate that when this brilliant if

-disreputable Majesty was forced for once in his life into

-the companionship of decent people he should have fallen

-into the clutches of a good woman who was also a religious

-fanatic. Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow of a literary

-hack by the name of Scarron, had begun her career at the

-French court as governess to the seven illegitimate children

-of Louis XIV and the Marquise de Montespan. When

-that lady’s love philtres ceased to have the desired effect

-and the King began to show occasional signs of boredom,

-it was the governess who stepped into her shoes. Only she

-was different from all her predecessors. Before she agreed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_323"></a>[323]</span>

-to move into His Majesty’s apartments, the Archbishop of

-Paris had duly solemnized her marriage to the descendant

-of Saint Louis.</p>

-

-<p>During the next twenty years the power behind the throne

-was therefore in the hands of a woman who was completely

-dominated by her confessor. The clergy of France had

-never forgiven either Richelieu or Mazarin for their conciliatory

-attitude towards the Protestants. Now at last

-they had a chance to undo the work of these shrewd statesmen

-and they went to it with a will. For not only were

-they the official advisers of the Queen, but they also became

-the bankers of the King.</p>

-

-<p>That again is a curious story.</p>

-

-<p>During the last eight centuries the monasteries had accumulated

-the greater part of the wealth of France and

-as they paid no taxes in a country which suffered perpetually

-from a depleted treasury, their surplus wealth was of

-great importance. And His Majesty, whose glory was

-greater than his credit, made a grateful use of this opportunity

-to replenish his own coffers and in exchange for certain

-favors extended to his clerical supporters he was allowed

-to borrow as much money as he wanted.</p>

-

-<p>In this way the different stipulations of the “irrevocable”

-Edict of Nantes were one by one revoked. At first the

-Protestant religion was not actually forbidden, but life for

-those who remained faithful to the Huguenot cause was

-made exasperatingly uncomfortable. Whole regiments of

-dragoons were turned loose upon those provinces where the

-false doctrines were supposed to be most strongly entrenched.

-The soldiers were billeted among the inhabitants

-with instructions to make themselves thoroughly detestable.

-They ate the food and drank the wine and stole the forks

-and spoons and broke the furniture and insulted the wives<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_324"></a>[324]</span>

-and daughters of perfectly harmless citizens and generally

-behaved as if they were in a conquered territory. When

-their poor hosts, in their despair, rushed to the courts for

-some form of redress and protection, they were laughed at

-for their trouble and were told that they had brought their

-misfortunes upon their own heads and knew perfectly well

-how they could get rid of their unwelcome guests and at the

-same time regain the good will of the government.</p>

-

-<p>A few, a very few, followed this suggestion and allowed

-themselves to be baptized by the nearest village priest. But

-the vast majority of these simple people remained faithful

-to the ideals of their childhood. At last, however, when

-one after another their churches were closed and their clergy

-were sent to the galleys, they began to understand that they

-were doomed. Rather than surrender, they decided to go

-into exile. But when they reached the frontier, they were

-told that no one was allowed to leave the country, that

-those who were caught in the act were to be hanged, and

-that those who aided and abetted such fugitives were liable

-to be sent to the galleys for life.</p>

-

-<p>There are apparently certain things which this world will

-never learn.</p>

-

-<p>From the days of the Pharaohs to those of Lenin, all

-governments at one time or another have tried the policy

-of “closing the frontier” and none of them has ever been

-able to score a success.</p>

-

-<p>People who want to get out so badly that they are willing

-to take all sorts of risks can invariably find a way. Hundreds

-of thousands of French Protestants took to the “underground

-route” and soon afterwards appeared in London

-or Amsterdam or Berlin or Basel. Of course, such fugitives

-were not able to carry much ready cash. But they

-were known everywhere as honest and hard working merchants<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_325"></a>[325]</span>

-and artisans. Their credit was good and their

-energy undiminished. After a few years they usually regained

-that prosperity which had been their share in the

-old country and the home government was deprived of a

-living economic asset of incalculable value.</p>

-

-<p>Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the revocation

-of the Edict of Nantes was the prelude to the French Revolution.</p>

-

-<p>France had been and still was a very rich country. But

-commerce and clericalism have never been able to coöperate.</p>

-

-<p>From the moment that the French government surrendered

-to petticoats and cassocks, her fate was sealed. The

-same pen that decreed the expulsion of the Huguenots

-signed the death-warrant of Louis XVI.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_326"></a>[326]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXIV">CHAPTER XXIV<br>

-<span class="smaller">FREDERICK THE GREAT</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous

-for its love of popular forms of government. But

-ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs

-had tainted this sober-minded family of bookkeepers and

-overseers, they rendered some very useful service to the

-cause of tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>In part this was the result of a practical necessity. The

-Hohenzollerns had fallen heir to the poorest part of Europe,

-a half-populated wilderness of sand and forests. The

-Thirty Years War had left them bankrupt. They needed

-both men and money to start in business once more and

-they set out to get them, regardless of race, creed or previous

-condition of servitude.</p>

-

-<p>The father of Frederick the Great, a vulgarian with the

-manners of a coal-heaver and the personal tastes of a bartender,

-could grow quite tender when he was called upon to

-meet a delegation of foreign fugitives. “The more the merrier,”

-was his motto in all matters pertaining to the vital

-statistics of his kingdom and he collected the disinherited

-of all nations as carefully as he collected the six-foot-three

-grenadiers of his lifeguard.</p>

-

-<p>His son was of a very different caliber, a highly civilized

-human being who, having been forbidden by his father to

-study Latin and French, had made a speciality of both languages

-and greatly preferred the prose of Montaigne to the

-poetry of Luther and the wisdom of Epictetus of that of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_327"></a>[327]</span>

-the Minor Prophets. The Old Testament severity of his

-father (who ordered the boy’s best friend to be decapitated

-in front of his window so as to teach him a lesson in

-obedience) had not inclined his heart toward those Judaean

-ideals of rectitude of which the Lutheran and Calvinist

-ministers of his day were apt to speak with such great

-praise. He came to regard all religion as a survival of

-prehistoric fear and ignorance, a mood of subservience carefully

-encouraged by a small class of clever and unscrupulous

-fellows who knew how to make good use of their own pre-eminent

-position by living pleasantly at the expense of their

-neighbors. He was interested in Christianity and even more

-so in the person of Christ himself, but he approached the

-subject by way of Locke and Socinius and as a result he

-was, in religious matters at least, a very broad minded

-person, and could truly boast that in his country “every one

-could find salvation after his own fashion.”</p>

-

-<p>This clever saying he made the basis for all his further

-experiments along the line of Tolerance. For example,

-he decreed that all religions were good as long as those who

-professed them were upright people who led decent, law-abiding

-lives; that therefore all creeds must enjoy equal

-rights and the state must never interfere in religious questions,

-but must content herself with playing policeman and

-keeping the peace between the different denominations. And

-because he truly believed this, he asked nothing of his subjects

-except that they be obedient and faithful and leave

-the final judgment of their thoughts and deeds “to Him

-alone who knew the conscience of men” and of whom he

-(the King) did not venture to form so small an opinion as

-to believe him to be in need of that human assistance which

-imagines that it can further the divine purpose by the exercise

-of violence and cruelty.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_328"></a>[328]</span></p>

-

-<p>In all these ideas, Frederick was a couple of centuries

-ahead of his day. His contemporaries shook their heads

-when the king gave his Catholic subjects a piece of land

-that they might build themselves a church right in the heart

-of his capital. They began to murmur ominous words of

-warning when he made himself the protector of the Jesuit

-order, which had just been driven out of most Catholic

-countries, and they definitely ceased to regard him as a

-Christian when he claimed that ethics and religion had

-nothing to do with each other and that each man could

-believe whatever he pleased as long as he paid his taxes

-and served his time in the army.</p>

-

-<p>Because at that time they happened to live within the

-boundaries of Prussia, these critics held their peace, for

-His Majesty was a master of epigram and a witty remark

-on the margin of a royal rescript could do strange things

-to the career of those who in some way or another had

-failed to please him.</p>

-

-<p>The fact however remains that it was the head of an unlimited

-monarchy, an autocrat of thirty years’ standing,

-who gave Europe a first taste of almost complete religious

-liberty.</p>

-

-<p>In this distant corner of Europe, Protestant and Catholic

-and Jew and Turk and Agnostic enjoyed for the first time

-in their lives equal rights and equal prerogatives. Those

-who preferred to wear red coats could not lord it over their

-neighbors who preferred to wear green coats, and vice versa.

-And the people who went back for their spiritual consolation

-to Nicaea were forced to live in peace and amity with

-others who would as soon have supped with the Devil as

-with the Bishop of Rome.</p>

-

-<p>That Frederick was entirely pleased with the outcome

-of his labors, that I rather doubt. When he felt his last<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_329"></a>[329]</span>

-hour approaching, he sent for his faithful dogs. They

-seemed better company in this supreme hour than the members

-of “the so-called human race.” (His Majesty was a

-columnist of no mean ability.)</p>

-

-<p>And so he died, another Marcus Aurelius who had strayed

-into the wrong century and who, like his great predecessor,

-left a heritage which was entirely too good for his successors.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_330"></a>[330]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXV">CHAPTER XXV<br>

-<span class="smaller">VOLTAIRE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about

-the nefarious labors of the press agent and many good

-people denounce “publicity” as an invention of the

-modern devil of success, a new-fangled and disreputable

-method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause.

-But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the

-past, when examined without prejudice, completely contradict

-the popular notion that publicity is something of recent

-origin.</p>

-

-<p>The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and

-minor, were past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd.

-Greek history and Roman history are one long succession

-of what we people of the journalistic profession call “publicity

-stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified. A

-great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that

-today even Broadway would refuse to fall for it.</p>

-

-<p>Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the

-tremendous value of carefully pre-arranged publicity. And

-we cannot blame them. They were not the sort of men

-who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the

-road like the blushing daisies. They were very much in

-earnest. They wanted their ideas to live. How could

-they hope to succeed without attracting a crowd of followers?</p>

-

-<p>A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_331"></a>[331]</span>

-by spending eighty years in a quiet corner of a monastery,

-for such long voluntary exile, if duly advertised (as it was),

-becomes an excellent selling point and makes people curious

-to see the little book which was born of a lifetime of

-prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola,

-who hope to see some tangible results of their work while

-they are still on this planet, must willy-nilly resort to

-methods now usually associated with a circus or a new movie

-star.</p>

-

-<p>Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises

-those who are humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols

-these virtues was delivered under circumstances which

-have made it a subject of conversation to this very day.</p>

-

-<p>No wonder that those men and women who were denounced

-as the arch enemies of the Church took a leaf out

-of the Holy Book and resorted to certain rather obvious

-methods of publicity when they began their great fight upon

-the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in

-bondage.</p>

-

-<p>I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest

-of all virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has

-very often been blamed for the way in which he sometimes

-played upon the tom-tom of public consciousness. Perhaps

-he did not always show the best of good taste. But those

-whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.</p>

-

-<p>And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in

-the eating, the success or failure of a man like Voltaire

-should be measured by the services he actually rendered to

-his fellow-men and not by his predilection for certain sorts

-of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.</p>

-

-<p>In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature

-once said, “What of it if I have no scepter? I have got

-a pen.” And right he was. He had a pen. Any number<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_332"></a>[332]</span>

-of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose and used

-more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged

-to that class of literary giants who all alone and under the

-most adverse circumstances can turn out as much copy

-as an entire syndicate of modern sport writers. He scribbled

-on the tables of dirty country inns. He composed

-endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country

-houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses

-in Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets

-of the royal Prussian residence and used reams of the

-private stationery which bore the monogram of the governor

-of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play with a hoop

-and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a

-considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some

-books,” and eighty years later, in the self-same town of

-Paris, we hear him ask for a pad of foolscap and unlimited

-coffee that he may finish yet one more volume before the

-inevitable hour of darkness and rest.</p>

-

-<p>His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and

-his treatises upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle

-him to an entire chapter of this book. He wrote no better

-verses than half a hundred other sonneteers of that era.

-As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his

-ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort

-of stuff we find in the Sunday papers.</p>

-

-<p>But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was

-stupid and narrow and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence

-which has endured until the beginning of the Great

-Civil War of the year 1914.</p>

-

-<p>The age in which he lived was a period of extremes.

-On the one hand, the utter selfishness and corruption of a

-religious, social and economic system which had long since

-outlived its usefulness. On the other side, a large number<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_333"></a>[333]</span>

-of eager but overzealous young men and young women

-ready to bring about a millennium which was based upon

-nothing more substantial than their good intentions. A

-humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly son of an inconspicuous

-notary public into this maelstrom of sharks

-and pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred

-to swim and struck out for shore. The methods he employed

-during his long struggle with adverse circumstances

-were often of a questionable nature. He begged and flattered

-and played the clown. But this was in the days before

-royalties and literary agents. And let the author who

-never wrote a potboiler throw the first stone!</p>

-

-<p>Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a

-few additional bricks. During a long and busy life devoted

-to warfare upon stupidity, he had experienced too

-many defeats to worry about such trifles as a public beating

-or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a

-man of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend

-his leisure hours in His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may

-find himself honored with a high titulary position at the

-same court from which he has just been banished. And if

-all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests

-denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion,

-isn’t there somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love

-letters that beautiful medal presented to him by the Pope

-to prove that he can gain the approbation of Holy Church

-as well as her disapproval?</p>

-

-<p>It was all in the day’s work.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and

-crowd his days and weeks and months and years with a

-strange and colorful assortment of the most variegated experiences.</p>

-

-<p>By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_334"></a>[334]</span>

-His father was what for the lack of a better term we might

-call a sort of private trust company. He was the confidential

-handy-man of a number of rich nobles and looked

-after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet

-(for that was the family name) was therefore accustomed

-to a society a little better than that of his own people,

-something which later in life gave him a great advantage

-over most of his literary rivals. His mother was a certain

-Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who

-did not bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was

-possessed of that small “d’” which all Frenchmen of the

-middle classes (and all Europeans in general and a few

-Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and her

-husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize.

-As for the son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his

-ennobled grandparents and as soon as he began to write, he

-exchanged the plebeian François Marie Arouet for the more

-aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but how and where

-he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery.

-He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care

-of him after his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely.

-The brother, on the other hand, a faithful priest of the

-Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and rectitude, bored

-him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he spent

-as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.</p>

-

-<p>Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his

-little “Zozo” promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent

-him to the Jesuits that he might become versed in Latin

-hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good fathers did

-their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil

-a sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and

-living tongues. But they found it impossible to eradicate<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_335"></a>[335]</span>

-a certain bump of “queerness” which from the very beginning

-had set this child apart from the other scholars.</p>

-

-<p>At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and

-to please his father, young François then took up the study

-of the law. Unfortunately one could not read all day long.

-There were the long hours of the lazy evenings. These

-hours François whiled away either writing funny little pieces

-for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary compositions

-to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two

-centuries ago such a life was generally believed to lead

-straight to perdition. Father Arouet fully appreciated the

-danger his son was running. He went to one of his many

-influential friends and obtained for M. François a position

-as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The

-Dutch capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out

-of sheer boredom Voltaire began a love affair with the not

-particularly attractive daughter of a terrible old woman

-who was a society reporter. The lady, who hoped to marry

-her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the French

-minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous

-Romeo before the whole city knew about the scandal. His

-Excellency had troubles enough of his own and was not

-eager for more. He bundled his secretary into the next

-stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once

-more found himself at the mercy of his father.</p>

-

-<p>In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of

-an expedient which was often used by such Frenchmen as

-had a friend at court. He asked and obtained a “lettre de

-cachet” and placed his son before the choice of enforced

-leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school.

-The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised

-that he would be a model of industry and application. He

-was as good as his word and applied himself to the happy<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_336"></a>[336]</span>

-life of a free lance pamphleteer with such industry that

-the whole town talked about it. This was not according

-to the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely

-within his rights when he decided to send his son away

-from the flesh-pots of the Seine and packed him off to a

-friend in the country, where the young man was to remain

-for a whole year.</p>

-

-<p>There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the

-week (Sundays included) Voltaire began the study of letters

-in all seriousness and composed the first of his plays.

-After twelve months of fresh air and a very healthy monotony,

-he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere

-of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series

-of lampoons upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved

-all that was said about him but did not like this

-publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second period of

-exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at

-last a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days,

-that is to say, prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s

-social prominence, was not a bad place. One was not allowed

-to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty much

-as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A

-lonely cell in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do

-some serious work. When he was released, he had finished

-several plays and these were performed with such tremendous

-success that one of them broke all records of the eighteenth

-century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.</p>

-

-<p>This brought him some money (which he needed badly)

-but it also established his reputation as a wit, a most unfortunate

-thing for a young man who still has to make

-his career. For hereafter he was held responsible for every

-joke that enjoyed a few hours’ popularity on the boulevards

-and in the coffee-houses. And incidentally it was the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_337"></a>[337]</span>

-reason why he went to England and took a post-graduate

-course in liberal statesmanship.</p>

-

-<p>It happened in the year 1725. Voltaire had (or had not)

-been funny about the old but otherwise useless family of de

-Rohan. The Chevalier de Rohan felt that his honor had

-been assailed and that something must be done about it.

-Of course, it was impossible for a descendant of the ancient

-rulers of Brittany to fight a duel with the son of a notary

-public and the Chevalier delegated the work of revenge to

-his flunkeys.</p>

-

-<p>One night Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully,

-one of his father’s customers, when he was told that some

-one wished to speak to him outside. He went to the door,

-was fallen upon by the lackeys of my Lord de Rohan and

-was given a sound beating. The next day the story was

-all over the town. Voltaire, even on his best days, looked

-like the caricature of a very ugly little monkey. What

-with his eyes blackened and his head bandaged, he was a fit

-subject for half a dozen popular reviews. Only something

-very drastic could save his reputation from an untimely

-death at the hands of the comic papers. And as soon as

-raw beefsteak had done its work, M. de Voltaire sent his

-witnesses to M. le Chevalier de Rohan and began his preparation

-for mortal combat by an intensive course in fencing.</p>

-

-<p>Alas! when the morning came for the great fight, Voltaire

-once more found himself behind the bars. De Rohan,

-a cad unto the last, had given the duel away to the police,

-and the battling scribe remained in custody until, provided

-with a ticket for England, he was sent traveling in a northwestern

-direction and was told not to return to France until

-requested to do so by His Majesty’s gendarmes.</p>

-

-<p>Four whole years Voltaire spent in and near London.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_338"></a>[338]</span>

-The British kingdom was not exactly a Paradise, but compared

-to France, it was a little bit of Heaven.</p>

-

-<p>A royal scaffold threw its shadow over the land. The

-thirtieth of January of the year 1649 was a date remembered

-by all those in high places. What had happened to

-sainted King Charles might (under slightly modified circumstances)

-happen to any one else who dared to set himself

-above the law. And as for the religion of the country,

-of course the official church of the state was supposed to

-enjoy certain lucrative and agreeable advantages, but those

-who preferred to worship elsewhere were left in peace and

-the direct influence of the clerical officials upon the affairs

-of state was, compared to France, almost negligible. Confessed

-Atheists and certain bothersome non-conformists

-might occasionally succeed in getting themselves into jail,

-but to a subject of King Louis XV the general condition

-of life in England must have seemed wellnigh perfect.</p>

-

-<p>In 1729, Voltaire returned to France, but although he

-was permitted to live in Paris, he rarely availed himself of

-that privilege. He was like a scared animal, willing to accept

-bits of sugar from the hands of his friends, but forever

-on the alert and ready to escape at the slightest sign

-of danger. He worked very hard. He wrote prodigiously

-and with a sublime disregard for dates and facts, and choosing

-for himself subjects which ran all the way from Lima,

-Peru, to Moscow, Russia, he composed a series of such

-learned and popular histories, tragedies and comedies that

-at the age of forty he was by far the most successful man

-of letters of his time.</p>

-

-<p>Followed another episode which was to bring him into

-contact with a different kind of civilization.</p>

-

-<p>In distant Prussia, good King Frederick, yawning audibly

-among the yokels of his rustic court, sadly pined for the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_339"></a>[339]</span>

-companionship of a few amusing people. He felt a tremendous

-admiration for Voltaire and for years he had tried

-to induce him to come to Berlin. But to a Frenchman of

-the year 1750 such a migration seemed like moving into the

-wilds of Virginia and it was not until Frederick had repeatedly

-raised the ante that Voltaire at last condescended

-to accept.</p>

-

-<p>He traveled to Berlin and the fight was on. Two such

-hopeless egotists as the Prussian king and the French playwright

-could not possibly hope to live under one and the

-same roof without coming to hate each other. After two

-years of sublime disagreement, a violent quarrel about nothing

-in particular drove Voltaire back to what he felt inclined

-to call “civilization.”</p>

-

-<p>But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he

-was right, and the French poetry of the Prussian king was

-atrocious. But His Majesty’s attitude upon the subject of

-religious liberty left nothing to be desired and that was

-more than could be said of any other European monarch.</p>

-

-<p>And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned

-to his native land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal

-sentences by which the French courts tried to maintain

-order without some very scathing words of protest. All his

-life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness

-to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on

-the sixth day of creation had bestowed upon the most

-sublime product of His handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated

-and loathed stupidity in every shape, form and manner.

-The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of

-his anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening

-to demolish, this “infamous enemy” was nothing more or

-less than the lazy stupidity of the mass of the people who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_340"></a>[340]</span>

-refused to think for themselves as long as they had enough

-to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.</p>

-

-<p>From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself

-pursued by a gigantic machine which seemed to move

-through sheer force of lethargy and combined the cruelty

-of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency of Juggernaut.

-To destroy or at least upset this contraption

-become the obsession of his old years, and the French government,

-to give this particular devil his due, ably assisted

-him in his efforts by providing the world with a choice

-collection of legal scandals.</p>

-

-<p>The first one occurred in the year 1761.</p>

-

-<p>In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France

-there lived a certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant.

-Toulouse had always been a pious city. No Protestant

-was there allowed to hold office or to be a doctor or

-a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was permitted

-to keep a Protestant servant. And on August

-23rd and 24th of each year the entire community celebrated

-the glorious anniversary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew

-with a solemn feast of praise and thanksgiving.</p>

-

-<p>Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had

-lived all his life in complete harmony with his neighbors.

-One of his sons had turned Catholic, but the father had

-continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and had

-let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children

-were entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them

-best.</p>

-

-<p>But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was

-Marc Antony, the oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate

-fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but that career was

-closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and refused

-to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_341"></a>[341]</span>

-an attack of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey

-upon the young man’s mind. He began to entertain his

-father and mother with long recitations of Hamlet’s well

-known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his

-friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.</p>

-

-<p>This went on for some time and then one night, while

-the family was entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped

-into his father’s storeroom, took a piece of packing rope

-and hanged himself from the doorpost.</p>

-

-<p>There his father found him a few hours later, his coat

-and vest neatly folded upon the counter.</p>

-

-<p>The family was in despair. In those days the body of a

-person who had committed suicide was dragged nude and

-face downward through the streets of the town and was

-hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by the

-birds.</p>

-

-<p>The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of

-such a disgrace. They stood around and talked of what

-they ought to do and what they were going to do until one

-of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent for the police,

-and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was immediately

-filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for

-the death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to

-prevent him from becoming a Catholic.”</p>

-

-<p>In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial

-nest of eighteenth century France, with boredom like a

-black funeral pall hanging heavily upon the entire community,

-the most idiotic and fantastic yarns were given

-credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.</p>

-

-<p>The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under

-such suspicious circumstances, at once arrested the entire

-family, their guests and their servants and every one who

-had recently been seen in or near the Calas home. They<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_342"></a>[342]</span>

-dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in irons

-and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most

-desperate criminals. The next day they were examined.

-All of them told the same story. How Marc Antony had

-come into the house in his usual spirits, how he had left

-the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his

-solitary walks, etc., etc.</p>

-

-<p>By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse

-had taken a hand in the matter and with their help the

-dreadful news of this bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed

-one of his own children because he was about to return to

-the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout the land

-of Languedoc.</p>

-

-<p>Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime

-might think that the authorities would have spent that day

-inspecting the scene of the murder. Marc Antony enjoyed

-quite a reputation as an athlete. He was twenty-eight

-and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father

-having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a

-struggle were small indeed. But none of the town councilors

-bothered about such little details. They were too busy with

-the body of the victim. For Marc Antony, the suicide,

-had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three

-weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon

-it was most solemnly buried by the White Penitents who

-for some mysterious reason had made the defunct Calvinist

-an ex-officio member of their own order and who conducted

-his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance

-and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop

-or an exceedingly rich patron of the local Basilica.</p>

-

-<p>During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town,

-the good people of Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever

-testimony they could against the person of Jean Calas<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_343"></a>[343]</span>

-and his family and finally, after the case had been thoroughly

-thrashed out in the public press, and five months

-after the suicide, the trial began.</p>

-

-<p>One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested

-that the shop of the old man be visited to see

-whether such a suicide as he described would have been possible,

-but he was overridden and with twelve votes against

-one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken

-on the wheel.</p>

-

-<p>He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his

-wrists until his feet were a meter from the ground. Then

-his body was stretched until the limbs were “drawn from

-their sockets.” (I am copying from the official report.) As

-he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed,

-he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast

-quantities of water that his body had soon “swollen to twice

-its natural size.” As he persisted in his diabolical refusal

-to confess his guilt, he was placed on a tumbril and was

-dragged to the place of execution where his arms and legs

-were broken in two places by the executioner. During the

-next two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates

-and priests continued to bother him with their questions.

-With incredible courage the old man continued to

-proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice, exasperated

-by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and

-ordered him to be strangled to death.</p>

-

-<p>The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself

-and none of the other members of the family were killed.

-The widow, deprived of all her goods, was allowed to go

-into retirement and starve as best she could in the company

-of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent

-to different convents with the exception of the youngest

-who had been away at school at Nîmes at the time of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_344"></a>[344]</span>

-brother’s suicide and who had wisely fled to the territory

-of the sovereign city of Geneva.</p>

-

-<p>The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire

-in his castle of Ferney (conveniently built near the

-frontier of Switzerland so that a few minutes’ walk could

-carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at first refused

-to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with

-the Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private

-little theater which stood within sight of their own city as

-a direct provocation and the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire,

-in one of his supercilious moods, wrote that he could

-not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called Protestant

-martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those

-terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides,

-it seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other

-people) that twelve supposedly respectable judges would

-have condemned an innocent man to such a terrible death

-without very good reason.</p>

-

-<p>But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open

-house to all comers and no questions asked, had a visit from

-an honest merchant from Marseilles who had happened to be

-in Toulouse at the time of the trial and who was able to

-give him some first-hand information. Then at last he began

-to understand the horror of the crime that had been

-committed and from that moment on he could think of nothing

-else.</p>

-

-<p>There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of

-merit is reserved for those rare souls who, practically alone,

-dare to face the entire established order of society and who

-loudly cry for justice when the high courts of the land have

-pronounced sentence and when the community at large has

-accepted their verdict as equitable and just.</p>

-

-<p>Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_345"></a>[345]</span>

-dare to accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder,

-and he prepared his case as carefully as if he had been a

-professional attorney. He interviewed the Calas boy who

-had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every one who could

-possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired

-counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions,

-lest his anger and his indignation carry him away.

-And when he felt sure of his ground, he opened his campaign.</p>

-

-<p>First of all he induced every man of some influence whom

-he knew within the realm of France (and he knew most of

-them) to write to the Chancellor of the Kingdom and ask

-for a revision of the Calas case. Then he set about to find

-the widow and as soon as she had been located, he ordered

-her to be brought to Paris at his own expense and engaged

-one of the best known lawyers to look after her. The spirit

-of the woman had been completely broken. She vaguely

-prayed that she might get her daughters out of the convent

-before she died. Beyond that, her hopes did not extend.</p>

-

-<p>Then he got into communication with the other son who

-was a Catholic, made it possible for him to escape from his

-school and to join him in Geneva. And finally he published

-all the facts in a short pamphlet entitled “Original Documents

-Concerning the Calas Family,” which consisted of letters

-written by the survivors of the tragedy and contained

-no reference whatsoever to Voltaire himself.</p>

-

-<p>Afterwards, too, during the revision of the case, he remained

-carefully behind the scenes, but so well did he handle

-his publicity campaign that soon the cause of the Calas family

-was the cause of all families in all countries of Europe

-and that thousands of people everywhere (including the

-King of England and the Empress of Russia) contributed

-to the funds that were being raised to help the defense.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_346"></a>[346]</span></p>

-

-<p>Eventually Voltaire gained his victory, but not until he

-had fought one of the most desperate battle of his entire

-career.</p>

-

-<p>The throne of France just then was occupied by Louis XV

-of unsavory memory. Fortunately his mistress hated the

-Jesuits and all their works (including the Church) with a

-most cordial hatred and was therefore on the side of Voltaire.

-But the King loved his ease above all other things

-and was greatly annoyed at all the fuss made about an

-obscure and dead Protestant. And of course as long as His

-Majesty refused to sign a warrant for a new trial, the

-Chancellor would not take action, and as long as the Chancellor

-would not take action, the tribunal of Toulouse was

-perfectly safe and so strong did they feel themselves that

-they defied public opinion in a most high-handed fashion

-and refused to let Voltaire or his lawyers have access to the

-original documents upon which they had based their conviction.</p>

-

-<p>During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation

-until finally in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor

-ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse to surrender all the records

-in the Calas case and moved that there be a new trial. The

-widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at

-last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles

-when this decision was made public. A year later

-the special court which had been ordered to investigate the

-appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done to death for

-a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts

-the King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon

-the widow and her children. Furthermore the magistrates

-who had handled the Calas case were deprived of their office

-and it was politely suggested to the people of Toulouse that

-such a thing must not happen again.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_347"></a>[347]</span></p>

-

-<p>But although the French government might take a lukewarm

-view of the incident, the people of France had been

-stirred to the very depths of their outraged souls. And

-suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was not the only

-miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many others

-who had suffered as innocently as Calas.</p>

-

-<p>In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the

-neighborhood of Toulouse had offered the hospitality of

-his house to a visiting Calvinist minister. For this hideous

-crime he had been deprived of his estate and had been sent

-to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly strong

-man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire

-was told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate

-man away from the galleys, brought him to Switzerland

-where his wife and children were being supported by

-public charity and looked after the family until the crown

-was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property

-and the family were given permission to return to their

-deserted homestead.</p>

-

-<p>Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had

-been caught at an open-air meeting of Protestants and who

-for that crime had been dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate

-period, but who now, at the intercession of

-Voltaire, was set free.</p>

-

-<p>These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome

-hors d’œuvre to what was to follow.</p>

-

-<p>Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long

-suffering part of France which after the extermination of

-the Albigensian and Waldensian heretics had been left a

-wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.</p>

-

-<p>In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant

-by the name of Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made

-a living as an expert in medieval law, a lucrative position<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_348"></a>[348]</span>

-at a time when the feudal judicial system had grown so

-complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an income

-tax blank.</p>

-

-<p>Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless

-idiot, much given to brooding. In March of the year

-1764 she left her home. The parents searched far and wide

-but found no trace of the child until a few days later when

-the bishop of the district informed the father that the

-girl had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a

-nun and was now in a convent.</p>

-

-<p>Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the

-spirit of the Protestants in that part of France. Sirven

-humbly answered that everything undoubtedly would be for

-the best in this worst of all possible worlds and meekly accepted

-the inevitable. But in the unaccustomed atmosphere

-of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the last vestiges

-of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself,

-she was returned to her own people. She was then

-in a state of terrible mental depression and in such continual

-horror of voices and spooks that her parents feared for her

-life. A short time afterwards she once more disappeared.

-Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.</p>

-

-<p>At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people

-were in a mood to believe anything that was said against a

-Protestant. The Sirvens, remembering what had just happened

-to innocent Jean Calas, decided not to court a similar

-fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through the

-Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to

-death, they at last reached Switzerland. They had not left

-a moment too soon. A few months later, both the father and

-the mother were found guilty (in their absence) of the

-crime of having murdered their child and were ordered to

-be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_349"></a>[349]</span>

-execution of their parents and thereafter to be banished for

-life.</p>

-

-<p>A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of

-Voltaire and as soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he

-turned his attention to the Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had

-died. Remained the duty of vindicating the husband. It

-took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the tribunal

-of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender

-any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom

-of publicity and beg money from Frederick of Prussia

-and Catherine of Russia and Poniatowski of Poland before

-he could force the crown to take an interest. But finally,

-in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in the eighth

-year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated

-and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.</p>

-

-<p>So ended the second case.</p>

-

-<p>The third one followed immediately.</p>

-

-<p>In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of

-Abbeville, not far from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by

-the side of the road were found broken to pieces by an unknown

-hand. Three young boys were suspected of this

-sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of

-them escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught.

-Of these, the older one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre,

-was suspected of being an atheist. A copy of the Philosophical

-Dictionary, that famous work to which all the great

-leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among

-his books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided

-to look into the young man’s past. It was true they

-could not connect him with the Abbeville case but had he

-not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel down and uncover

-while a religious procession went by?</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_350"></a>[350]</span></p>

-

-<p>De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch

-a stage-coach and had meant no offense.</p>

-

-<p>Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing

-the pain less easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that

-he had mutilated one of the two crucifixes and was condemned

-to death for “impiously and deliberately walking

-before the Host without kneeling or uncovering, singing

-blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane

-books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which

-were supposed to have indicated a lack of respect for the

-Church.</p>

-

-<p>The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be

-torn out with hot irons, his right hand was to be cut off,

-and he was to be slowly burned to death, and all that only

-a century and a half ago!) that the public was stirred into

-several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were guilty

-of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one

-could not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions

-were sent to the King, ministers were besieged with requests

-for a respite. But the country was full of unrest and there

-must be an example, and de la Barre, having undergone

-the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was

-decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and

-his corpse, together with his Philosophical Dictionary and

-some volumes by our old friend Bayle, were publicly burned

-by the hangman.</p>

-

-<p>It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing

-influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and

-the Descartes. It showed what invariably happened to those

-ill-guided young men who left the narrow path between

-the right and the wrong and followed the leadership of a

-group of radical philosophers.</p>

-

-<p>Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_351"></a>[351]</span>

-fast approaching his eightieth birthday, but he plunged

-into the case with all his old zeal and with a brain that

-burned with a clear white flame of outraged decency.</p>

-

-<p>De la Barre had been executed for “blasphemy.” First

-of all, Voltaire tried to discover whether there existed a law

-by which people guilty of that supposed crime could be condemned

-to death. He could not find one. Then he asked

-his lawyer friends. They could not find one. And it gradually

-dawned upon the community that the judges in their

-unholy eagerness had “invented” this bit of legal fiction

-to get rid of their prisoner.</p>

-

-<p>There had been ugly rumors at the time of de la Barre’s

-execution. The storm that now arose forced the judges to

-be very circumspect and the trial of the third of the youthful

-prisoners was never finished. As for de la Barre, he was

-never vindicated. The review of the case dragged on for

-years and when Voltaire died, no decision had as yet been

-reached. But the blows which he had struck, if not for

-tolerance at least against intolerance, were beginning to

-tell.</p>

-

-<p>The official acts of terror instigated by gossiping old

-women and senile courts came to an end.</p>

-

-<p>Tribunals that have religious axes to grind are only

-successful when they can do their work in the dark and are

-able to surround themselves with secrecy. The method of

-attack followed by Voltaire was one against which such

-courts had no means of defense.</p>

-

-<p>Voltaire turned on all the lights, hired a voluminous

-orchestra, invited the public to attend, and then bade his

-enemies do their worst.</p>

-

-<p>As a result, they did nothing at all.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_352"></a>[352]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXVI">CHAPTER XXVI<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE ENCYCLOPEDIA</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>There are three different schools of statesmanship.

-The first one teaches a doctrine which reads somewhat

-as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by poor

-benighted creatures who are unable to think for themselves,

-who suffer mental agonies whenever they are obliged

-to make an independent decision and who therefore can be

-led astray by the first ward-heeler that comes along. Not

-only is it better for the world at large that these ‘herd

-people’ be ruled by some one who knows his own mind, but

-they themselves, too, are infinitely happier when they do not

-have to bother about parliaments and ballot-boxes and can

-devote all their time to their work-shops, their children, their

-flivvers and their vegetable gardens.”</p>

-

-<p>The disciples of this school become emperors, sultans,

-sachems, sheiks and archbishops and they rarely regard

-labor unions as an essential part of civilization. They work

-hard and build roads, barracks, cathedrals and jails.</p>

-

-<p>The adherents of the second school of political thought

-argue as follows: “The average man is God’s noblest invention.

-He is a sovereign in his own right, unsurpassed in

-wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives. He is

-perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but

-those committees through which he tries to rule the universe

-are proverbially slow when it comes to handling delicate

-affairs of state. Therefore, the masses ought to leave all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_353"></a>[353]</span>

-executive business to a few trusted friends who are not hampered

-by the immediate necessity of making a living and

-who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”</p>

-

-<p>Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the

-logical candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first

-consul and Lord protector.</p>

-

-<p>They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the

-cathedrals they turn into jails.</p>

-

-<p>But there is a third group of people. They contemplate

-man with the sober eye of science and accept him as he is.

-They appreciate his good qualities, they understand his

-limitations. They are convinced from a long observation

-of past events that the average citizen, when not under the

-influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard

-to do what is right. But they make themselves no false

-illusions. They know that the natural process of growth

-is exceedingly slow, that it would be as futile to try and

-hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of human

-intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government

-of a state, but whenever they have a chance to put

-their ideas into action, they build roads, improve the jails

-and spend the rest of the available funds upon schools and

-universities. For they are such incorrigible optimists that

-they believe that education of the right sort will gradually

-rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore

-a thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.</p>

-

-<p>And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal,

-they usually write an encyclopedia.</p>

-

-<p>Like so many other things that give evidence of great

-wisdom and profound patience, the encyclopedia-habit took

-its origin in China. The Chinese Emperor K’ang-hi tried

-to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in five

-thousand and twenty volumes.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_354"></a>[354]</span></p>

-

-<p>Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was

-contented with thirty-seven books.</p>

-

-<p>The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced

-nothing of the slightest value along this line of enlightenment.

-A fellow-countryman of Saint Augustine, the

-African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years of his

-life composing something which he held to be a veritable

-treasure house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that

-people might the more easily retain the many interesting

-facts which he presented to them, he used poetry. This

-terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by heart

-by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and

-was held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature,

-music and science.</p>

-

-<p>Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name

-of Isidore wrote an entirely new encyclopedia and after

-that, the output increased at the regular rate of two for

-every hundred years. What has become of them all, I do

-not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals)

-has possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these

-volumes had been allowed to survive, there would not be

-room for anything else on this earth.</p>

-

-<p>When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century,

-Europe experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual

-curiosity, the purveyors of encyclopedias entered

-into a veritable Paradise. Such books, then as now, were

-usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live on

-eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted

-for less than the money spent upon paper and ink. England

-especially was a great country for this sort of literature

-and so it was quite natural that John Mills, a Britisher who

-lived in Paris, should think of translating the successful

-“Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_355"></a>[355]</span>

-French language that he might peddle his product among

-the subjects of good King Louis and grow rich. For this

-purpose he associated himself with a German professor and

-then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do the

-actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton,

-who saw a chance to make a small fortune, deliberately

-swindled his partner and as soon as he had frozen Mills and

-the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise, continued to publish

-the pirated edition on his own account. He called the

-forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel

-des Arts et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful

-prospectuses with such a tremendous selling appeal that

-the list of subscribers was soon filled.</p>

-

-<p>Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the

-Collège de France to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot

-of paper and awaited results.</p>

-

-<p>Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did

-not prove as simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor

-produced notes but no articles, the subscribers loudly

-clamored for Volume I and everything was in great disorder.</p>

-

-<p>In this emergency Lebreton remembered that a “Universal

-Dictionary of Medicine” which had appeared only a few

-months before had been very favorably received. He sent

-for the editor of this medical handbook and hired him on

-the spot. And so it happened that a mere encyclopedia became

-the “Encyclopédie.” For the new editor was no one

-less than Denis Diderot and the work which was to have

-been a hack job became one of the most important contributions

-of the eighteenth century towards the sum total

-of human enlightenment.</p>

-

-<p>Diderot at that time was thirty-seven years old and his

-life had been neither easy nor happy. He had refused

-to do what all respectable young Frenchmen were supposed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_356"></a>[356]</span>

-to do and go to a university. Instead, as soon as he could

-get away from his Jesuit teachers, he had proceeded to

-Paris to become a man of letters. After a short period of

-starvation (acting upon the principle that two can go

-hungry just as cheaply as one) he had married a lady who

-proved to be a terribly pious woman and an uncompromising

-shrew, a combination which is by no means as rare as some

-people seem to believe. But as he was obliged to support

-her, he had been forced to take all sorts of odd jobs and to

-compile all sorts of books from “Inquiries concerning Virtue

-and Merit” to a rather disreputable rehash of Boccaccio’s

-“Decameron.” In his heart, however, this pupil of Bayle

-remained faithful to his liberal ideals. Soon the government

-(after the fashion of governments during times of

-stress) discovered that this inoffensive looking young author

-maintained grave doubts about the story of creation as

-rendered in the first chapter of Genesis and otherwise was

-considerable of a heretic. In consequence whereof Diderot

-was conducted to the prison of Vincennes and there held

-under lock and key for almost three months.</p>

-

-<p>It was after his release from jail that he entered the

-service of Lebreton. Diderot was one of the most eloquent

-men of his time. He saw the chance of a lifetime in the

-enterprise of which he was to be the head. A mere rehash

-of Chambers’ old material seemed entirely beneath his dignity.

-It was an era of tremendous mental activity. Very

-well! Let the Encyclopedia of Lebreton contain the latest

-word upon every conceivable subject and let the articles be

-written by the foremost authorities in every line of human

-endeavor.</p>

-

-<p>Diderot was so full of enthusiasm that he actually persuaded

-Lebreton to give him full command and unlimited

-time. Then he made up a tentative list of his coöperators,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_357"></a>[357]</span>

-took a large sheet of foolscap and began, “A: the first letter

-of the alphabet, etc., etc.”</p>

-

-<p>Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was

-done. Rarely, however, has a man worked under such tremendous

-disadvantages. Lebreton had increased his original

-capital when he hired Diderot, but he never paid his editor

-more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the

-other people who were supposed to lend their assistance,

-well, we all know how those things are. They were either

-busy just then, or they would do it next month, or they

-had to go to the country to see their grandmother. With

-the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the work

-himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped

-upon him by the officials of both the Church and the State.</p>

-

-<p>Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not

-because so many people want them but because so many

-people are glad to get rid of them. The book which a

-century and a half ago was howled down as a manifestation

-of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and harmless

-tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative

-element among the clergy of the eighteenth century,

-it sounded like a clarion call of destruction, anarchy,

-atheism and chaos.</p>

-

-<p>Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the

-editor-in-chief as an enemy of society and religion, a loose

-reprobate who believed neither in God, home or the sanctity

-of the family ties. But the Paris of the year 1770 was still

-an overgrown village where every one knew every one else.

-And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of life

-was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually

-lived up to this motto, who kept open house for all those

-who were hungry, who labored twenty hours a day for the

-sake of humanity and asked nothing in return but a bed,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_358"></a>[358]</span>

-a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded, hard-working

-fellow was so shining an example of those virtues

-in which the prelates and the monarchs of that day were

-so conspicuously lacking, that it was not easy to attack

-him from that particular angle. And so the authorities

-contented themselves with making his life just as unpleasant

-as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage,

-by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding

-Diderot’s home, by confiscating his notes and occasionally

-by suppressing the work altogether.</p>

-

-<p>These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen

-his enthusiasm. At last the work was finished and the

-“Encyclopédie” actually accomplished what Diderot had

-expected of it—it became the rallying point for all those

-who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age

-and who knew that the world was desperately in need of a

-general overhauling.</p>

-

-<p>It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor

-slightly out of the true perspective.</p>

-

-<p>Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby

-coat, counted himself happy when his rich and brilliant

-friend, the Baron D’Holbach, invited him to a square meal

-once a week, and who was more than satisfied when four

-thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived

-at the same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot

-and Helvétius and Volney and Condorcet and a score of

-others, all of whom gained a much greater personal renown

-than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good

-people would never have been able to exercise the influence

-they did. It was more than a book, it was a social and

-economic program. It told what the leading minds of the

-day were actually thinking. It contained a concrete statement

-of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_359"></a>[359]</span>

-world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the

-human race.</p>

-

-<p>France had reached a point where those who had eyes

-to see and ears to hear knew that something drastic must

-be done to avoid an immediate catastrophe, while those who

-had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused to use them,

-maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that

-peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement

-of a set of antiquated laws that belonged to the

-era of the Merovingians. For the moment, those two parties

-were so evenly balanced that everything remained as it had

-always been and this led to strange complications. The

-same France which on one side of the ocean played such

-a conspicuous rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom

-and addressed the most affectionate letters to Monsieur

-Georges Washington (who was a Free Mason) and arranged

-delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre,

-Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used

-to call a “sceptic” and what we call a plain atheist, this

-country on the other side of the broad Atlantic stood revealed

-as the most vindictive enemy of all forms of spiritual

-progress and only showed her sense of democracy in the

-complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher

-and peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.</p>

-

-<p>Eventually all this was changed.</p>

-

-<p>But it was changed in a way which no one had been

-able to foresee. For the struggle that was to remove the

-spiritual and social handicaps of all those who were born

-outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves themselves.

-It was the work of a small group of disinterested

-citizens whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated

-quite as bitterly as their Catholic oppressors and who could<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_360"></a>[360]</span>

-count upon no other reward than that which is said to

-await all honest men in Heaven.</p>

-

-<p>The men who during the eighteenth century defended

-the cause of tolerance rarely belonged to any particular

-denomination. For the sake of personal convenience they

-sometimes went through certain outward motions of religious

-conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their

-writing desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned,

-they might just as well have lived in Athens in the fourth

-century B.C. or in China in the days of Confucius.</p>

-

-<p>They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain

-reverence for various things which most of their contemporaries

-held in great respect and which they themselves

-regarded as harmless but childish survivals of a bygone

-day.</p>

-

-<p>They took little stock in that ancient national history

-which the western world, for some curious reason, had

-picked out from among all Babylonian and Assyrian and

-Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and had accepted

-as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true

-disciples of their great master, Socrates, they listened only

-to the inner voice of their own conscience and regardless

-of consequences, they lived fearlessly in a world that had

-long since been surrendered to the timid.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_361"></a>[361]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXVII">CHAPTER XXVII<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial

-misery known as the Kingdom of France came

-crashing down on a memorable evening in the month

-of August of the year of grace 1789.</p>

-

-<p>On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing

-emotional fury, the National Assembly worked itself into

-a veritable orgy of brotherly love. Until in a moment of

-intense excitement the privileged classes surrendered all

-those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken

-them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared

-themselves in favor of those theoretical rights of man

-which henceforth would be the foundation-stone for all further

-attempts at popular self-government.</p>

-

-<p>As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of

-the feudal system. An aristocracy which is actually composed

-of the “aristoi,” of the best of the most enterprising

-elements of society, which boldly assumes leadership and

-shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance

-to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active

-service and contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs

-in diverse departments of government is only fit to drink

-tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on Second.</p>

-

-<p>The old France therefore was dead.</p>

-

-<p>Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.</p>

-

-<p>But it was dead and with it there passed away that most<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_362"></a>[362]</span>

-outrageous form of an invisible government which the

-Church, ever since the days of Richelieu, had been able to

-impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint Louis.</p>

-

-<p>Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.</p>

-

-<p>Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts

-and souls of all honest men and women, it is needless to

-speak.</p>

-

-<p>The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.</p>

-

-<p>And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in

-an autocratic form of government was for good and all

-to be eradicated from this fair earth.</p>

-

-<p>Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are

-gone!</p>

-

-<p>And more words to that effect.</p>

-

-<p>Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its

-many iniquities, the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal

-and when it was all over, behold our old friend Intolerance,

-wearing a pair of proletarian pantaloons and his hair

-brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side with the public

-prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.</p>

-

-<p>Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for

-claiming that authority maintaining itself solely by the

-grace of Heaven might sometimes be in error.</p>

-

-<p>Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the

-will of the people need not always and invariably be the

-will of God.</p>

-

-<p>A ghastly joke!</p>

-

-<p>But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular

-fancies) with the blood of a million innocent bystanders.</p>

-

-<p>What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original.

-One can find the same idea couched in different if

-more elegant words in the works of many of the ancients.</p>

-

-<p>In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_363"></a>[363]</span>

-apparently there always have been, and most likely there

-always will be two entirely different varieties of human

-beings.</p>

-

-<p>A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the

-serious searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive

-at certain temperate philosophical conclusions which

-will place them above and beyond the common worries of

-mankind.</p>

-

-<p>But the vast majority of the people are not contented

-with a mild diet of spiritual “light wines.” They want something

-with a kick to it, something that burns on the tongue,

-that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit up and take

-notice. What that “something” is does not matter very

-much, provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications

-and is served in a direct and simple fashion and

-in unlimited quantities.</p>

-

-<p>This fact seems to have been little understood by historians

-and this has led to many and serious disappointments.

-No sooner has an outraged populace torn down the stronghold

-of the past (a fact duly and enthusiastically reported

-by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it turns mason,

-carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the

-city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit

-as vile and tyrannical as the old one and used for the same

-purpose of repression and terror.</p>

-

-<p>The very moment a number of proud nations have at last

-succeeded in throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an

-“infallible man” they accept the dictates of an “infallible

-book.”</p>

-

-<p>Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a

-flunkey, is madly galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters

-the deserted palace, puts on the discarded royal raiment

-and forthwith commits herself to those selfsame blunders<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_364"></a>[364]</span>

-and cruelties which have just driven her predecessor into

-exile.</p>

-

-<p>It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our

-story and must be told.</p>

-

-<p>No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible

-for the great French upheaval were of the best.

-The Declaration of the Rights of Man had laid down the

-principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed in the

-peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not

-even his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not

-disturb the public order as laid down by the various decrees

-and laws.</p>

-

-<p>This however did not mean equal rights for all religious

-denominations. The Protestant faith henceforth was to be

-tolerated, Protestants were not to be annoyed because they

-worshiped in a different church from their Catholic neighbors,

-but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant”

-Church of the state.</p>

-

-<p>Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of

-political life, knew that this far famed concession was only

-a half-way measure. But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn

-a great social cataclysm into a one-man revolution, died

-under the effort and many noblemen and bishops, repenting

-of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of

-August, were already beginning that policy of obstructionism

-which was to be of such fatal consequence to their master

-the king. And it was not until two years later in the year

-1791 (and exactly two years too late for any practical

-purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants

-and the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality

-and were declared to enjoy the same liberty before the law.</p>

-

-<p>From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed.

-The constitution which the representatives of the French<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_365"></a>[365]</span>

-people finally bestowed upon an expectant country insisted

-that all priests of whatsoever faith should swear an oath of

-allegiance to the new form of government and should regard

-themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the school-teachers

-and postal employees and light-house keepers and

-customs officials who were their fellow-citizens.</p>

-

-<p>Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the

-new constitution were in direct violation of every solemn

-agreement that had been concluded between France and the

-Holy See since the year 1516. But the Assembly was in no

-mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents and

-treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this

-decree or resign their positions and starve to death. A

-few bishops and a few priests accepted what seemed inevitable.

-They crossed their fingers and went through the formality

-of an oath. But by far the greater number, being

-honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf

-out of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted

-during so many years, they began to say mass in

-deserted stables and to give communion in pigsties, to preach

-their sermons behind country hedges and to pay clandestine

-visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the

-middle of the night.</p>

-

-<p>Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the

-Protestants had done under similar circumstances, for

-France was too hopelessly disorganized to take more than

-very perfunctory measures against the enemies of her constitution.

-And as none of them seemed to run the risk of

-the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to

-ask that they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they

-were popularly called, be officially recognized as one of the

-“tolerated sects” and be accorded those privileges which during<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_366"></a>[366]</span>

-the previous three centuries they had so persistently

-refused to grant to their compatriots of the Calvinist faith.</p>

-

-<p>The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the

-safe distance of the year 1925, was not without a certain

-grim humor. But no definite decision was taken, for the

-Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under the denomination

-of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court,

-combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies,

-caused a panic which in less than a week spread from the

-coast of Belgium to the shores of the Mediterranean and

-which was responsible for that series of wholesale assassinations

-which raged from the second to the seventh of September

-of the year 1792.</p>

-

-<p>From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate

-into a reign of terror.</p>

-

-<p>The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers

-came to naught when a starving populace began to suspect

-that their own leaders were engaged in a gigantic plot to

-sell the country to the enemy. The explosion which then

-followed is common history. That the conduct of affairs

-in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the hands

-of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which

-every honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But

-that the principal actor in the drama should have been a

-prig, a model-citizen, a hundred-percenting paragon of

-Virtue, that indeed was something which no one had been

-able to foresee.</p>

-

-<p>When France began to understand the true nature of her

-new master, it was too late, as those who tried in vain to

-utter their belated words of warning from the top of a

-scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have testified.</p>

-

-<p>Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point

-of view of politics and economics and social organization.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_367"></a>[367]</span>

-But not until the historian shall turn psychologist or the

-psychologist shall turn historian shall we really be able to

-explain and understand those dark forces that shape the

-destinies of nations in their hour of agony and travail.</p>

-

-<p>There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness

-and light. There are those who maintain that the

-human race respects only one thing, brute force. Some

-hundred years from now, I may be able to make a choice.

-This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest

-of all experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French

-revolution, was a noisy apotheosis of violence.</p>

-

-<p>Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world

-by way of reason were either dead or were put to death by

-the very people whom they had helped to glory. And with

-the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots and the Condorcets

-out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New

-Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s

-fate. What a ghastly mess they made of their high

-mission!</p>

-

-<p>During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the

-out-and-out enemies of religion, those who had some particular

-reason to detest the very symbols of Christianity;

-those who in some silent and hidden way had suffered so

-deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere

-sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that

-the smell of incense made them turn pale with long forgotten

-rage. Together with a few others who believed that they

-could disprove the existence of a personal God with the help

-of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy the

-Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful

-task but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary

-psychology that the normal becomes abnormal and

-the impossible is turned into an every day occurrence.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_368"></a>[368]</span>

-Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old

-Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing

-Christmas and Easter; abolishing weeks and months and

-re-dividing the year into periods of ten days each with a new

-pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another paper pronunciamento

-which abolished the worship of God and left

-the universe without a master.</p>

-

-<p>But not for long.</p>

-

-<p>However eloquently explained and defended within the

-bare rooms of the Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and

-empty void was too repellent to most citizens to be tolerated

-for more than a couple of weeks. The old Deity

-no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example

-of Moses and Mahomet and invent a new one that

-should suit the demands of the times?</p>

-

-<p>As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!</p>

-

-<p>Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime

-a comely actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek

-draperies, would fill the bill perfectly. The lady was found

-among the dancers of his late Majesty’s corps de ballet

-and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to

-the high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the

-loyal followers of an older faith.</p>

-

-<p>As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries,

-had stood a tender watch over all those who had bared the

-wounds of their soul before the patient eyes of perfect understanding,

-she too was gone, hastily hidden by loving

-hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned into

-mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty,

-the proud product of an amateur sculptor and done rather

-carelessly in white plaster. But that was not all. Notre

-Dame had seen other innovations. In the middle of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_369"></a>[369]</span>

-choir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple of

-Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a

-throne for the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl

-was not holding court and receiving the worship of her

-trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy harbored a

-“Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry

-high the burning flame of world enlightenment.</p>

-

-<p>The “end of time” came before another six months.</p>

-

-<p>On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794

-the French people were officially informed that God had been

-reëstablished and that the immortality of the soul was once

-more a recognized article of faith. On the eighth of June,

-the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the

-second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques

-Rousseau) was officially presented to his eager disciples.</p>

-

-<p>Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address

-of welcome. He had reached the highest point of his

-career. The obscure law clerk from a third rate country

-town had become the high priest of the Revolution. More

-than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine

-Théot, revered by thousands as the true mother of God,

-had just proclaimed the forthcoming return of the Messiah

-and she had even revealed his name. It was Maximilian

-Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic

-uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing

-reams of oratory in which he assured God that from now

-on all would be well with His little world.</p>

-

-<p>And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law

-by which those suspected of treason and heresy (for once

-more they were held to be the same, as in the good old days of

-the Inquisition) were deprived of all means of defense, a

-measure so ably conceived that during the next six weeks<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_370"></a>[370]</span>

-more than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath

-the slanting knife of the guillotine.</p>

-

-<p>The rest of his story is only too well known.</p>

-

-<p>As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself

-held to be Good (with a capital G) he could, in his

-quality of a logical fanatic, not possibly recognize the right

-of other men, less perfect, to exist on the same planet with

-himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a capital

-E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the

-brink of depopulation.</p>

-

-<p>Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the

-enemies of Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate

-struggle destroyed this Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.</p>

-

-<p>Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent

-itself. The constitution which the French people then

-adopted recognized the existence of different denominations

-and gave them the same rights and privileges. Officially

-at least the Republic washed her hands of all religion.

-Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an association,

-were free to do so but they were obliged to support

-their own ministers and priests and recognize the superior

-rights of the state and the complete freedom of choice of

-the individual.</p>

-

-<p>Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have

-lived peacefully side by side.</p>

-

-<p>It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat,

-continues to deny the principle of a division of state and

-church (see the decree of Pope Pius IX of December 8th,

-1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back to power by

-supporting those political parties who hope to upset the

-republican form of government and bring back the monarchy

-or the empire. But these battles are usually fought in the

-private parlors of some minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodge<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_371"></a>[371]</span>

-of a retired general with an ambitious

-mother-in-law.</p>

-

-<p>They have thus far provided the funny papers with some

-excellent material but they are proving themselves increasingly

-futile.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_372"></a>[372]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII">CHAPTER XXVIII<br>

-<span class="smaller">LESSING</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a

-battle was fought between the armies of the French

-Revolution and the armies of the allied monarchs

-who had set forth to annihilate the terrible monster of insurrection.</p>

-

-<p>It was a glorious victory, but not for the allies. Their

-infantry could not be employed on the slippery hillsides of

-the village of Valmy. The battle therefore consisted of a

-series of solemn broadsides. The rebels fired harder and

-faster than the royalists. Hence the latter were the first

-to leave the field. In the evening the allied troops retreated

-northward. Among those present at the engagement was

-a certain Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, aide to the hereditary

-Prince of Weimar.</p>

-

-<p>Several years afterwards this young man published his

-memoirs of that day. While standing ankle-deep in the

-sticky mud of Lorraine, he had turned prophet. And he had

-predicted that after this cannonade, the world would never

-be the same. He had been right. On that ever memorable

-day, Sovereignty by the grace of God was blown into limbo.

-The Crusaders of the Rights of Man did not run like

-chickens, as they had been expected to do. They stuck

-to their guns. And they pushed those guns forward through

-valleys and across mountains until they had carried their

-ideal of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to the furthermost<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_373"></a>[373]</span>

-corners of Europe and had stabled their horses in

-every castle and church of the entire continent.</p>

-

-<p>It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence.

-The revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one

-hundred and fifty years and we can poke as much fun at

-them as we like. We can even be grateful for the many

-good things which they bestowed upon this world.</p>

-

-<p>But the men and women who lived through those days,

-who one morning had gaily danced around the Tree of

-Liberty and then during the next three months had been

-chased like rats through the sewers of their own city, could

-not possibly take such a detached view of those problems

-of civic upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their

-cellars and garrets and had combed the cobwebs out of their

-perukes, they began to devise measures by which to prevent

-a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity.</p>

-

-<p>But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must

-first of all bury the past. Not a vague past in the broad

-historical sense of the word but their own individual “pasts”

-when they had surreptitiously read the works of Monsieur

-de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for

-the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de

-Voltaire were stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur

-Diderot were sold to the junk-man. Pamphlets that had

-been reverently read as the true revelation of reason were

-relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an effort

-was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short

-sojourn in the realm of liberalism.</p>

-

-<p>Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the

-literary material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant

-brotherhood overlooked one item which was even more important

-as a telltale of the popular mind. That was the

-stage. It was a bit childish on the part of the generation<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_374"></a>[374]</span>

-that had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The Marriage

-of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment

-believed in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and

-the people who had wept over “Nathan the Wise” could

-never successfully prove that they had always regarded religious

-tolerance as a misguided expression of governmental

-weakness.</p>

-

-<p>The play and its success were there to convict them of

-the opposite.</p>

-

-<p>The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment

-of the latter half of the eighteenth century was a

-German, one Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was the son

-of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology in the

-University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination

-for a religious career and had played hooky so persistently

-that his father heard of it, had told him to come home and

-had placed him before the choice of immediate resignation

-from the university or diligent application as a member of

-the medical department. Gotthold, who was no more of a

-doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was

-asked of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of

-his beloved actor friends and upon their subsequent disappearance

-from town was obliged to hasten to Wittenberg

-that he might escape arrest for debt.</p>

-

-<p>His flight meant the beginning of a period of long walks

-and short meals. First of all he went to Berlin where he

-spent several years writing badly paid articles for a number

-of theatrical papers. Then he engaged himself as private

-secretary to a rich friend who was going to take a trip

-around the world. But no sooner had they started than the

-Seven Years’ war must break out. The friend, obliged to

-join his regiment, had taken the first post-chaise for home<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_375"></a>[375]</span>

-and Lessing, once more without a job, found himself stranded

-in the city of Leipzig.</p>

-

-<p>But he was of a sociable nature and soon found a new

-friend in the person of one Eduard Christian von Kleist, an

-officer by day and a poet by night, a sensitive soul who gave

-the hungry ex-theologian insight into the new spirit that

-was slowly coming over this world. But von Kleist was shot

-to death in the battle of Kunersdorf and Lessing was driven

-to such dire extremes of want that he became a columnist.</p>

-

-<p>Then followed a period as private secretary to the commander

-of the fortress of Breslau where the boredom of garrison

-life was mitigated by a profound study of the works

-of Spinoza which then, a hundred years after the philosopher’s

-death, were beginning to find their way to foreign

-countries.</p>

-

-<p>All this, however, did not settle the problem of the daily

-Butterbrod. Lessing was now almost forty years old and

-wanted a home of his own. His friends suggested that he

-be appointed keeper of the Royal Library. But years before,

-something had happened that had made Lessing

-persona non grata at the Prussian court. During his first

-visit to Berlin he had made the acquaintance of Voltaire.

-The French philosopher was nothing if not generous and

-being a person without any idea of “system” he had allowed

-the young man to borrow the manuscript of the “Century of

-Louis XIV,” then ready for publication. Unfortunately,

-Lessing, when he hastily left Berlin, had (entirely by accident)

-packed the manuscript among his own belongings.

-Voltaire, exasperated by the bad coffee and the hard beds of

-the penurious Prussian court, immediately cried out that he

-had been robbed. The young German had stolen his most

-important manuscript, the police must watch the frontier,

-etc., etc., etc., after the manner of an excited Frenchman<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_376"></a>[376]</span>

-in a foreign country. Within a few days the postman returned

-the lost document, but it was accompanied by a letter

-from Lessing in which the blunt young Teuton expressed

-his own ideas of people who would dare to suspect his

-honesty.</p>

-

-<p>This storm in a chocolate-pot might have easily been forgotten,

-but the eighteenth century was a period when chocolate-pots

-played a great rôle in the lives of men and women

-and Frederick, even after a lapse of almost twenty years,

-still loved his pesky French friend and would not hear of

-having Lessing at his court.</p>

-

-<p>And so farewell to Berlin and off to Hamburg, where there

-was rumor of a newly to be founded national theater. This

-enterprise came to nothing and Lessing in his despair accepted

-the office of librarian to the hereditary grand duke

-of Brunswick. The town of Wolfenbüttel which then became

-his home was not exactly a metropolis, but the grand-ducal

-library was one of the finest in all Germany. It contained

-more than ten thousand manuscripts and several of

-these were of prime importance in the history of the Reformation.</p>

-

-<p>Boredom of course is the main incentive to scandal mongering

-and gossip. In Wolfenbüttel a former art critic,

-columnist and dramatic essayist was by this very fact a

-highly suspicious person and soon Lessing was once more

-in trouble. Not because of anything he had done but on

-account of something he was vaguely supposed to have done,

-to wit: the publication of a series of articles attacking the

-orthodox opinions of the old school of Lutheran theology.</p>

-

-<p>These sermons (for sermons they were) had actually been

-written by a former Hamburg minister, but the grand duke

-of Brunswick, panic stricken at the prospect of a religious

-war within his domains, ordered his librarian to be discreet<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_377"></a>[377]</span>

-and keep away from all controversies. Lessing complied

-with the wishes of his employer. Nothing, however, had

-been said about treating the subject dramatically and so he

-set to work to re-valuate his opinions in terms of the stage.</p>

-

-<p>The play which was born out of this small-town rumpus

-was called “Nathan the Wise.” The theme was very old and

-I have mentioned it before in this book. Lovers of literary

-antiquities can find it (if Mr. Sumner will allow them) in

-Boccaccio’s “Decameron” where it is called the “Sad Story

-of the Three Rings” and where it is told as follows:</p>

-

-<p>Once upon a time a Mohammedan prince tried to extract

-a large sum of money from one of his Jewish subjects. But

-as he had no valid reason to deprive the poor man of his

-property, he bethought himself of a ruse. He sent for the

-victim and having complimented him gracefully upon his

-learning and wisdom, he asked him which of the three most

-widely spread religions, the Turkish, the Jewish and the

-Christian, he held to be most true. The worthy patriarch

-did not answer the Padishah directly but said, “Let me, oh

-great Sultan, tell you a little story. Once upon a time there

-was a very rich man who had a beautiful ring and he made

-a will that whichever of his sons at the time of his death

-should be found with that ring upon his finger should fall

-heir to all his estates. His son made a like will. His grandson

-too, and for centuries the ring changed hands and all

-was well. But finally it happened that the owner of the

-ring had three sons whom he loved equally well. He simply

-could not decide which of the three should own that much

-valued treasure. So he went to a goldsmith and ordered

-him to make two other rings exactly like the one he had.

-On his death-bed he sent for his children and gave them

-each his blessing and what they supposed was the one and

-only ring. Of course, as soon as the father had been buried,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_378"></a>[378]</span>

-the three boys all claimed to be his heir because they had

-The Ring. This led to many quarrels and finally they laid

-the matter before the Kadi. But as the rings were absolutely

-alike, even the judges could not decide which was the right

-one and so the case has been dragged on and on and very

-likely will drag on until the end of the world. Amen.”</p>

-

-<p>Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that

-no one religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it

-was the inner spirit of man that counted rather than his

-outward conformity to certain prescribed rituals and dogmas

-and that therefore it was the duty of people to bear with

-each other in love and friendship and that no one had the

-right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured

-perfection and say, “I am better than all others because

-I alone possess the Truth.”</p>

-

-<p>But this idea, much applauded in the year 1778, was no

-longer popular with the little princelings who thirty years

-later returned to salvage such goods and chattels as had

-survived the deluge of the Revolution. For the purpose of

-regaining their lost prestige, they abjectly surrendered their

-lands to the rule of the police-sergeant and expected the

-clerical gentlemen who depended upon them for their livelihood

-to act as a spiritual militia and help the regular cops

-to reëstablish law and order.</p>

-

-<p>But whereas the purely political reaction was completely

-successful, the attempt to reshape men’s minds after the

-pattern of fifty years before ended in failure. And it could

-not be otherwise. It was true that the vast majority of the

-people in all countries were sick and tired of revolution and

-unrest, of parliaments and futile speeches and forms of taxation

-that had completely ruined commerce and industry.

-They wanted peace. Peace at any price. They wanted to

-do business and sit in their own front parlors and drink<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_379"></a>[379]</span>

-coffee and not be disturbed by the soldiers billeted upon them

-and forced to drink an odious extract of oak-leaves. Provided

-they could enjoy this blessed state of well-being, they

-were willing to put up with certain small inconveniences such

-as saluting whoever wore brass buttons, bowing low before

-every imperial letter-box and saying “Sir” to every assistant

-official chimney-sweep.</p>

-

-<p>But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of

-sheer necessity, of the need for a short breathing space after

-the long and tumultuous years when every new morning

-brought new uniforms, new political platforms, new police

-regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and earth. It

-would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general

-air of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely

-appointed masters, that the people in their heart of

-hearts had forgotten the new doctrines which the drums of

-Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into their heads

-and hearts.</p>

-

-<p>As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent

-in all reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward

-semblance of decency and order and cared not one

-whit for the inner spirit, the average subject enjoyed a fairly

-wide degree of independence. On Sunday he went to church

-with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week

-he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept

-his private opinions to himself and aired his views when a

-careful inspection of the premises had first assured him that

-no secret agent was hidden underneath the sofa or was lurking

-behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed the

-events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head

-when his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper

-told him what new idiotic measures his masters had taken<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_380"></a>[380]</span>

-to assure the peace of the realm and bring about a return

-to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.</p>

-

-<p>What his masters were doing was exactly what similar

-masters with an imperfect knowledge of the history of human

-nature under similar circumstances have been doing ever

-since the year one. They thought that they had destroyed

-free speech when they ordered the removal of the cracker-barrels

-from which the speeches that had so severely criticized

-their government had been made. And whenever they

-could, they sent the offending orators to jail with such stiff

-sentences (forty, fifty, a hundred years) that the poor devils

-gained great renown as martyrs, whereas in most instances

-they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a few books

-and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.</p>

-

-<p>Warned by this example, the others kept away from the

-public parks and did their grumbling in obscure wine shops

-or in the public lodging houses of overcrowded cities where

-they were certain of a discreet audience and where their influence

-was infinitely more harmful than it would have been

-on a public platform.</p>

-

-<p>There are few things more pathetic in this world than the

-man upon whom the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a

-little bit of authority and who is in eternal fear for his

-official prestige. A king may lose his throne and may laugh

-at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption

-of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king,

-whether he wears his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s

-crown. But the mayor of a third rate town, once

-he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of office,

-is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself

-airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore

-woe unto him who dares to approach such a potentate<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_381"></a>[381]</span>

-pro tem without visible manifestations of that reverence and

-worship due to so exalted a human being.</p>

-

-<p>But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who

-openly questioned the existing order of things in learned

-tomes and handbooks of geology and anthropology and

-economics, fared infinitely worse.</p>

-

-<p>They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their

-livelihood. Then they were exiled from the town in which

-they had taught their pernicious doctrines and with their

-wives and children were left to the charitable mercies of the

-neighbors.</p>

-

-<p>This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience

-to a large number of perfectly sincere people

-who were honestly trying to go to the root of our many

-social ills. Time, however, the great laundress, has long

-since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates

-were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these

-amiable scholars. Today, King Frederick William of

-Prussia is chiefly remembered because he interfered with

-the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous radical

-who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be

-worthy of being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines,

-according to the police reports, appealed only to

-“beardless youths and idle babblers.” The Duke of Cumberland

-has gained lasting notoriety because as King of Hanover

-he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a

-protest against “His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the

-country’s constitution.” And Metternich has retained a certain

-notoriety because he extended his watchful suspicion

-to the field of music and once censored the music of Schubert.</p>

-

-<p>Poor old Austria!</p>

-

-<p>Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly

-disposed towards the “gay empire” and forgets that once<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_382"></a>[382]</span>

-upon a time it had an active intellectual life of its own and

-was something more than an amusing and well-mannered

-county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars

-and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted

-by no one less than Johann Strauss himself.</p>

-

-<p>We may go even further and state that during the entire

-eighteenth century Austria played a very important rôle in

-the development of the idea of religious tolerance. Immediately

-after the Reformation the Protestants had found a

-fertile field for their operations in the rich province between

-the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had

-changed when Rudolf II became emperor.</p>

-

-<p>This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a

-ruler to whom treaties made with heretics were of no consequence

-whatsoever. But although educated by the Jesuits,

-he was incurably lazy and this saved his empire from too

-drastic a change of policy.</p>

-

-<p>That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This

-monarch’s chief qualification for office was the fact that he

-alone among all the Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons.

-Early during his reign he had visited the famous House of

-the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year 1291 by a number

-of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central

-Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had

-sworn a dire oath to make his country one-hundred-percent

-Catholic.</p>

-

-<p>He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism

-once more was proclaimed the official and exclusive

-faith of Austria and Styria and Bohemia and Silesia.</p>

-

-<p>Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange

-family, which acquired vast quantities of European real

-estate with every new wife, an effort was made to drive the

-Protestants from their Magyar strongholds. But backed up<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_383"></a>[383]</span>

-by the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the

-Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain

-their independence until the second half of the eighteenth

-century. And by that time a great change had taken

-place in Austria itself.</p>

-

-<p>The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last

-even their sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference

-with their affairs on the part of the Popes and they

-were willing for once to risk a policy contrary to the wishes

-of Rome.</p>

-

-<p>In an earlier part of this book I have already told how

-many medieval Catholics believed that the organization of

-the Church was all wrong. In the days of the martyrs,

-these critics argued, the Church was a true democracy ruled

-by elders and bishops who were appointed by common consent

-of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede

-that the Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct

-successor of the Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite

-position in the councils of the Church, but they insisted that

-this power had been purely honorary and that the popes

-therefore should never have considered themselves superior

-to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend

-their influence beyond the confines of their own territory.</p>

-

-<p>The popes from their side had fought this idea with all

-the bulls, anathemas and excommunications at their disposal

-and several brave reformers had lost their lives as a result

-of their bold agitation for greater clerical decentralization.</p>

-

-<p>The question had never been definitely settled, and then

-during the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was

-revived by the vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop

-of Trier. His name was Johann von Hontheim, but

-he is better known by his Latin pseudonym of Febronius.

-Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberal<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_384"></a>[384]</span>

-education. After a few years spent at the University of

-Louvain he had temporarily forsaken his own people and

-had gone to the University of Leiden. He got there at a

-time when that old citadel of undiluted Calvinism was beginning

-to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This suspicion

-had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard

-Noodt, a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to

-enter the field of theology and had been permitted to publish

-a speech in which he had extolled the ideal of religious

-tolerance.</p>

-

-<p>His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.</p>

-

-<p>“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to

-lay down certain laws of science which hold good for all

-people at all times and under all conditions. It follows that

-it would have been very easy for him, had he desired to do

-so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that they

-all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject

-of religion. We know that He did not do anything

-of the sort. Therefore, we act against the express will of

-God if we try to coerce others by force to believe that which

-we ourselves hold to be true.”</p>

-

-<p>Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or

-not, it is hard to say. But something of that same spirit

-of Erasmian rationalism can be found in those works of

-Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own ideas

-upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.</p>

-

-<p>That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in

-February of the year 1764) is of course no more than was

-to be expected. But it happened to suit the interests of

-Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and Febronianism or

-Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started was

-called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practical<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_385"></a>[385]</span>

-shape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the

-son of Maria Theresa, bestowed upon his subjects on the

-thirteenth of October of the year 1781.</p>

-

-<p>Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great

-enemy, Frederick of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing

-the right thing at the wrong moment. During the last two

-hundred years the little children of Austria had been sent

-to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them

-if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those

-same infants henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors

-(who, as they all knew, had horns and a long black tail),

-as their dearly beloved brothers and sisters was to ask the

-impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard working, blundering

-Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles and

-aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and

-cardinals and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden

-outburst of courage. He was the first among the Catholic

-rulers who dared to advocate tolerance as a desirable

-and practical possibility of statecraft.</p>

-

-<p>And what he did three months later was even more startling.

-On the second of February of the year of grace 1782

-he issued his famous decree concerning the Jews and extended

-the liberty then only enjoyed by Protestants and Catholics

-to a category of people who thus far had considered themselves

-fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the same

-air as their Christian neighbors.</p>

-

-<p>Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe

-that the good work continued indefinitely and that Austria

-now became a Paradise for those who wished to follow the

-dictates of their own conscience.</p>

-

-<p>I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers

-might rise to a sudden height of common sense, but the

-Austrian peasant, taught since time immemorial to regard<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_386"></a>[386]</span>

-the Jew as his natural enemy and the Protestant as a rebel

-and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that old and

-deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people

-as his natural enemies.</p>

-

-<p>A century and a half after the promulgation of these

-excellent Edicts of Tolerance, the position of those who did

-not belong to the Catholic Church was quite as unfavorable

-as it had been in the sixteenth century. Theoretically a

-Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers

-or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And

-in practice it was impossible for them to be invited to dinner

-by the imperial boot-black.</p>

-

-<p>So much for paper decrees.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_387"></a>[387]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXIX">CHAPTER XXIX<br>

-<span class="smaller">TOM PAINE</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect

-that God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to

-perform.</p>

-

-<p>The truth of this statement is most apparent to those

-who have studied the history of the Atlantic seaboard.</p>

-

-<p>During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern

-part of the American continent was settled by people

-who had gone so far in their devotion to the ideals of the

-Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor might have taken

-them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of the

-words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very

-wide and very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these

-pioneers had set up a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated

-in the witch-hunting orgies of the Mather family.</p>

-

-<p>Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two

-reverend gentlemen could in any way be held responsible

-for the very tolerant tendencies which we find expounded

-with such able vigor in the Constitution of the United

-States and in the many documents that were written immediately

-before the outbreak of hostilities between England

-and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case,

-for the period of repression of the seventeenth century was

-so terrible that it was bound to create a furious reaction

-in favor of a more liberal point of view.</p>

-

-<p>This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent

-for the collected works of Socinius and ceased to frighten

-little children with stories about Sodom and Gomorrah. But<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_388"></a>[388]</span>

-their leaders were almost without exception representatives

-of the new school of thought and with great ability and

-tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into

-the parchment platform upon which the edifice of their

-new and independent nation was to be erected.</p>

-

-<p>They might not have been quite so successful if they had

-been obliged to deal with one united country. But colonization

-in the northern part of America had always been a complicated

-business. The Swedish Lutherans had explored

-part of the territory. The French had sent over some

-of their Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied

-a large share of the land. While almost every sort and

-variety of English sect had at one time or another tried

-to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness between

-the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.</p>

-

-<p>This had made for a variety of religious expression and

-so well had the different denominations been balanced that in

-several of the colonies a crude and rudimentary form of

-mutual forbearance had been forced upon a people who

-under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at

-each other’s throats.</p>

-

-<p>This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend

-gentlemen who prospered where others quarreled. For

-years after the advent of the new spirit of charity they had

-continued their struggle for the maintenance of the old ideal

-of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had successfully

-estranged many of the younger men from a creed

-which seemed to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and

-kindliness from some of its more ferocious Indian neighbors.</p>

-

-<p>Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt

-of battle in the long struggle for freedom belonged to this

-small but courageous group of dissenters.</p>

-

-<p>Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_389"></a>[389]</span>

-of eighty tons can carry enough new notions to upset an

-entire continent. The American colonists of the eighteenth

-century were obliged to do without sculpture and grand

-pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more intelligent

-among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand

-that there was something astir in the big world,

-of which they had never heard anything in their Sunday

-sermons. The booksellers then became their prophets. And

-although they did not officially break away from the established

-church and changed little in their outer mode of life,

-they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they

-were faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania,

-who had refused to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the

-ground that the good Lord had expressly reserved for himself

-the right to three things: “To be able to create something

-out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate

-man’s conscience.”</p>

-

-<p>And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political

-and social program for the future conduct of their

-country, these brave patriots incorporated their ideas into

-the documents in which they placed their ideals before the

-high court of public opinion.</p>

-

-<p>It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of

-Virginia had they known that some of the oratory to which

-they listened with such profound respect was directly inspired

-by their arch-enemies, the Libertines. But Thomas

-Jefferson, their most successful politician, was himself a man

-of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that religion

-could only be regulated by reason and conviction and

-not by force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal

-right to the free exercise of their religion according to the

-dictates of their conscience, he merely repeated what had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_390"></a>[390]</span>

-been thought and written before by Voltaire and Bayle and

-Spinoza and Erasmus.</p>

-

-<p>And later when the following heresies were heard: “that

-no declaration of faith should be required as a condition of

-obtaining any public office in the United States,” or “that

-Congress should make no law which referred to the establishment

-of religion or which prohibited the free exercise

-thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.</p>

-

-<p>In this way the United States came to be the first country

-where religion was definitely separated from politics; the first

-country where no candidate for office was forced to show his

-Sunday School certificate before he could accept the nomination;

-the first country in which people could, as far as the law

-was concerned, worship or fail to worship as they pleased.</p>

-

-<p>But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter)

-the average man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable

-to follow them as soon as they deviated the least little bit

-from the beaten track. Not only did many of the states

-continue to impose certain restrictions upon those of their

-subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but

-the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or

-Bostonians or Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant

-of those who did not share their own views as if they

-had never read a single line of their own Constitution. All

-of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the case of

-Thomas Paine.</p>

-

-<p>Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of

-the Americans.</p>

-

-<p>He was the publicity man of the Revolution.</p>

-

-<p>By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor;

-by instinct and training, a rebel. He was forty years old

-before he visited the colonies. While on a visit to London

-he had met Benjamin Franklin and had received the excellent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_391"></a>[391]</span>

-advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided

-with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had

-sailed for Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the

-son-in-law of Franklin, to found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania

-Gazette.”</p>

-

-<p>Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon

-found himself in the midst of those events that were trying

-men’s souls. And being possessed of a singularly well-ordered

-mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted collection

-of American grievances and had incorporated them into

-a pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application

-of “common sense” should convince the people that the

-American cause was a just cause and deserved the hearty

-coöperation of all loyal patriots.</p>

-

-<p>This little book at once found its way to England and to

-the continent where it informed many people for the first

-time in their lives that there was such a thing as “an

-American nation” and that it had an excellent right, yea, it

-was its sacred duty to make war upon the mother country.</p>

-

-<p>As soon as the Revolution was over, Paine went back to

-Europe to show the English people the supposed absurdities

-of the government under which they lived. It was a time

-when terrible things were happening along the banks of

-the Seine and when respectable Britishers were beginning

-to look across the Channel with very serious misgivings.</p>

-

-<p>A certain Edmund Burke had just published his panic-stricken

-“Reflections on the French Revolution.” Paine

-answered with a furious counter-blast of his own called “The

-Rights of Man” and as a result the English government

-ordered him to be tried for high treason.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile his French admirers had elected him to the

-Convention and Paine, who did not know a word of French<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_392"></a>[392]</span>

-but was an optimist, accepted the honor and went to Paris.

-There he lived until he fell under the suspicion of Robespierre.

-Knowing that at any moment he might be arrested

-and decapitated, he hastily finished a book that was to contain

-his philosophy of life. It was called “The Age of

-Reason.” The first part was published just before he was

-taken to prison. The second part was written during the

-ten months he spent in jail.</p>

-

-<p>Paine believed that true religion, what he called “the religion

-of humanity,” had two enemies, atheism on the one hand

-and fanaticism on the other. But when he gave expression

-to this thought he was attacked by every one and when he

-returned to America in 1802 he was treated with such profound

-and relentless hatred that his reputation as a “dirty

-little atheist” has survived him by more than a century.</p>

-

-<p>It is true that nothing happened to him. He was not

-hanged or burned or broken on the wheel. He was merely

-shunned by all his neighbors, little boys were encouraged to

-stick their tongues out at him when he ventured to leave

-his home, and at the time of his death he was an embittered

-and forgotten man who found relief for his anger in writing

-foolish political tracts against the other heroes of the

-Revolution.</p>

-

-<p>This seems a most unfortunate sequel to a splendid beginning.</p>

-

-<p>But it is typical of something that has repeatedly happened

-during the history of the last two thousand years.</p>

-

-<p>As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private

-intolerance begins.</p>

-

-<p>And lynchings start when official executions have come

-to an end.</p>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_393"></a>[393]</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXX">CHAPTER XXX<br>

-<span class="smaller">THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS</span></h2>

-

-</div>

-

-<p>Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to

-write this book. The word “Intolerance,” in the

-minds of most people, was then almost exclusively

-identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when

-an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of

-tolerance” it was generally accepted that so and so had

-spent his life fighting the abuses of the Church and the

-tyranny of a professional priesthood.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the war.</p>

-

-<p>And much was changed in this world.</p>

-

-<p>Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen.</p>

-

-<p>Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his

-fellow-men, we got a hundred.</p>

-

-<p>And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of

-the horrors of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with

-the infinitely more painful manifestations of a paltry form

-of racial intolerance and social intolerance and a score of

-petty forms of intolerance, the existence of which had not

-even been suspected a decade ago.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>This seems very terrible to many good people who until

-recently lived in the happy delusion that progress was

-a sort of automatic time-piece which needed no other winding

-than their occasional approbation.</p>

-

-<p>They sadly shake their heads, whisper “Vanity, vanity,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_394"></a>[394]</span>

-all is vanity!” and mutter disagreeable things about the cussedness

-of the human race which goes everlastingly to school,

-yet always refuses to learn.</p>

-

-<p>Until, in sheer despair, they join the rapidly increasing

-ranks of our spiritual defeatists, attach themselves to this

-or that or the other religious institution (that they may

-transfer their own burden to the back of some one else), and

-in the most doleful tones acknowledge themselves beaten and

-retire from all further participation in the affairs of their

-community.</p>

-

-<p>I don’t like such people.</p>

-

-<p>They are not merely cowards.</p>

-

-<p>They are traitors to the future of the human race.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>So far so good, but what is the solution, if a solution

-there be?</p>

-

-<p>Let us be honest with ourselves.</p>

-

-<p>There is not any.</p>

-

-<p>At least not in the eyes of a world which asks for quick

-results and expects to settle all difficulties of this earth comfortably

-and speedily with the help of a mathematical or

-medical formula or by an act of Congress. But those of

-us who have accustomed ourselves to consider history in the

-light of eternity and who know that civilization does not

-begin and end with the twentieth century, feel a little more

-hopeful.</p>

-

-<p>That vicious circle of despair of which we hear so much

-nowadays (“man has always been that way,” “man always

-will be that way,” “the world never changes,” “things are

-just about the same as they were four thousand years ago,”)

-does not exist.</p>

-

-<p>It is an optical illusion.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_395"></a>[395]</span></p>

-

-<p>The line of progress is often interrupted but if we set

-aside all sentimental prejudices and render a sober judgment

-upon the record of the last twenty thousand years

-(the only period about which we possess more or less concrete

-information) we notice an indubitable if slow rise

-from a condition of almost unspeakable brutality and crudeness

-to a state which holds the promise of something infinitely

-nobler and better than what has ever gone before

-and even the ghastly blunder of the Great War can not

-shake the firm conviction that this is true.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>The human race is possessed of almost incredible vitality.</p>

-

-<p>It has survived theology.</p>

-

-<p>It due time it will survive industrialism.</p>

-

-<p>It has lived through cholera and plague, high heels and

-blue laws.</p>

-

-<p>It will also learn how to overcome the many spiritual ills

-which beset the present generation.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>History, chary of revealing her secrets, has thus far

-taught us one great lesson.</p>

-

-<p>What the hand of man has done, the hand of man can

-also undo.</p>

-

-<p>It is a question of courage, and next to courage, of education.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>That of course sounds like a platitude. For the last

-hundred years we have had “education” driven into our ears

-until we are sick and tired of the word and look longingly

-back to a time when people could neither read nor write<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_396"></a>[396]</span>

-but used their surplus intellectual energy for occasional moments

-of independent thinking.</p>

-

-<p>But when I here speak of “education” I do not mean

-the mere accumulation of facts which is regarded as the

-necessary mental ballast of our modern children. Rather,

-I have in mind that true understanding of the present which

-is born out of a charitable and generous knowledge of the

-past.</p>

-

-<p>In this book I have tried to prove that intolerance is merely

-a manifestation of the protective instinct of the herd.</p>

-

-<p>A group of wolves is intolerant of the wolf that is different

-(be it through weakness or strength) from the rest of

-the pack and invariably tries to get rid of this offending

-and unwelcome companion.</p>

-

-<p>A tribe of cannibals is intolerant of the individual who by

-his idiosyncrasies threatens to provoke the wrath of the Gods

-and bring disaster upon the whole village and brutally relegates

-him or her to the wilderness.</p>

-

-<p>The Greek commonwealth can ill afford to harbor within

-its sacred walls a citizen who dares to question the very

-fundaments upon which the success of the community has

-been built and in a poor outburst of intolerance condemns

-the offending philosopher to the merciful death of poison.</p>

-

-<p>The Roman state cannot possibly hope to survive if a

-small group of well-meaning zealots is allowed to play fast

-and loose with certain laws which have been held indispensable

-ever since the days of Romulus, and much against

-her own will she is driven into deeds of intolerance which

-are entirely at variance with her age-old policy of liberal

-aloofness.</p>

-

-<p>The Church, spiritual heir to the material dominions of

-the ancient Empire, depends for her continued existence

-upon the absolute and unquestioning obedience of even the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_397"></a>[397]</span>

-humblest of her subjects and is driven to such extremes of

-suppression and cruelty that many people prefer the ruthlessness

-of the Turk to the charity of the Christian.</p>

-

-<p>The great insurgents against ecclesiastical tyranny, beset

-by a thousand difficulties, can only maintain their rule if

-they show themselves intolerant to all spiritual innovations

-and scientific experiments and in the name of “Reform”

-they commit (or rather try to commit) the self-same mistakes

-which have just deprived their enemies of most of

-their former power and influence.</p>

-

-<p>And so it goes throughout the ages until life, which might

-be a glorious adventure, is turned into a horrible experience

-and all this happens because human existence so far has

-been entirely dominated by fear.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>For fear, I repeat it, is at the bottom of all intolerance.</p>

-

-<p>No matter what form or shape a persecution may take, it

-is caused by fear and its very vehemence is indicative of the

-degree of anguish experienced by those who erect the gallows

-or throw fresh logs upon the funeral pyre.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Once we recognize this fact, the solution of the difficulty

-immediately presents itself.</p>

-

-<p>Man, when not under the influence of fear, is strongly

-inclined to be righteous and just.</p>

-

-<p>Thus far he has had very few opportunities to practice

-these two virtues.</p>

-

-<p>But I cannot for the life of me see that this matters

-overmuch. It is part of the necessary development of the

-human race. And that race is young, hopelessly, almost

-ridiculously young. To ask that a certain form of mammal,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_398"></a>[398]</span>

-which began its independent career only a few thousand

-years ago should already have acquired those virtues which

-go only with age and experience, seems both unreasonable

-and unfair.</p>

-

-<p>And furthermore, it warps our point of view.</p>

-

-<p>It causes us to be irritated when we should be patient.</p>

-

-<p>It makes us say harsh things where we should only feel

-pity.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>In the last chapters of a book like this, there is a serious

-temptation to assume the rôle of the prophet of woe and indulge

-in a little amateur preaching.</p>

-

-<p>Heaven forbid!</p>

-

-<p>Life is short and sermons are apt to be long.</p>

-

-<p>And what cannot be said in a hundred words had better

-never be said at all.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>Our historians are guilty of one great error. They speak

-of prehistoric times, they tell us about the Golden Age of

-Greece and Rome, they talk nonsense about a supposedly

-dark period, they compose rhapsodies upon the tenfold

-glories of our modern era.</p>

-

-<p>If perchance these learned doctors perceive certain characteristics

-which do not seem to fit into the picture they

-have so prettily put together, they offer a few humble apologies

-and mumble something about certain undesirable qualities

-which are part of our unfortunate and barbaric heritage

-but which in due course of time will disappear, just as the

-stage-coach has given way before the railroad engine.</p>

-

-<p>It is all very pretty but it is not true. It may flatter

-our pride to believe ourselves heir to the ages. It will be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_399"></a>[399]</span>

-better for our spiritual health if we know ourselves for what

-we are—contemporaries of the folks that lived in caves, neolithic

-men with cigarettes and Ford cars, cliff-dwellers who

-reach their homes in an elevator.</p>

-

-<p>For then and only then shall we be able to make a first

-step toward that goal that still lies hidden beyond the

-vast mountain ranges of the future.</p>

-

-<hr class="tb">

-

-<p>To speak of Golden Ages and Modern Eras and Progress

-is sheer waste of time as long as this world is dominated by

-fear.</p>

-

-<p>To ask for tolerance, as long as intolerance must of

-need be an integral part of our law of self-preservation, is

-little short of a crime.</p>

-

-<p>The day will come when tolerance shall be the rule, when

-intolerance shall be a myth like the slaughter of innocent

-captives, the burning of widows, the blind worship of a

-printed page.</p>

-

-<p>It may take ten thousand years, it may take a hundred

-thousand.</p>

-

-<p>But it will come, and it will follow close upon the first

-true victory of which history shall have any record, the

-triumph of man over his own fear.</p>

-

-<p class="hanging"><i>Westport, Connecticut</i><br>

-<i>July, 19, 1925</i></p>

-

-<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***</div>

-</body>

-</html>

-

+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      Tolerance | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+a {
+    text-decoration: none;
+}
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+h1,h2 {
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+h2.nobreak {
+    page-break-before: avoid;
+}
+
+hr {
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.tb {
+    width: 45%;
+    margin-left: 27.5%;
+    margin-right: 27.5%;
+}
+
+hr.chap {
+    width: 65%;
+    margin-left: 17.5%;
+    margin-right: 17.5%;
+}
+
+img.online {
+    max-height: 2.5em;
+    margin-top: -1.25em;
+}
+
+img.inline {
+    max-height: 0.8em;
+    vertical-align: middle;
+}
+
+img.w100 {
+    width: 100%;
+}
+
+div.chapter {
+    page-break-before: always;
+}
+
+p {
+    margin-top: 0.5em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: 0.5em;
+    text-indent: 1em;
+}
+
+table {
+    margin: 1em auto 1em auto;
+    max-width: 30em;
+    border-collapse: collapse;
+}
+
+td {
+    padding-left: 2.25em;
+    padding-right: 0.25em;
+    vertical-align: top;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+.tdc {
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.tdr {
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.tdpg {
+    vertical-align: bottom;
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.blockquote {
+    margin: 1.5em auto auto auto;
+    max-width: 30em;
+}
+
+.caption p {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.center {
+    text-align: center;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.copyright {
+    margin: 1.5em auto auto auto;
+    max-width: 20em;
+    border-top: 2px solid black;
+    border-bottom: 2px solid black;
+    padding: 1em 0;
+}
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.hanging {
+    margin-top: 3em;
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+.larger {
+    font-size: 150%;
+}
+
+.noindent {
+    text-indent: 0;
+}
+
+.pagenum {
+    position: absolute;
+    right: 4%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+
+.right {
+    margin-top: 0;
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.smaller {
+    font-size: 80%;
+}
+
+.smcap {
+    font-variant: small-caps;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+
+.titlepage {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-top: 3em;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.x-ebookmaker img {
+    max-width: 100%;
+    width: auto;
+    height: auto;
+}
+
+/* Illustration classes */
+.illowp100 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp70 {width: 70%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp70 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp80 {width: 80%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp80 {width: 100%;}
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_i"></a>[i]</span></p>
+
+<h1>TOLERANCE</h1>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ii"></a>[ii]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iii"></a>[iii]</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage larger">TOLERANCE</p>
+
+<p class="titlepage"><span class="smaller"><i>By</i></span><br>
+HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+
+<p class="noindent"><i>The final end of the State consists not in dominating
+over men, restraining them by fear, subjecting
+them to the will of others. Rather it has for its
+end so to act that its citizens shall in security
+develop soul and body and make free use of their
+reason. For the true end of the State is Liberty.</i></p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Spinoza.</span></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+
+<p class="noindent"><i>Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future.
+I will wait for Humanity at the crossroads, three
+hundred years hence.</i></p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Luigi Lucatelli.</span></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter titlepage illowp100" style="max-width: 4.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/b-and-l.jpg" alt=" ">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="titlepage"><span class="smaller"><i>NEW YORK</i></span><br>
+BONI &amp; LIVERIGHT<br>
+<span class="smaller">1925</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iv"></a>[iv]</span></p>
+
+<div class="copyright">
+
+<p class="center smaller">COPYRIGHT 1925 <img class="inline" src="images/deco.jpg" alt=" "> BY<br>
+BONI &amp; LIVERIGHT, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br>
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" style="max-width: 4.6875em;">
+  <img class="online" src="images/b-and-l.jpg" alt=" ">
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_v"></a>[v]</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">TO THE MEMORY OF<br>
+JOHN W. T. NICHOLS</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vi"></a>[vi]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vii"></a>[vii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr"></td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr"></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Prologue</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#PROLOGUE">11</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr smaller">CHAPTER</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">I.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Tyranny of Ignorance</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">17</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">II.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Greeks</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">28</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">III.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Beginning of Restraint</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">68</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Twilight of the Gods</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">80</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">V.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Imprisonment</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">104</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Pure of Life</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">114</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Inquisition</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">126</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Curious Ones</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">146</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IX.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The War Upon the Printed Word</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">160</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">X.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Concerning the Writing of History in General
+    and This Book in Particular</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">168</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Renaissance</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">172</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Reformation</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">181</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Erasmus</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">195</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Rabelais</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">212</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">New Signboards for Old</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">223</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XVI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Anabaptists</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">246</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XVII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Sozzini Family</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">257</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XVIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Montaigne</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">269</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIX.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Arminius</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">275</a><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_viii"></a>[viii]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XX.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Bruno</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">286</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Spinoza</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">292</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The New Zion</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">307</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Sun King</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">321</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXIV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Frederick the Great</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">326</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Voltaire</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">330</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXVI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Encyclopedia</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">352</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXVII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Intolerance of Revolution</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">361</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXVIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Lessing</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">372</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXIX.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Tom Paine</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">387</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XXX.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Last Hundred Years</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">393</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span></p>
+
+<h1>TOLERANCE</h1>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="PROLOGUE">TOLERANCE<br>
+<span class="smaller">PROLOGUE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley
+of Ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>To the north, to the south, to the west and
+to the east stretched the ridges of the Hills Everlasting.</p>
+
+<p>A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a
+deep worn gully.</p>
+
+<p>It came out of the Mountains of the Past.</p>
+
+<p>It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.</p>
+
+<p>It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the
+humble needs of the villagers.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and
+had filled their casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the
+shady corners where they had spent their day, pondering
+over the mysterious pages of an old book.</p>
+
+<p>They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who
+would have preferred to play with the pretty pebbles,
+brought down from distant lands.</p>
+
+<p>Often these words were not very clear.</p>
+
+<p>But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten
+race. Hence they were holy.</p>
+
+<p>For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was
+venerable. And those who dared to gainsay the wisdom of
+the fathers were shunned by all decent people.</p>
+
+<p>And so they kept their peace.</p>
+
+<p>Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused
+the common share of the products of the garden?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span></p>
+
+<p>Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the
+narrow streets of the little town, vague stories of men and
+women who had dared to ask questions.</p>
+
+<p>They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.</p>
+
+<p>A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range
+that hid the sun.</p>
+
+<p>Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.</p>
+
+<p>The years came and the years went by.</p>
+
+<p>Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Out of the darkness crept a man.</p>
+
+<p>The nails of his hands were torn.</p>
+
+<p>His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of
+long marches.</p>
+
+<p>He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.</p>
+
+<p>Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he
+was carried to a cot.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning throughout the village it was known:
+“He has come back.”</p>
+
+<p>The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They
+had always known that this was to be the end.</p>
+
+<p>Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll
+away from the foot of the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their
+heads and whispered burning words.</p>
+
+<p>They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law.
+Bitterly this man had sinned against the wishes of Those
+Who Knew.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought
+to trial.</p>
+
+<p>They meant to be lenient.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span></p>
+
+<p>They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother.
+They recalled the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert
+these thirty years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be
+obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>The Men Who Knew would see to that.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the
+people stood around in respectful silence.</p>
+
+<p>He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders
+bade him sit down.</p>
+
+<p>He refused.</p>
+
+<p>They ordered him to be silent.</p>
+
+<p>But he spoke.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought
+those who but a short time before had been his comrades.</p>
+
+<p>“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be
+rejoiced. I have come back from beyond the mountains.
+My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands have felt the touch
+of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.</p>
+
+<p>“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my
+father.</p>
+
+<p>“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north
+lay the ranges from the Beginning of Time.</p>
+
+<p>“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush
+and a hasty shaking of heads. When I insisted, I was taken
+to the rocks and shown the bleached bones of those who had
+dared to defy the Gods.</p>
+
+<p>“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love
+those who are brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to
+me from their sacred books. The Law, they explained, had
+ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The Valley was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>
+ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the
+fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the
+mountains were of the Gods. What lay beyond was to
+remain unknown until the End of Time.</p>
+
+<p>“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as
+they have lied to you.</p>
+
+<p>“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as
+rich as any. And men and women of our own flesh and
+blood. And cities resplendent with the glories of a thousand
+years of labor.</p>
+
+<p>“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen
+the promise of a happier life. Follow me and I shall lead
+you thither. For the smile of the Gods is the same there
+as here and everywhere.”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.</p>
+
+<p>“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege!
+A fit punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason.
+He dares to scoff at the Law as it was written down
+a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”</p>
+
+<p>And they took up heavy stones.</p>
+
+<p>And they killed him.</p>
+
+<p>And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that
+it might lie there as a warning to all who questioned the
+wisdom of the ancestors.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Then it happened a short time later that there was a
+great drought. The little Brook of Knowledge ran dry.
+The cattle died of thirst. The harvest perished in the fields,
+and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>
+Everything would all come right in the end, they prophesied,
+for so it was writ in their most Holy Chapters.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They
+were so very old.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Winter came.</p>
+
+<p>The village was deserted.</p>
+
+<p>More than half of the populace died from sheer want.</p>
+
+<p>The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the
+mountains.</p>
+
+<p>But the Law said “No!”</p>
+
+<p>And the Law must be obeyed.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>One night there was a rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>Feebly the Old Men protested.</p>
+
+<p>They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot.
+They bewailed the ingratitude of their children, but when
+the last wagon pulled out of the village, they stopped the
+driver and forced him to take them along.</p>
+
+<p>The flight into the unknown had begun.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It
+was no easy task to discover the road he had mapped out.</p>
+
+<p>Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the
+first cairn was found.</p>
+
+<p>From there on the trip was less difficult.</p>
+
+<p>The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the
+woods and amidst the endless wilderness of rock.</p>
+
+<p>By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span></p>
+
+<p>Silently the people looked at each other.</p>
+
+<p>“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and
+the Old Men were wrong....</p>
+
+<p>“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....</p>
+
+<p>“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the
+Old Men sit in our carts and chant their ancient lays....</p>
+
+<p>“He saved us, and we slew him....</p>
+
+<p>“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we
+could have known at the time....”</p>
+
+<p>Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and
+they drove their cows and their goats into the pastures and
+they built themselves houses and laid out their fields and
+they lived happily for a long time afterwards.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave
+pioneer in the fine new edifice which had been erected as a
+home for the Wise Old Men.</p>
+
+<p>A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley,
+but when the spot was reached where his body ought to
+have been, it was no longer there.</p>
+
+<p>A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.</p>
+
+<p>A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail
+(now a magnificent highway). It gave the name of the man
+who had first defied the dark terror of the unknown, that his
+people might be guided into a new freedom.</p>
+
+<p>And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some
+day (so we hope) it shall no longer be.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became
+ruler of the eastern half of the Roman Empire.</p>
+
+<p>This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the
+much disputed railroad junction of the late war) had no
+use for “book-learnin’.” It was by his orders that the
+ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally suppressed.
+And it was he who closed the doors of the only
+Egyptian temple that had continued to do business centuries
+after the valley of the Nile had been invaded by the monks
+of the new Christian faith.</p>
+
+<p>This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far
+from the first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men
+could remember, the spot had been dedicated to the worship
+of Isis and for some curious reason, the Goddess had survived
+where all her African and Greek and Roman rivals had
+miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth century, the
+island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of
+picture writing was still understood and where a small number
+of priests continued to practice a trade which had been
+forgotten in every other part of the land of Cheops.</p>
+
+<p>And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His
+Imperial Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were
+declared state property, the statues and images were sent to
+the museum of Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters
+were thrown into jail. And when the last of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>
+them had died from hunger and neglect, the age-old trade of
+making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.</p>
+
+<p>All this was a great pity.</p>
+
+<p>If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little
+less thorough and had saved just a few of those old picture
+experts in a sort of literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made
+the task of the historian a great deal easier. For while
+(owing to the genius of Champollion) we can once more spell
+out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly
+difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their
+message to posterity.</p>
+
+<p>And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient
+world.</p>
+
+<p>What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left
+us whole brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind
+when they exclaimed piously, “Who shall ever be able to
+understand the counsel of the Gods in Heaven?” How did
+they feel towards those divine spirits which they invoked
+so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret,
+whose commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of
+their most holy city? Why were they at once the most
+tolerant of men, encouraging their priests to study the high
+heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and at the same
+time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous punishments
+upon those of their neighbors who had committed some
+breach of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?</p>
+
+<p>Until recently we did not know.</p>
+
+<p>We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand
+of Sinai and deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And
+everywhere in Mesopotamia and Egypt we did our best to
+find the key that should unlock the front door of this mysterious
+store-house of wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>
+that the back door had been wide open all the time and that
+we could enter the premises at will.</p>
+
+<p>But that convenient little gate was not situated in the
+neighborhood of Akkad or Memphis.</p>
+
+<p>It stood in the very heart of the jungle.</p>
+
+<p>And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan
+temple.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in
+contact with what they were pleased to call “wild men” or
+“savages.”</p>
+
+<p>The meeting had not been a pleasant one.</p>
+
+<p>The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the
+white men, had welcomed them with a salvo of spears and
+arrows.</p>
+
+<p>The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.</p>
+
+<p>After that there had been little chance for a quiet and
+unprejudiced exchange of ideas.</p>
+
+<p>The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing
+loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees
+and deserved all that was coming to him.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean
+Jacques Rousseau began to contemplate the world through
+a haze of sentimental tears. His contemporaries, much
+impressed by his ideas, pulled out their handkerchiefs and
+joined in the weeping.</p>
+
+<p>The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite
+subjects. In their hands (although they had never seen
+one) he became the unfortunate victim of circumstances and
+the true representative of all those manifold virtues of which
+the human race had been deprived by three thousand years
+of a corrupt system of civilization.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span></p>
+
+<p>Today, at least in this particular field of investigation,
+we know better.</p>
+
+<p>We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated
+animals, from which as a rule he is not so very far
+removed.</p>
+
+<p>In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble.
+The savage, but for the grace of God, is our own self under
+much less favorable conditions. By examining him carefully
+we begin to understand the early society of the valley of the
+Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia and by knowing
+him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange
+hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin
+crust of manners and customs which our own species of
+mammal has acquired during the last five thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On
+the other hand a realization of the conditions from which we
+have escaped, together with an appreciation of the many
+things that have actually been accomplished, can only tend
+to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything
+it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among
+our distant cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.</p>
+
+<p>This is not a handbook of anthropology.</p>
+
+<p>It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>But tolerance is a very broad theme.</p>
+
+<p>The temptation to wander will be great. And once we
+leave the beaten track, Heaven alone knows where we will
+land.</p>
+
+<p>I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state
+exactly and specifically what I mean by tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the
+human race and all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It
+therefore behooves an humble student to go to that authority<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>
+which is accepted as final by the largest number of those who
+speak the language in which this book is written.</p>
+
+<p>I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.</p>
+
+<p>There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written:
+“Tolerance (from Latin <i>tolerare</i>—to endure):—The allowance
+of freedom of action or judgment to other people, the
+patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from one’s
+own or the generally received course or view.”</p>
+
+<p>There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this
+book I shall let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.</p>
+
+<p>And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a
+definite policy, I shall return to my savages and tell you what
+I have been able to discover about tolerance in the earliest
+forms of society of which we have any record.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>It is still generally believed that primitive society was very
+simple, that primitive language consisted of a few simple
+grunts and that primitive man possessed a degree of liberty
+which was lost only when the world became “complex.”</p>
+
+<p>The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers
+and missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central
+Africa and the Polar regions and Polynesia show the
+exact opposite. Primitive society was exceedingly complicated,
+primitive language had more forms and tenses and
+declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was
+a slave not only to the present, but also to the past and to
+the future; in short, an abject and miserable creature who
+lived in fear and died in terror.</p>
+
+<p>This may seem far removed from the popular picture of
+brave red-skins merrily roaming the prairies in search of
+buffaloes and scalps, but it is a little nearer to the truth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span></p>
+
+<p>And how could it have been otherwise?</p>
+
+<p>I have read the stories of many miracles.</p>
+
+<p>But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival
+of man.</p>
+
+<p>How and in what manner and why the most defenseless
+of all mammals should have been able to maintain himself
+against microbes and mastodons and ice and heat and eventually
+become master of all creation, is something I shall not
+try to solve in the present chapter.</p>
+
+<p>One thing, however, is certain. He never could have
+accomplished all this alone.</p>
+
+<p>In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality
+in the composite character of the tribe.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single
+idea, an all-overpowering desire to survive.</p>
+
+<p>This was very difficult.</p>
+
+<p>And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to
+the one supreme demand—to live.</p>
+
+<p>The individual counted for nothing, the community at
+large counted for everything, and the tribe became a roaming
+fortress which lived by itself and for itself and of itself
+and found safety only in exclusiveness.</p>
+
+<p>But the problem was even more complicated than at first
+appears. What I have just said held good only for the
+visible world, and the visible world in those early times was
+a negligible quantity compared to the realm of the invisible.</p>
+
+<p>In order to understand this fully we must remember that
+primitive people are different from ourselves. They are not
+familiar with the law of cause and effect.</p>
+
+<p>If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence,
+send for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>
+of the stuff as soon as he can. My ability to recognize cause
+and effect tells me that the poison ivy has caused the rash,
+that the doctor will be able to give me something that will
+make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine will
+prevent a repetition of this painful experience.</p>
+
+<p>The true savage would act quite differently. He would
+not connect the rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in
+a world in which past, present and future are inextricably
+interwoven. All his dead leaders survive as Gods and his
+dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all continue to be
+invisible members of the clan and they accompany each
+individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him
+and sleep with him and they stand watch over his door. It
+is his business to keep them at arm’s length or gain their
+friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will be immediately
+punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all
+those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune
+which comes as the revenge of the Gods.</p>
+
+<p>He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the
+ordinary not to a primary cause but to interference on the
+part of an invisible spirit and when he notices a rash on his
+arms he does not say, “Damn that poison ivy!” but he mumbles,
+“I have offended a God. The God has punished me,”
+and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion
+to counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm”
+that shall prove stronger than the charm which the irate
+God (and not the ivy) has thrown upon him.</p>
+
+<p>As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he
+lets it grow right there where it has always grown. And if
+perchance the white man comes with a can of kerosene and
+burns the shrub down, he will curse him for his trouble.</p>
+
+<p>It follows that a society in which everything happens as<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>
+the result of the direct personal interference on the part of
+an invisible being must depend for its continued existence
+upon a strict obedience of such laws as seem to appease the
+wrath of the Gods.</p>
+
+<p>Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed.
+His ancestors had devised it and had bestowed it upon him
+and it was his most sacred duty to keep that law intact and
+hand it over in its present and perfect form to his own
+children.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in
+progress, in growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.</p>
+
+<p>But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year
+before last, and it is typical of all low forms of society that
+the people see no possible reason why they should improve
+what (to them) is the best of all possible worlds because
+they never knew any other.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent
+a change in the laws and in the established forms of society?</p>
+
+<p>The answer is simple.</p>
+
+<p>By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to
+regard common police regulations as an expression of the
+divine will, or in plain language, by a rigid system of intolerance.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant
+of human beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten
+to add that given the circumstances under which he lived, it
+was his duty to be intolerant. Had he allowed any one to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>
+interfere with the thousand and one rules upon which his
+tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind,
+the life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and
+that would have been the greatest of all possible crimes.</p>
+
+<p>But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group
+of people, relatively limited in number, protect a most complex
+system of verbal regulations when we in our own day
+with millions of soldiers and thousands of policemen find it
+difficult to enforce a few plain laws?</p>
+
+<p>Again the answer is simple.</p>
+
+<p>The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He
+accomplished by shrewd calculation what he could not do by
+force.</p>
+
+<p>He invented the idea of “taboo.”</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression.
+Such things are rarely the product of a sudden inspiration.
+They are the result of long years of growth and experiment.
+Let that be as it may, the wild men of Africa and Polynesia
+devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a great deal
+of trouble.</p>
+
+<p>The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know
+more or less what it means. Our own world is full of taboos,
+things we simply must not do or say, like mentioning our
+latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving our spoon in
+our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very
+serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette
+and rarely interfere with our own personal happiness.</p>
+
+<p>To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the
+utmost importance.</p>
+
+<p>It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had
+been “set apart” from the rest of the world, that they (to
+use the Hebrew equivalent) were “holy” and must not be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>
+discussed or touched on pain of instant death and everlasting
+torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who
+dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the
+priesthood was created to maintain the taboo is a problem
+which had not yet been solved. As tradition is much older
+than religion, it seems more than likely that taboos existed
+long before the world had heard of sorcerers and witch-doctors.
+But as soon as the latter had made their appearance,
+they became the staunch supporters of the idea of
+taboo and used it with such great virtuosity that the taboo
+became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric ages.</p>
+
+<p>When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt,
+those countries were still in a state of development in which
+the taboo counted for a great deal. Not a taboo in the crude
+and primitive form as it was afterwards found in New
+Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of
+conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we
+are all familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.</p>
+
+<p>Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely
+unknown in those lands at that early age.</p>
+
+<p>What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely
+indifference caused by ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>But we can find no trace of any willingness (however
+vague) on the part of either kings or priests to allow others
+to exercise that “freedom of action or judgment” or of that
+“patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from the
+generally received cause or view” which has become the ideal
+of our modern age.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not
+interested in prehistoric history or what is commonly called
+“ancient history.”</p>
+
+<p>The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the
+discovery of the individual.</p>
+
+<p>And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations,
+belongs to the Greeks.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE GREEKS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in
+a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able
+to provide our world in less than two centuries
+with the complete framework for all our present day experiments
+in politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry,
+physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which
+has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries
+and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during
+his career, has tried to give an answer.</p>
+
+<p>Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the
+chemical and physical and astronomical and medical faculties,
+have always looked with ill-concealed contempt upon all
+efforts to discover what one might call “the laws of history.”
+What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and shooting
+stars seems to have no business within the realm of human
+beings.</p>
+
+<p>I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that
+there must be such laws. It is true that thus far we have
+not discovered many of them. But then again we have never
+looked very hard. We have been so busy accumulating facts
+that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them and
+evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of
+wisdom which might be of some real value to our particular
+variety of mammal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this
+new field of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s
+book, offer the following historical axiom.</p>
+
+<p>According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life
+(animate existence as differentiated from inanimate existence)
+began when for once all physical and chemical elements
+were present in the ideal proportion necessary for the creation
+of the first living cell.</p>
+
+<p>Translate this into terms of history and you get this:</p>
+
+<p>“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a
+very high form of civilization is only possible when all the
+racial, climatic, economic and political conditions are present
+in an ideal proportion or in as nearly an ideal condition and
+proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”</p>
+
+<p>Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.</p>
+
+<p>A race with the brain development of a cave-man would
+not prosper, even in Paradise.</p>
+
+<p>Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would
+not have composed fugues, Praxiteles would not have made
+statues if they had been born in an igloo near Upernivik
+and had been obliged to spend most of their waking hours
+watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology
+if he had been obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill
+in Lancashire. And Alexander Graham Bell would not have
+invented the telephone if he had been a conscripted serf and
+had lived in a remote village of the Romanow domains.</p>
+
+<p>In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was
+found, the climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants
+were not very robust or enterprising, and political and economic
+conditions were decidedly bad. The same held true
+of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which afterwards<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>
+moved into the valley between the Tigris and the
+Euphrates were strong and vigorous people. There was
+nothing the matter with the climate. But the political and
+economic environment remained far from good.</p>
+
+<p>In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture
+was backward and there was little commerce outside
+of the caravan route which passed through the country from
+Africa to Asia and vice versa. Furthermore, in Palestine
+politics were entirely dominated by the priests of the temple
+of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the development
+of any sort of individual enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The
+race was strong and trade conditions were good. The country,
+however, suffered from a badly balanced economic system.
+A small class of ship owners had been able to get hold
+of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial
+monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had
+at an early date fallen into the hands of the very rich.
+The poor, deprived of all excuse for the practice of a reasonable
+amount of industry, grew callous and indifferent
+and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and
+went to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her
+rulers.</p>
+
+<p>In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization,
+certain of the necessary elements for success were always
+lacking.</p>
+
+<p>When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur,
+in Greece in the fifth century before our era, it lasted only
+a very short time, and strange to say, even then it did not
+take place in the mother country but in the colonies across
+the Aegean Sea.</p>
+
+<p>In another book I have given a description of those famous
+island-bridges which connected the mainland of Asia with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>
+Europe and across which the traders from Egypt and Babylonia
+and Crete since time immemorial had traveled to
+Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise
+and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be
+found on the western coast of Asia Minor in a strip of land
+known as Ionia.</p>
+
+<p>A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow
+bit of mountainous territory, ninety miles long and only a
+few miles wide, had been conquered by Greek tribes from the
+mainland who there had founded a number of colonial towns
+of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus were the
+best known, and it was along those cities that at last the
+conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion
+that civilization reached a point which has sometimes
+been equaled but never has been surpassed.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the
+most active and enterprising elements from among a dozen
+different nations.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, there was a great deal of general
+wealth derived from the carrying trade between the old and
+the new world, between Europe and Asia.</p>
+
+<p>In the third place, the form of government under which
+the colonists lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance
+to develop their talents to the very best of their ability.</p>
+
+<p>If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that
+in countries devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate
+does not matter much. Ships can be built and goods can be
+unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does not get so cold
+that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are flooded,
+the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily
+weather reports.</p>
+
+<p>But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>
+favorable to the development of an intellectual class. Before
+the existence of books and libraries, learning was handed
+down from man to man by word of mouth and the town-pump
+was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest of
+universities.</p>
+
+<p>In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump
+for 350 out of every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors
+made such excellent use of their climatic advantages
+that they became the pioneers of all future scientific development.</p>
+
+<p>The first of whom we have any report, the real founder
+of modern science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in
+the sense that he had robbed a bank or murdered his family
+and had fled to Miletus from parts unknown. But no one
+knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian or a
+Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned
+racial experts) or a Semite?</p>
+
+<p>It shows what an international center this little old city
+at the mouth of the Meander was in those days. Its population
+(like that of New York today) consisted of so many
+different elements that people accepted their neighbors at
+their face value and did not look too closely into the family
+antecedents.</p>
+
+<p>Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook
+of philosophy, the speculations of Thales do not properly belong
+in these pages, except in so far as they tend to show the
+tolerance towards new ideas which prevailed among the
+Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town on a
+muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region,
+when the Jews were still captives in the land of Assyria and
+when northern and western Europe were naught but a howling
+wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>In order that we may understand how such a development<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span>
+was possible, we must know something about the changes
+which had taken place since the days when Greek chieftains
+sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the plunder of
+the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were
+still the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization.
+They were over-grown children who regarded life as
+one long, glorified rough-house, full of excitement and wrestling
+matches and running races and all the many things
+which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not
+forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with
+bread and bananas.</p>
+
+<p>The relationship between these boisterous paladins and
+their Gods was as direct and as simple as their attitude towards
+the serious problems of every-day existence. For the
+inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the world of the
+Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this
+earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals.
+Exactly where and when and how man and his Gods
+had parted company was a more or less hazy point, never
+clearly established. Even then the friendship which those
+who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their
+subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no
+way been interrupted and it had remained flavored with
+those personal and intimate touches which gave the religion
+of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that
+Zeus was a very powerful and mighty potentate with a long
+beard who upon occasion would juggle so violently with his
+flashes of lightning and his thunderbolts that it seemed that
+the world was coming to an end. But as soon as they were
+a little older and were able to read the ancient sagas for
+themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those
+terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span>
+nursery and who now appeared in the light of a merry
+family-party—everlastingly playing practical jokes upon
+each other and taking such bitter sides in the political disputes
+of their mortal friends that every quarrel in Greece
+was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the
+denizens of the aether.</p>
+
+<p>Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings,
+Zeus remained a very great God, the mightiest of all rulers
+and a personage whom it was not safe to displease. But he
+was “reasonable” in that sense of the word which is so well
+understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was
+reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper
+way. And best of all, he had a sense of humor and did not
+take either himself or his world too seriously.</p>
+
+<p>This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a
+divine figure, but it offered certain very distinct advantages.
+Among the ancient Greeks there never was a hard and fast
+rule as to what people must hold true and what they must
+disregard as false. And because there was no “creed” in
+the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and
+a class of professional priests, ready to enforce them with
+the help of the secular gallows, the people in different parts
+of the country were able to reshape their religious ideas
+and ethical conceptions as best suited their own individual
+tastes.</p>
+
+<p>The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of
+Mount Olympus, showed of course much less respect for
+their august neighbors than did the Asopians who dwelled in
+a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The Athenians,
+feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own
+patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great
+liberties with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose
+valleys were far removed from the main trade routes, clung<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span>
+tenaciously to a simpler faith and frowned upon all levity in
+the serious matter of religion, and as for the inhabitants of
+Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound for the
+village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo
+(who was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the
+greatest of all divine spirits and deserved the special homage
+of those who came from afar and still had a couple of
+drachmas in their pocket.</p>
+
+<p>The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to
+set the Jews apart from all other nations, would never have
+been possible if the life of Judaea had not centered around
+a single city which was strong enough to destroy all rival
+places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an exclusive
+religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.</p>
+
+<p>In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither
+Athens nor Sparta ever succeeded in establishing itself as
+the recognized capital of a united Greek fatherland. Their
+efforts in this direction only led to long years of unprofitable
+civil war.</p>
+
+<p>No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists
+offered great scope for the development of a very
+independent spirit of thought.</p>
+
+<p>The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the
+Bible of the Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They
+were just books. They were never united into “The Book.”
+They told the adventures of certain wonderful heroes who
+were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of the generation
+then living. Incidentally they contained a certain
+amount of religious information because the Gods, without
+exception, had taken sides in the quarrel and had neglected
+all other business for the joy of watching the rarest prize-fight
+that had ever been staged within their domain.</p>
+
+<p>The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>
+directly or indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva
+or Apollo never even dawned upon the Greek mind. These
+were a fine piece of literature and made excellent reading
+during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they caused
+children to feel proud of their own race.</p>
+
+<p>And that was all.</p>
+
+<p>In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom,
+in a city filled with the pungent smell of ships from all
+the seven seas, rich with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the
+laughter of a well fed and contented populace, Thales was
+born. In such a city he worked and taught and in such a
+city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed
+greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors,
+remember that his ideas never penetrated beyond a very
+limited circle. The average Miletian may have heard the
+name of Thales, just as the average New Yorker has probably
+heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,
+and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who
+smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle and who wrote something
+about a man walking through a railroad train, about which
+there once was an article in a Sunday paper.</p>
+
+<p>That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the
+fiddle has got hold of a little spark of truth which eventually
+may upset (or at least greatly modify) the scientific conclusions
+of the last sixty centuries, is a matter of profound
+indifference to the millions of easy-going citizens whose
+interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict
+which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the
+law of gravity.</p>
+
+<p>The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the
+difficulty by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.),
+the founder of modern science.” And we can almost see the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>
+headlines in the “Miletus Gazette” saying, “Local graduate
+discovers secret of true science.”</p>
+
+<p>But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten
+track and struck out for himself, I could not possibly tell
+you. This much is certain, that he did not live in an intellectual
+vacuum, nor did he develop his wisdom out of his
+inner consciousness. In the seventh century before Christ,
+a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had
+already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical
+and physical and astronomical information at the
+disposal of those intelligent enough to make use of it.</p>
+
+<p>Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before
+they dared to dump a couple of million tons of granite on
+top of a little burial chamber in the heart of a pyramid.</p>
+
+<p>The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously
+studied the behavior of the sun that they might predict the
+wet and dry seasons and give the peasants a calendar by
+which they could regulate their work on the farms.</p>
+
+<p>All these problems, however, had been solved by people
+who still regarded the forces of nature as the direct and
+personal expression of the will of certain invisible Gods who
+administered the seasons and the course of the planets and
+the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s cabinet
+manage the department of agriculture or the post-office
+or the treasury.</p>
+
+<p>Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well
+educated people of his day, he did not bother to discuss it in
+public. If the fruit vendors along the water front wanted
+to fall upon their faces whenever there was an eclipse of the
+sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual
+sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the
+last man to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>
+elementary knowledge of the behavior of heavenly bodies
+would have foretold that on the 25th of May of the year 585
+B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would find herself
+between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town
+of Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians
+and the Lydians had been engaged in battle on the
+afternoon of this famous eclipse and had been obliged to
+cease killing each other for lack of sufficient light, he refused
+to believe that the Lydian deities (following a famous precedent
+established a few years previously during a certain
+battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle,
+and had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the
+victory might go to those whom they favored.</p>
+
+<p>For Thales had reached the point (and that was his
+great merit) where he dared to regard all nature as the
+manifestation of one Eternal Will, subject to one Eternal
+Law and entirely beyond the personal influence of those
+divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own
+image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place
+just the same if there had been no more important engagement
+that particular afternoon than a dog fight in the
+streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast in Halicarnassus.</p>
+
+<p>Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific
+observations, he laid down one general and inevitable law
+for all creation and guessed (and to a certain extent guessed
+correctly) that the beginning of all things was to be found
+in the water which apparently surrounded the world on all
+sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning
+of time.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales
+himself wrote. It is possible that he may have put his ideas<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>
+into concrete form (for the Greeks had already learned the
+alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not a page which can
+be directly attributed to him survives today. For our
+knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the
+scanty bits of information found in the books of some of
+his contemporaries. From these, however, we have learned
+that Thales in private life was a merchant with wide connections
+in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the
+way, was typical of most of the early philosophers. They
+were “lovers of wisdom.” But they never closed their eyes
+to the fact that the secret of life is found among the living
+and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite as dangerous
+as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of
+the food.</p>
+
+<p>To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad
+and indifferent, was the supreme measure of all things.
+Wherefore they spent their leisure time patiently studying
+this strange creature as he was and not as they thought
+that he ought to be.</p>
+
+<p>This made it possible for them to remain on the most
+amicable terms with their fellow citizens and allowed them to
+wield a much greater power than if they had undertaken to
+show their neighbors a short cut to the Millennium.</p>
+
+<p>They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.</p>
+
+<p>But by their own example they managed to show how a
+true understanding of the forces of nature must inevitably
+lead to that inner peace of the soul upon which all true happiness
+depends and having in this way gained the good-will
+of their community they were given full liberty to study and
+explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture
+within those domains which were popularly believed to be
+the exclusive property of the Gods. And as one of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span>
+pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the long years
+of his useful career.</p>
+
+<p>Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks
+apart, although he had examined each little piece separately,
+and had openly questioned all sorts of things which the
+majority of the people since the beginning of time had held
+to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully in
+his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his
+heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.</p>
+
+<p>And once he had shown the way, there were many others
+eager to follow.</p>
+
+<p>There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who
+left Asia Minor for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent
+the following years as a “sophist” or private tutor in different
+Greek cities. He specialized in astronomy and among
+other things he taught that the sun was not a heavenly
+chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a
+red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger
+than the whole of Greece.</p>
+
+<p>When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from
+Heaven killed him for his audacity, he went a little further in
+his theories and stated boldly that the moon was covered with
+mountains and valleys and finally he even hinted at a certain
+“original matter” which was the beginning and the end of
+all things and which had existed from the very beginning of
+time.</p>
+
+<p>But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover,
+he trod upon dangerous ground, for he discussed
+something with which people were familiar. The sun and
+the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek did not
+care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But
+when the professor began to argue that all things had gradually
+grown and developed out of a vague substance called<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>
+“original matter”—then he went decidedly too far. Such an
+assertion was in flat contradiction with the story of Deucalion
+and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated
+the world by turning bits of stone into men and women.
+To deny the truth of a most solemn tale which all little
+Greek boys and girls had been taught in their early childhood
+was most dangerous to the safety of established society.
+It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their elders
+and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the
+subject of a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian
+Parents’ League.</p>
+
+<p>During the monarchy and the early days of the republic,
+the rulers of the city would have been more than able to
+protect a teacher of unpopular doctrines from the foolish
+hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants. But Athens by this
+time had become a full-fledged democracy and the freedom
+of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore,
+Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority
+of the people, was himself a favorite pupil of the great
+astronomer, and the legal prosecution of Anaxagoras was
+welcomed as an excellent political move against the city’s
+old dictator.</p>
+
+<p>A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader
+in one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a
+law passed which demanded “the immediate prosecution of
+all those who disbelieved in the established religion or held
+theories of their own about certain divine things.” Under
+this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison. Finally,
+however, the better elements in the city prevailed.
+Anaxagoras was allowed to go free after the payment of a
+small fine and move to Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he
+died, full of years and honor, in the year 428 B.C.</p>
+
+<p>His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>
+suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras
+was forced to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind
+and two centuries later they came to the notice of one Aristotle,
+who in turn used them as a basis for many of his own
+scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a thousand
+years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid
+Muhammad ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës),
+the great Arab physician who in turn popularized them
+among the students of the Moorish universities of southern
+Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote
+them down in a number of books. These were duly carried
+across the Pyrenees until they reached the universities of
+Paris and Boulogne. There they were translated into Latin
+and French and English and so thoroughly were they accepted
+by the people of western and northern Europe that
+today they have become an integral part of every primer of
+science and are considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation
+after his trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach
+doctrines which were at variance with popular belief. And
+then, during the last years of the fifth century, a second
+case took place.</p>
+
+<p>The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering
+teacher who hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian
+colony in northern Greece. This spot already enjoyed a
+doubtful reputation as the birthplace of Democritus, the
+original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the
+law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the
+largest number of people the greatest amount of happiness
+obtainable with the smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore
+was regarded as a good deal of a radical and a fellow
+who should be under constant police supervision.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span></p>
+
+<p>Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to
+Athens and there, after many years of study, proclaimed
+that man was the measure of all things, that life was too
+short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry into the doubtful
+existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought to be
+used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and
+more thoroughly enjoyable.</p>
+
+<p>This statement, of course, went to the very root of the
+matter and it was bound to shock the faithful more than
+anything that had ever been written or said. Furthermore
+it was made during a very serious crisis in the war between
+Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of
+defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most
+evidently it was not the right moment to incur the wrath
+of the Gods by an inquiry into the scope of their supernatural
+powers. Protagoras was accused of atheism, of
+“godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the
+courts.</p>
+
+<p>Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and
+Protagoras, although a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.</p>
+
+<p>He fled.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked,
+and it seems that he was drowned, for we never hear of him
+again.</p>
+
+<p>As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence,
+he was really not a philosopher at all but a young writer
+who harbored a personal grudge against the Gods because
+they had once failed to give him their support in a law-suit.
+He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance that finally
+his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts
+of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just
+then enjoyed great popularity among the people of northern<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>
+Hellas. For this unseemly conduct he was condemned
+to death. But ere the sentence was executed, the poor devil
+was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth,
+continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully
+died of his own bad temper.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the
+most famous case of Greek intolerance of which we possess
+any record, the judicial murder of Socrates.</p>
+
+<p>When it is sometimes stated that the world has not
+changed at all and that the Athenians were no more broadminded
+than the people of later times, the name of Socrates
+is dragged into the debate as a terrible example of Greek
+bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of the
+case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of
+this brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct
+tribute to the spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed
+throughout ancient Greece in the fifth century before our
+era.</p>
+
+<p>For Socrates, at a time when the common people still
+firmly believed in a large number of divine beings, made himself
+the prophet of an only God. And although the Athenians
+may not always have known what he meant when he
+spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration
+which told him what to do and say), they were fully
+aware of his very unorthodox attitude towards those ideals
+which most of his neighbors continued to hold in holy veneration
+and his utter lack of respect for the established order
+of things. In the end, however, politics killed the old man
+and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the
+crowd) had really very little to do with the outcome of the
+trial.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children
+and little money. The boy therefore had never been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>
+able to pay for a regular college course, for most of the
+philosophers were practical fellows and often charged as
+much as two thousand dollars for a single course of instruction.
+Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study
+of useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere
+waste of time and energy. Provided a person cultivated his
+conscience, so he reasoned, he could well do without geometry
+and a knowledge of the true nature of comets and planets
+was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken
+nose and the shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with
+the loafers on the corner of the street and his nights listening
+to the harangues of his wife (who was obliged to provide
+for a large family by taking in washing, as her husband
+regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible
+detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and
+expeditions and ex-member of the Athenian senate was
+chosen among all the many teachers of his day to suffer for
+his opinions.</p>
+
+<p>In order to understand how this happened, we must know
+something about the politics of Athens in the days when
+Socrates rendered his painful but highly useful service to
+the cause of human intelligence and progress.</p>
+
+<p>All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was
+executed) Socrates tried to show his neighbors that they
+were wasting their opportunities; that they were living hollow
+and shallow lives; that they devoted entirely too much
+time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost invariably
+squandered the divine gifts with which a great
+and mysterious God had endowed them for the sake of a few
+hours of futile glory and self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly
+convinced was he of man’s high destiny that he broke
+through the bounds of all old philosophies and went even<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>
+farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught
+that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached
+that “man’s invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate
+measure of all things and that it is not the Gods but
+we ourselves who shape our destiny.”</p>
+
+<p>The speech which Socrates made before the judges who
+were to decide his fate (there were five hundred of them to
+be precise and they had been so carefully chosen by his
+political enemies that some of them could actually read and
+write) was one of the most delightful bits of commonsense
+ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has
+the right to tell another man what he should believe or to
+deprive him of the right to think as he pleases,” and further,
+“Provided that man remain on good terms with his own conscience,
+he can well do without the approbation of his friends,
+without money, without a family or even a home. But as no
+one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough
+examination of all the pros and cons of every problem,
+people must be given a chance to discuss all questions with
+complete freedom and without interference on the part of the
+authorities.”</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong
+statement at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian
+war there had been a bitter struggle in Athens between
+the rich and the poor, between capital and labor. Socrates
+was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and evil in both
+systems of government and who tried to find a compromise
+which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course,
+had made him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but
+thus far they had been too evenly balanced to take action
+against him.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span></p>
+
+<p>When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent
+Democrats gained complete control of the state and
+expelled the aristocrats, Socrates was a doomed man.</p>
+
+<p>His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the
+city before it was too late and this would have been a very
+wise thing to do.</p>
+
+<p>For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During
+the greater part of a century he had been a sort of
+vocal “columnist,” a terribly clever busy-body who had made
+it his hobby to expose the shams and the intellectual swindles
+of those who regarded themselves as the pillars of Athenian
+society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His
+name had become a household word throughout eastern
+Greece. When he said something funny in the morning, by
+night the whole town had heard about it. Plays had been
+written about him and when he was finally arrested and
+taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of
+Attica who was not thoroughly familiar with all the details
+of his career.</p>
+
+<p>Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like
+that honorable grain merchant who could neither read nor
+write but who knew all about the will of the Gods and therefore
+was loudest in his accusations) were undoubtedly convinced
+that they were rendering a great service to the community
+by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of
+the so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could
+only lead to laziness and crime and discontent among the
+slaves.</p>
+
+<p>It is rather amusing to remember that even under those
+circumstances, Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous
+virtuosity that a majority of the jury was all for letting
+him go free and suggested that he might be pardoned if only
+he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of debating,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span>
+of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave
+his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not
+bother them with his eternal doubts.</p>
+
+<p>But Socrates would not hear of it.</p>
+
+<p>“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience,
+as long as the still small voice within me, bids me go forth
+and show men the true road to reason, I shall continue to
+buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and I shall say
+what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”</p>
+
+<p>After that, there was no other course but to condemn the
+prisoner to death.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy
+ship which made an annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet
+returned from its voyage and until then, the Athenian law
+did not allow any executions. The whole of this month the
+old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system
+of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity
+to escape, he refused to go. He had lived his life and had
+done his duty. He was tired and ready to depart. Until
+the hour of his execution he continued to talk with his
+friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right
+and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things
+of the spirit rather than those of the material world.</p>
+
+<p>Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon
+his couch and settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.</p>
+
+<p>For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this
+terrible outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove
+themselves from the scene of their former activities.</p>
+
+<p>But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed
+their former occupation as public teachers, and within a
+dozen years after the death of the old philosopher, his ideas
+were more popular than ever.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span></p>
+
+<p>The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult
+period. It was five years since the struggle for the leadership
+of the Greek peninsula had ended with the defeat of
+Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans. This had
+been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to
+say that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never
+wrote a line worth remembering or contributed a single idea
+to the sum total of human knowledge (with the exception of
+certain military tactics which survive in our modern game
+of football) thought that they had accomplished their task
+when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the
+Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the
+Athenian mind had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A
+decade after the end of the Peloponnesian war, the old harbor
+of the Piraeus was once more filled with ships from all parts
+of the world and Athenian admirals were again fighting at
+the head of the allied Greek navies.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated
+by his own contemporaries, had made the city the
+intellectual capital of the world—the Paris of the fourth
+century before the birth of Christ. Whosoever in Rome or
+Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a fashionable
+education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit
+a school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.</p>
+
+<p>For this ancient world, which we modern people find so
+difficult to understand properly, took the problem of existence
+seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of
+pagan civilization, the impression has gained ground that the
+average Roman or Greek was a highly immoral person who
+paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous Gods and for the
+rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners, drinking
+vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>
+pretty prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a
+change he went to war and slaughtered innocent Germans
+and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of shedding
+blood.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there
+were a great many merchants and war contractors who had
+accumulated their millions without much regard for those
+ethical principles which Socrates had so well defined before
+his judges. Because these people were very wealthy, they
+had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that
+they enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded
+as commendable representatives of the civilization of their
+day.</p>
+
+<p>We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions
+as one of the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and
+her colonies. We look at the ruins of the forty room palace
+which the old profiteer built out of his ill-gotten gains. And
+we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”</p>
+
+<p>Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who
+was one of the house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find
+ourselves in the company of a spirit as lofty and as exalted
+as ever lived.</p>
+
+<p>I know that the making of generalizations about our
+neighbors and about other nations is one of the most popular
+of indoor sports, but let us not forget that Epictetus, the
+philosopher, was quite as truly a representative of the time
+in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the imperial flunkey, and
+that the desire for holiness was as great twenty centuries
+ago as it is today.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from
+that which is practiced today. It was the product of an
+essentially European brain and had nothing to do with the
+Orient. But the “barbarians” who established it as their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>
+ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were
+our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy
+of life which was highly successful if we agree that
+a clear conscience and a simple, straightforward life, together
+with good health and a moderate but sufficient income,
+are the best guarantee for general happiness and contentment.
+The future of the soul did not interest these people
+overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special
+sort of mammal which by reason of its intellectual application
+had risen high above the other creatures which crawled
+upon this earth. If they frequently referred to the Gods,
+they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons” or
+“aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name,
+but Zeus in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical
+a value as x or y in the problems of Euclid and meant just
+as much or as little.</p>
+
+<p>Life it was which interested those men and next to living,
+art.</p>
+
+<p>Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied
+and following the method of reasoning which Socrates had
+originated and made popular, they achieved some very remarkable
+results.</p>
+
+<p>That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world
+they went to absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more
+than human. But Plato is the only one among all the teachers
+of antiquity who from sheer love for a perfect world
+ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.</p>
+
+<p>This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved
+disciple of Socrates and became his literary executor.</p>
+
+<p>In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates
+had ever said or thought into a series of dialogues which
+might be truthfully called the Socratian Gospels.</p>
+
+<p>When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>
+of the more obscure points in his master’s doctrines and
+explained them in a series of brilliant essays. And finally
+he conducted a number of lecture courses which spread the
+Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond the
+confines of Attica.</p>
+
+<p>In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and
+unselfish devotion that we might almost compare him to St.
+Paul. But whereas St. Paul had led a most adventurous and
+dangerous existence, ever traveling from north to south and
+from west to east that he might bring the Good Tidings to
+all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged
+from his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to
+come to him.</p>
+
+<p>Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent
+wealth allowed him to do this.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through
+his mother could trace his descent to no one less than Solon.
+Then as soon as he came of age he inherited a fortune more
+than sufficient for his simple needs.</p>
+
+<p>And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly
+traveled to the Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to
+follow a few of the lectures in the Platonic University.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young
+men of his time. He served in the army, but without any
+particular interest in military affairs. He went in for outdoor
+sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly good runner,
+but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium.
+Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal
+of his time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and
+paid a short visit to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather
+Solon had done before him. After that, however, he
+returned home for good and during fifty consecutive years
+he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners of a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>
+pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the
+river Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the
+Academy.</p>
+
+<p>He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually
+he switched over to politics and in this field he laid the
+foundations for our modern school of government. He was
+at heart a confirmed optimist and believed in a steady process
+of human evolution. The life of man, so he taught, rises
+slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful
+bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from
+beautiful institutions to beautiful ideas.</p>
+
+<p>This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to
+lay down certain definite principles upon which his perfect
+state was to be founded, his zeal for righteousness and his
+desire for justice were so great that they made him deaf and
+blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which has
+ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection
+by the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very
+strange commonwealth and reflected and continues to reflect
+with great nicety the prejudices of those retired colonels
+who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private income,
+who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound
+distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place”
+and want to have a share of those special privileges which
+by right should go to the members of the “upper class.”</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect
+among the medieval scholars of western Europe and in their
+hands the famous Republic became a most formidable
+weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato
+had reached his conclusions from very different premises than
+those which were popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span></p>
+
+<p>For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man
+in the Christian sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors
+he had always regarded with deep contempt as ill-mannered
+rustics from distant Macedonia. He had been deeply
+mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in the
+chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and
+sat and sat and sat in his little olive grove and became more
+and more exasperated by the foolish quarrels of the little
+city-states of his native land, and witnessed the utter failure
+of the old democratic ideal, he grew convinced that some sort
+of religion was necessary for the average citizen, or his
+imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state
+of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative
+body of his model community should establish a definite
+rule of conduct for all citizens and should force both freemen
+and slaves to obey these regulations on pain of death or
+exile or imprisonment. This sounded like an absolute negation
+of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that liberty of
+conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only
+a short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant
+to be.</p>
+
+<p>The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to
+find. Whereas Socrates had been a man among men, Plato
+was afraid of life and escaped from an unpleasant and ugly
+world into the realm of his own day dreams. He knew of
+course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas
+ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states,
+whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of
+centralization had begun and soon the entire Greek peninsula
+was to be incorporated into that vast Macedonian Empire
+which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the
+banks of the Indus River.</p>
+
+<p>But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>
+the unruly democracies of the old peninsula, the country
+had produced the greatest of those many benefactors who
+have put the rest of the world under eternal obligation to
+the now defunct race of the Greeks.</p>
+
+<p>I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from
+Stagira, the man who in his day and age knew everything
+that was to be known and added so much to the sum total
+of human knowledge that his books became an intellectual
+quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans
+and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without
+exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village
+in Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures
+in Plato’s university. After his graduation he lectured in
+a number of places until the year 336 when he returned to
+Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden near the
+temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum
+and soon attracted pupils from all over the world.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor
+of increasing the number of academies within their walls.
+The town was at last beginning to lose its old commercial
+importance and all of her more energetic citizens were moving
+to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other cities of the
+south and the west. Those who remained behind were either
+too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound
+remnant of those old, turbulent masses of free citizens,
+who had been at once the glory and the ruin of
+the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded the
+“goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a
+dozen years after his death, his most notorious pupil came
+back and openly taught still more outrageous doctrines
+about the beginning of the world and the limited ability of
+the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>
+mumbled dark threats against the man who was making
+their city a by-word for free thinking and unbelief.</p>
+
+<p>If they had had their own way, they would have forced
+him to leave their country. But they wisely kept these opinions
+to themselves. For this short-sighted, stoutish gentleman,
+famous for his good taste in books and in clothes,
+was no negligible quantity in the political life of that day,
+no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town
+by a couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the
+son of a Macedonian court-physician and he had been
+brought up with the royal princes. And furthermore, as
+soon as he had finished his studies, he had been appointed
+tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been
+the daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed
+the friendship and the protection of the most powerful
+ruler the world had ever seen and the regent who
+administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s
+absence on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm
+should befall one who had been the boon companion of his
+imperial master.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death
+reached Athens than Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered
+what had happened to Socrates and felt no desire
+to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had carefully avoided
+mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his distaste
+for the democratic form of government and his lack of
+belief in the sovereign abilities of the common people were
+known to all. And when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst
+of fury, expelled the Macedonian garrison, Aristotle moved
+across the Euboean Sound and went to live in Calchis, where
+he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the
+Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.</p>
+
+<p>At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>
+positive grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as
+usual in that nation of amateur orators, his case was inextricably
+mixed up with politics and his unpopularity was
+due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few local ward-bosses,
+rather than to the expression of any startlingly new
+heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance
+of Zeus.</p>
+
+<p>Nor does it matter very much.</p>
+
+<p>The days of the small independent republics were numbered.</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European
+heritage of Alexander and Greece became one of their many
+provinces.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the
+Romans in most matters were even more tolerant than the
+Greeks of the Golden Age had been and they permitted
+their subjects to think as they pleased, provided they did
+not question certain principles of political expediency upon
+which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had,
+since time immemorial, been safely builded.</p>
+
+<p>All the same there existed a subtle difference between
+the ideals which animated the contemporaries of Cicero and
+those which had been held sacred by the followers of such
+a man as Pericles. The old leaders of Greek thought had
+based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions which
+they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and
+meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without
+the preliminary study. They were merely indifferent, and
+were proud of the fact. They were interested in practical
+things. They were men of action and had a deep-seated
+contempt for words.</p>
+
+<p>If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath
+an old olive tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>
+government or the influence of the moon upon the tides,
+they were more than welcome to do so.</p>
+
+<p>If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some
+practical use, then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise,
+together with singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture
+and science, this business of philosophizing had better
+be left to the Greeks and to the other foreigners whom
+Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world with
+those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention
+to the administration of their ever increasing domains; they
+would drill the necessary companies of foreign infantry and
+cavalry to protect their outlying provinces; they would
+survey the roads that were to connect Spain with Bulgaria;
+and generally they would devote their energies to the keeping
+of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and
+nations.</p>
+
+<p>Let us give honor where honor is due.</p>
+
+<p>The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected
+a structure which under one form or another has survived
+until our own time, and that in itself is no mean accomplishment.
+As long as the necessary taxes were paid and a
+certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct
+laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes
+enjoyed a very large degree of liberty. They could believe
+or disbelieve whatever they pleased. They could worship
+one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples full of Gods. It
+made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to
+profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling
+empire were forever reminded that the “pax Romana”
+depended for its success upon a liberal application
+of the principle of “live and let live.” They must under<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>
+no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or
+with the strangers within their gates. And if perchance
+they thought that their Gods had been insulted, they must
+not rush to the magistrate for relief. “For,” as the Emperor
+Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if the
+Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they
+can surely take care of themselves.”</p>
+
+<p>And with such scant words of consolation, all similar
+cases were instantly dismissed and people were requested
+to keep their private opinions out of the courts.</p>
+
+<p>If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle
+down among the Colossians, they had a right to bring their
+own Gods with them and erect a temple of their own in the
+town of Colossae. But if the Colossians should for similar
+reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they must
+be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal
+freedom of worship.</p>
+
+<p>It has often been argued that the Romans could permit
+themselves the luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude
+because they felt an equal contempt for both the Colossians
+and the Cappadocians and all the other savage tribes
+who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been true.
+I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand
+years, a form of almost complete religious tolerance was
+strictly maintained within the greater part of civilized and
+semi-civilized Europe, Asia and Africa and that the Romans
+developed a technique of statecraft which produced a maximum
+of practical results together with a minimum of friction.</p>
+
+<p>To many people it seemed that the millennium had been
+achieved and that this condition of mutual forbearance
+would last forever.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span></p>
+
+<p>But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built
+upon force.</p>
+
+<p>Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had
+destroyed herself.</p>
+
+<p>The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand
+battlefields.</p>
+
+<p>For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent
+citizens had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of
+administering a colonial empire that stretched from the
+Irish Sea to the Caspian.</p>
+
+<p>At last the reaction set in.</p>
+
+<p>Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted
+by the impossible task of a single city ruling an entire world.</p>
+
+<p>And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people
+grew tired of life and lost the zest for living.</p>
+
+<p>They had come to own all the country-houses, all the
+town-houses, all the yachts and all the stage-coaches they
+could ever hope to use.</p>
+
+<p>They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>They had eaten everything, they had seen everything,
+they had heard everything.</p>
+
+<p>They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been
+everywhere, they had made love to all the women from
+Barcelona to Thebes. All the books that had ever been
+written were in their libraries. The best pictures that had
+ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest musicians
+of the entire world had entertained them at their
+meals. And, as children, they had been instructed by the
+best professors and pedagogues who had taught them everything
+there was to be taught. As a result, all food and
+drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull, all women
+had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span>
+into a burden which a good many people were willing to
+drop at the first respectable opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>There remained only one consolation, the contemplation
+of the Unknown and the Invisible.</p>
+
+<p>The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent
+Roman any longer took stock in the silly nursery
+rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.</p>
+
+<p>There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans
+and the Stoics and the Cynics, all of whom preached charity
+and self-denial and the virtues of an unselfish and useful life.</p>
+
+<p>But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in
+the books of Zeno and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch,
+which were to be found in every cornerstore library.</p>
+
+<p>But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found
+to lack the necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans
+began to clamor for a certain amount of “emotion” with
+their spiritual meals.</p>
+
+<p>Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they
+really were, if we associate the idea of religion with a desire
+to lead useful and noble lives) could only appeal to a very
+small number of people, and almost all of those belonged
+to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of
+private instruction at the hands of competent Greek
+teachers.</p>
+
+<p>To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies
+meant less than nothing at all. They too had reached a
+point of development at which a good deal of the ancient
+mythology seemed the childish invention of rude and credulous
+ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as
+their so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence
+of any and all personal Gods.</p>
+
+<p>Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do
+under such circumstances. They paid a formal and outward<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span>
+tribute of respect to the official Gods of the Republic and
+then betook themselves for real comfort and happiness to
+one of the many mystery religions which during the last
+two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the
+ancient city on the banks of the Tiber.</p>
+
+<p>The word “mystery” which I have used before was of
+Greek origin. It originally meant a gathering of “initiated
+people”—of men and women whose “mouth had been shut”
+against the betrayal of those most holy secrets which only
+the true members of the mystery were supposed to know
+and which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a
+college fraternity or the cabalistic incantations of the Independent
+Order of Sea-Mice.</p>
+
+<p>During the first century of our era, however, a mystery
+was nothing more nor less than a special form of worship,
+a denomination, a church. If a Greek or a Roman (if you
+will pardon a little juggling with time) had left the Presbyterian
+church for the Christian Science church, he would
+have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.”
+For the word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of
+the Lord,” is of comparatively recent origin and was not
+known in those days.</p>
+
+<p>If you happen to be especially interested in the subject
+and wish to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a
+New York paper next Saturday. Almost any paper will
+do. Therein you will find four or five columns of announcements
+about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported from
+India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other
+countries and all of them offering special promises of health
+and riches and salvation everlasting.</p>
+
+<p>Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis,
+was just as full of imported and domestic religions. The
+international nature of the city had made this unavoidable.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span>
+From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern Asia
+Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians
+revered as the mother of the Gods and whose worship was
+connected with such unseemly outbreaks of emotional hilarity
+that the Roman police had repeatedly been forced to close
+the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic
+laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged
+public drunkenness and many other things that
+were even worse.</p>
+
+<p>Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed
+half a dozen strange divinities and the names of
+Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become as familiar to Roman
+ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.</p>
+
+<p>As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto
+the world a primary system of abstract truth and a practical
+code of conduct, based upon virtue, they now supplied
+the people of foreign lands who insisted upon images and
+incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and Dionysus
+and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above
+suspicion as far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless
+enjoying immense popularity.</p>
+
+<p>The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had
+frequented the shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar
+with their great God Baal (the arch-enemy of Jehovah)
+and with Astarte his wife, that strange creature to
+whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all
+his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very
+heart of Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized
+as the official protector of the city of Carthage
+during her long struggle for the supremacy of the Mediterranean
+and who finally after the destruction of all her
+temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the
+shape of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span></p>
+
+<p>But the most important of all, because highly popular
+among the soldiers of the army, was a deity whose broken
+images can still be found underneath every rubbish pile that
+marks the Roman frontier from the mouth of the Rhine to
+the source of the Tigris.</p>
+
+<p>This was the great God Mithras.</p>
+
+<p>Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of
+Light and Air and Truth, and he had been worshiped in
+the plains of the Caspian lowlands when our first ancestors
+took possession of those wonderful grazing fields and made
+ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards became
+known as Europe. To them he had been the giver
+of all good things and they believed that the rulers of this
+earth exercised their power only by the grace of his mighty
+will. Hence, as a token of his divine favor, he sometimes
+bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit of that
+celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded,
+and although he is gone and his name has been forgotten,
+the kindly saints of the Middle Ages, with their halo of
+light, remind us of an ancient tradition which was started
+thousands of years before the Church was ever dreamed of.</p>
+
+<p>But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly
+long time, it has been very difficult to reconstruct
+his life with any degree of accuracy. There was a good
+reason for this. The early Christian missionaries abhorred
+the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more bitter than
+that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their
+heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their
+most serious rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible
+to remove everything that might possibly remind people of
+his existence. In this task they succeeded so well that all
+Mithras temples have disappeared and that not a scrap of
+written evidence remains about a religion which for more<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>
+than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as
+Methodism or Presbyterianism is in the United States of
+today.</p>
+
+<p>However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a
+careful perusal of certain ruins which could not be entirely
+destroyed in the days before the invention of dynamite, we
+have been able to overcome this initial handicap and now
+possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting God
+and the things for which he stood.</p>
+
+<p>Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously
+born of a rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle,
+several nearby shepherds came to worship him and make
+him happy with their gifts.</p>
+
+<p>As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange
+adventures. Many of these remind us closely of the deeds
+which had made Hercules such a popular hero with the
+children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was often
+very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had
+engaged in a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten
+him. But he was so generous in his victory, that the sun
+and he had become like brothers, and were often mistaken
+for each other.</p>
+
+<p>When the God of all evil had sent a drought which
+threatened to kill the race of man, Mithras had struck a
+rock with his arrow, and behold! plentiful water had gushed
+forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman (for that
+was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to
+achieve his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had
+heard of it, had warned one man, had told him to build a
+big boat and load it with his relatives and his flocks and in
+this way had saved the human race from destruction. Until
+finally, having done all he could to save the world from the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>
+consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven
+to rule the just and righteous for all time.</p>
+
+<p>Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged
+to go through an elaborate form of initiation and were
+forced to eat a ceremonious meal of bread and wine in memory
+of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and his friend
+the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism
+in a font of water and do many other things which
+have no special interest to us, as that form of religion
+was completely exterminated more than fifteen hundred
+years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon
+a footing of absolute equality. Together they prayed before
+the same candle-lit altars. Together they chanted the
+same holy hymns and together they took part in the festivities
+which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of
+December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore
+they abstained from all work on the first day of the week,
+which even today is called Sun-day in honor of the great
+God. And finally when they died, they were laid away in
+patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good
+should enter into their just reward and the wicked should
+be cast into the fire everlasting.</p>
+
+<p>The success of these different mysteries, the widespread
+influence of Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points
+to a condition far removed from religious indifference. Indeed
+the early centuries of the empire were a period of restless
+search after something that should satisfy the emotional
+needs of the masses.</p>
+
+<p>But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened.
+A small vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga,
+the starting point for the overland route to Europe. Among<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span>
+the passengers were two men not overburdened with luggage.</p>
+
+<p>Their names were Paul and Barnabas.</p>
+
+<p>They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport
+and was well versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.</p>
+
+<p>It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity had set out to conquer the world.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The rapid conquest of the western world by the
+Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the
+Christian ideas must have been of divine origin.
+It is not my business to debate this point, but I would
+suggest that the villainous conditions under which the majority
+of the Romans were forced to live had as much to
+do with the success of the earliest missionaries as the sound
+common sense of their message.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the
+world of the soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers
+and scientists, fortunate folks who lived in delightful
+and enlightened ease on the slopes of the Lateran
+Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or
+somewhere along the bay of Naples.</p>
+
+<p>But they were only part of the story.</p>
+
+<p>Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little
+enough evidence of that plentiful prosperity which made
+the poets rave about the Millennium and inspired orators
+to compare Octavian to Jupiter.</p>
+
+<p>There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and
+reeking tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom
+life was merely an uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat
+and pain. To those men and women, the wonderful tale
+of a simple carpenter in a little village beyond the sea, who
+had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own hands,
+who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>
+had been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant
+something very real and tangible. Yes, they had all of
+them heard of Mithras and Isis and Astarte. But these
+Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and thousands
+of years ago and what people knew about them they only
+knew by hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds
+and thousands of years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the
+anointed, as the Greek missionaries called him, had been
+on this earth only a short time ago. Many a man then
+alive might have known him, might have listened to him,
+if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign
+of the Emperor Tiberius.</p>
+
+<p>And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit
+peddler from the next street, who in a little dark garden
+on the Appian Way had spoken with a certain Peter, a
+fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had actually
+been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon
+when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the
+soldiers of the Roman governor.</p>
+
+<p>We should remember this when we try to understand the
+sudden popular appeal of this new faith.</p>
+
+<p>It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling
+of intimacy and near-by-ness which gave Christianity
+such a tremendous advantage over all other creeds. That
+and the love which Jesus had so incessantly expressed for
+the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which
+radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had
+put it into the exact terms used by his followers was of very
+slight importance. The slaves had ears to hear and they
+understood. And trembling before the high promise of a
+glorious future, they for the first time in their lives beheld
+the rays of a new hope.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span></p>
+
+<p>At last the words had been spoken that were to set them
+free.</p>
+
+<p>No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing
+in the sight of the great of this world.</p>
+
+<p>On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a
+loving Father.</p>
+
+<p>They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.</p>
+
+<p>They were to partake of joys withheld from many of
+those proud masters who even then dwelled behind the high
+walls of their Samnian villas.</p>
+
+<p>For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity
+was the first concrete religious system which gave
+the average man a chance.</p>
+
+<p>Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience
+of the soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and
+I have tried to explain how, in a world full of the dry-rot
+of slavery, the good tidings must spread with the speed
+and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except
+upon rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual
+adventures of private citizens, be they free or in bondage.
+When these humble creatures have been neatly organized
+into nations, guilds, churches, armies, brotherhoods and federations;
+when they have begun to obey a single directing
+head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay
+taxes and can be forced into armies for the purpose of
+national conquest, then at last they begin to attract the
+attention of our chroniclers and are given serious attention.
+Hence we know a great deal about the early Church, but
+exceedingly little about the people who were the true founders
+of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early
+development of Christianity is one of the most interesting
+episodes in all history.</p>
+
+<p>The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span>
+ancient empire was really a combination of two conflicting
+interests. On the one side it stood forth as the champion
+of those all-embracing ideals of love and charity which the
+Master himself had taught. But on the other side it found
+itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism
+which since the beginning of time had set the
+compatriots of Jesus apart from the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with
+Judaean intolerance and as a result it established a reign
+of terror over the minds of men which was as efficient as it
+was illogical.</p>
+
+<p>To understand how this could have happened, we must
+go back once more to the days of Paul and to the first fifty
+years after the death of Christ, and we must firmly grasp
+the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform movement
+within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely
+nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened
+the rulers of the Jewish state and no one else.</p>
+
+<p>The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when
+Jesus lived had understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally
+they had feared the ultimate consequences of an agitation
+which boldly threatened to question a spiritual monopoly
+which was based upon nothing more substantial than
+brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they
+had been forced to act in a spirit of panic and had sent
+their enemy to the gallows before the Roman authorities
+had had time to intervene and deprive them of their victim.</p>
+
+<p>What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible
+to say. He was killed long before he was able to organize
+his disciples into a special sect nor did he leave a single
+word of writing from which his followers could conclude
+what he wanted them to do.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in
+disguise.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection
+of ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free
+to follow the spirit of their master’s words rather than the
+letter of his law. Had they been bound by a book, they
+would very likely have devoted all their energies to a theological
+discussion upon the ever enticing subject of commas
+and semi-colons.</p>
+
+<p>In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional
+scholars could have possibly shown the slightest interest in
+the new faith and Christianity would have gone the way of
+so many other sects which begin with elaborate written programs
+and end when the police are called upon to throw the
+haggling theologians into the street.</p>
+
+<p>At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize
+what tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman
+Empire, it is a matter of surprise that the authorities took
+practically no steps to quell a movement which was fully as
+dangerous to the safety of the state as an invasion by Huns
+or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this eastern
+prophet had caused great excitement among their house
+slaves, that the women were forever telling each other about
+the imminent reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that
+quite a number of old men had solemnly predicted the impending
+destruction of this world by a ball of fire.</p>
+
+<p>But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had
+gone into hysterics about some new religious hero. Most
+likely it would not be the last time, either. Meanwhile the
+police would see to it that these poor, frenzied fanatics did
+not disturb the peace of the realm.</p>
+
+<p>And that was that.</p>
+
+<p>The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>
+The followers of the new mystery went about their business
+in a most exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow
+the government. At first, several slaves had expected
+that the common fatherhood of God and the common brotherhood
+of man would imply a cessation of the old relation between
+master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had
+hastened to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was
+an invisible and intangible kingdom of the soul and that
+people on this earth had better take things as they found
+them, in expectation of the final reward which awaited them
+in Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of
+matrimony as established by the harsh laws of Rome, had
+rushed to the conclusion that Christianity was synonymous
+with emancipation and full equality of rights between men
+and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a
+number of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to
+refrain from all those extremes which would make their
+church suspect in the eyes of the more conservative pagans
+and had persuaded them to continue in that state of semi-slavery
+which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and
+Eve had been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most
+commendable respect for the law and as far as the authorities
+were concerned, the Christian missionaries could therefore
+come and go at will and preach as best suited their own
+individual tastes and preferences.</p>
+
+<p>But as has happened so often in history, the masses had
+shown themselves less tolerant than their rulers. Just because
+people are poor it does not necessarily follow that
+they are high-minded citizens who could be prosperous and
+happy if their conscience would only permit them to make
+those compromises which are held to be necessary for the
+accumulation of wealth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span></p>
+
+<p>And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by
+free meals and free prize-fights, was no exception to this
+rule. At first it derived a great deal of rough pleasure from
+those sober-faced groups of men and women who with rapt
+attention listened to the weird stories about a God who had
+ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal,
+and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for
+the hoodlums who pelted their gatherings with stones and
+dirt.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a
+detached view of this new development.</p>
+
+<p>The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted
+of certain solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified
+occasions and paid for in cash. This money went toward
+the support of the church officers. When thousands of people
+began to desert the old shrines and went to another
+church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests
+were faced by a very serious reduction in their salary. This
+of course did not please them at all, and soon they were loud
+in their abuse of the godless heretics who turned their backs
+upon the Gods of their fathers and burned incense to the
+memory of a foreign prophet.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another class of people in the city who had
+even better reason to hate the Christians. Those were the
+fakirs, who as Indian Yogis and Pooughies and hierophants
+of the great and only mysteries of Isis and Ishtar and
+Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and
+easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle
+classes. If the Christians had set up a rival establishment
+and had charged a handsome price for their own particular
+revelations, the guild of spook-doctors and palmists and necromancers
+would have had no reason for complaint. Business
+was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>
+mind if a bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a
+plague upon their silly notions!—refused to take
+any reward. Yea, they even gave away what they had, fed
+the hungry and shared their own roof with the homeless.
+And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and
+they never could have done this unless they were possessed
+of certain hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no
+one thus far had been able to discover.</p>
+
+<p>Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers.
+It was the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of
+thousands of disinherited peasants from all parts of the
+empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious laws that rule
+the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those who
+behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who
+for no apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and
+restraint. The hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink
+and (occasionally) will pay for one is a fine neighbor and a
+good fellow. But the man who holds himself aloof and refuses
+to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum, who
+does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being
+dragged through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a
+spoil-sport and an enemy of the community at large.</p>
+
+<p>When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that
+part of Rome inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was
+set for the first organized attacks upon the Christians.</p>
+
+<p>At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of
+drunken conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire
+that he might get rid of the slums and rebuild the city according
+to his own plans. The crowd, however, knew better.
+It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who were forever
+telling each other about the happy day when large balls
+of fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the
+wicked would go up in flames.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span></p>
+
+<p>Once this story had been successfully started, others followed
+in rapid succession. One old woman had heard the
+Christians talk with the dead. Another knew that they stole
+little children and cut their throats and smeared their blood
+upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course, no one
+had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous
+practices, but that was only because they were so terribly
+clever and had bribed the police. But now at last they had
+been caught red-handed and they would be made to suffer
+for their vile deeds.</p>
+
+<p>Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this
+occasion, we know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems,
+were among the victims for thereafter their names are never
+heard again.</p>
+
+<p>That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished
+nothing, it is needless to state. The noble dignity with which
+the martyrs accepted their fate was the best possible propaganda
+for the new ideas and for every Christian who perished,
+there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager to take his
+place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act
+of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year
+68), the Christians returned to their old haunts and everything
+was as it had been before.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the Roman authorities were making a great
+discovery. They began to suspect that a Christian was not
+exactly the same thing as a Jew.</p>
+
+<p>We can hardly blame them for having committed this
+error. The historical researches of the last hundred years
+have made it increasingly clear that the Synagogue was the
+clearing-house through which the new faith was passed on
+to the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had
+always been most careful in observing the ancient laws of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>
+fathers and that he had addressed himself almost exclusively
+to Jewish audiences. Once, and then only for a short time,
+had he left his native country, but the task which he had
+set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his fellow-Jews.
+Nor was there anything in what he had ever said
+which could have given the average Roman the impression
+that there was a deliberate difference between Christianity
+and Judaism.</p>
+
+<p>What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had
+clearly seen the terrible abuses which had entered the church
+of his fathers. He had loudly and sometimes successfully
+protested against them. But he had fought his battles for
+reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned upon
+him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some
+one had mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he
+would have rejected the idea as preposterous. But like
+many a reformer before his day and after, he had gradually
+been forced into a position where compromise was no longer
+possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a
+fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of
+reform, who were deeply perplexed when they suddenly
+found themselves at the head of a brand new party “outside”
+the organization to which they belonged, whereas they were
+merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”</p>
+
+<p>For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity
+(to use the name long before it had been coined) was the
+religion of a small Jewish sect which had a few adherents
+in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and Galilee and
+which had never been heard of outside of the province of
+Syria.</p>
+
+<p>It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen
+of Jewish descent, who had first recognized the possibilities
+of the new doctrine as a religion for all the world. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span>
+story of his suffering tells us how bitterly the Jewish Christians
+had been opposed to the idea of a universal religion
+instead of a purely national denomination, membership to
+which should only be open to people of their own race.
+They had hated the man who dared preach salvation to
+Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly that on his last visit
+to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered the fate
+of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the
+fury of his enraged compatriots.</p>
+
+<p>But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman
+soldiers to protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal
+town from where he could be shipped to Rome for that
+famous trial which never took place.</p>
+
+<p>A few years after his death, that which he had so often
+feared during his lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold
+actually occurred.</p>
+
+<p>Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place
+of the temple of Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor
+of Jupiter. The name of the city was changed to Aelia
+Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of the Roman
+province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they
+were either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed
+to live within several miles of the ruins on pain of death.</p>
+
+<p>It was the final destruction of their holy city which had
+been so disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several
+centuries afterwards, in the little villages of the Judaean
+hinterland colonies might have been found of strange people
+who called themselves “poor men” and who waited with great
+patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end of the
+world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the
+old Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time
+to time we hear them mentioned in books written during the
+fifth and sixth centuries. Far away from civilization, they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>
+developed certain strange doctrines of their own in which
+hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After
+the seventh century however we no longer find any trace of
+these so-called Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious
+Mohammedans had killed them all. And, anyway, if they
+had managed to exist a few hundred years longer, they
+would not have been able to avert the inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into
+one large political union, had made the world ready for the
+idea of a universal religion. Christianity, because it was
+both simple and practical and full of a direct appeal, was
+predestined to succeed where Judaism and Mithraism and
+all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail.
+But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of
+certain rather unpleasant characteristics which only too
+clearly betrayed its origin.</p>
+
+<p>The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas
+from Asia to Europe had carried a message of hope and
+mercy.</p>
+
+<p>But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.</p>
+
+<p>He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.</p>
+
+<p>But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.</p>
+
+<p>And his name was Religious Intolerance.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The early church was a very simple organization.
+As soon as it became apparent that the end of the
+world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was
+not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and
+that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of
+tears for a good long time, the need was felt for a more or
+less definite form of government.</p>
+
+<p>Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews)
+had come together in the synagogue. When the rift had
+occurred between the Jews and the Gentiles, the latter had
+betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house and if none
+could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the
+curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone
+quarry.</p>
+
+<p>At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath,
+but when bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the
+Gentile Christians increased, the latter began to drop the
+habit of keeping the Sabbath-day and preferred to meet on
+Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had taken place.</p>
+
+<p>These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to
+the popular as well as to the emotional character of the entire
+movement. There were no set speeches or sermons. There
+were no preachers. Both men and women, whenever they felt
+themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in meeting
+to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes,
+if we are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>
+brethren, “speaking with tongues,” had filled the heart of
+the great apostle with apprehension for the future. For
+most of them were simple folk without much education. No
+one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations
+but very often they got so excited that they raved like maniacs
+and while a church may survive persecution, it is helpless
+against ridicule. Hence the efforts of Paul and Peter and
+their successors to bring some semblance of order into this
+chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>At first these efforts met with little success. A regular
+program seemed in direct contradiction to the democratic
+nature of the Christian faith. In the end, however, practical
+considerations supervened and the meetings became subject
+to a definite ritual.</p>
+
+<p>They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to
+placate the Jewish Christians who might be present). Then
+the congregation united in a song of praise of more recent
+composition for the benefit of the Roman and the Greek
+worshipers.</p>
+
+<p>The only prescribed form of oration was the famous
+prayer in which Jesus had summed up his entire philosophy
+of life. The preaching, however, for several centuries remained
+entirely spontaneous and the sermons were delivered
+only by those who felt that they had something to say.</p>
+
+<p>But when the number of those gatherings increased, when
+the police, forever on the guard against secret societies,
+began to make inquiries, it was necessary that certain men
+be elected to represent the Christians in their dealings with
+the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken highly of
+the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities
+which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny
+vessels which were tossed upon a turbulent sea and were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>
+very much in need of a clever pilot if they were to survive
+the fury of the angry ocean.</p>
+
+<p>And so the faithful came together once more and elected
+deacons and deaconesses, pious men and women who were
+the “servants” of the community, who took care of the sick
+and the poor (an object of great concern to the early Christians)
+and who looked after the property of the community
+and took care of all the small daily chores.</p>
+
+<p>Still later when the church continued to grow in membership
+and the business of administration had become too intricate
+for mere amateurs, it was entrusted to a small group
+of “elders.” These were known by their Greek name of
+Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”</p>
+
+<p>After a number of years, when every village or city possessed
+a Christian church of its own, the need was felt for
+a common policy. Then an “overseer” (an Episkopos or
+Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire district and
+direct its dealings with the Roman government.</p>
+
+<p>Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the
+empire, and those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem
+and Carthage and Rome and Alexandria and Athens
+were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who were almost
+as important as the civil and military governors of their
+provinces.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over
+that part of the world where Jesus had lived and suffered
+and died enjoyed the greatest respect. But after Jerusalem
+had been destroyed and the generation which had expected
+the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared
+from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in
+his ruined palace saw himself deprived of his former prestige.</p>
+
+<p>And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was
+taken by the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>
+civilized world and who guarded the sites where Peter and
+Paul, the great apostles of the west, had suffered their
+martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa,
+the common expression of love and respect bestowed upon
+members of the clergy. In the course of centuries, the title
+of Papa however became almost exclusively associated in
+people’s minds with the particular “Father” who was the
+head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the
+Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of
+Rome, and not by any chance the Bishop of Constantinople
+or the Bishop of Carthage. This was an entirely normal
+development. When we read in our newspaper about “the
+President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.”
+We know that the head of our government is meant and
+not the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President
+of Harvard University or the President of the League
+of Nations.</p>
+
+<p>The first time the name occurred officially in a document
+was in the year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital
+of a highly successful empire and the power of the bishops
+was entirely overshadowed by that of the emperors. But
+during the next three hundred years, under the constant
+menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors
+of Caesar began to look for a new home that would
+offer them greater safety. This they found in a city in a
+different part of their domains. It was called Byzantium,
+after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said
+to have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated
+on the straits which separated Europe from Asia and
+dominating the trade route between the Black Sea and the
+Mediterranean, it controlled several important monopolies
+and was of such great commercial importance that already<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>
+Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this
+rich fortress.</p>
+
+<p>Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of
+Alexander and after having been for a short while part of
+Macedonia it had finally been incorporated into the Roman
+Empire.</p>
+
+<p>And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its
+Golden Horn filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it
+was chosen to become the center of the empire.</p>
+
+<p>The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and
+Vandals and Heaven knows what other sort of barbarians,
+felt that the end of the world had come when the imperial
+palaces stood empty for years at a time; when one department
+of state after another was removed to the shores of the
+Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were
+asked to obey laws made a thousand miles away.</p>
+
+<p>But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does
+not blow some one good. With the emperors gone, the
+bishops remained behind as the most important dignitaries
+of the town, the only visible and tangible successors to the
+glory of the imperial throne.</p>
+
+<p>And what excellent use they made of their new independence!
+They were shrewd politicians, for the prestige and
+the influence of their office had attracted the best brains of
+all Italy. They felt themselves to be the representatives of
+certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a hurry, but
+proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared
+to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of
+immediate necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and
+failed.</p>
+
+<p>But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose,
+who moved consistently and persistently towards one
+goal. In all they did and said and thought they were guided<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>
+by the desire to increase the glory of God and the strength
+and power of the organization which represented the divine
+will on earth.</p>
+
+<p>How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries
+was to show.</p>
+
+<p>While everything else perished in the deluge of savage
+tribes which hurled itself across the European continent,
+while the walls of the empire, one after the other, came
+crumbling down, while a thousand institutions as old as the
+plains of Babylon were swept away like so much useless
+rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of
+ages, but more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought
+at a terrible cost.</p>
+
+<p>For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed
+to end in a palace. It had been started as a protest against
+a form of government in which the priest as the self-appointed
+intermediary between the deity and mankind had
+insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary
+human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less
+than a hundred years it developed into a new supertheocracy,
+compared to which the old Jewish state had been a
+mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and carefree
+citizens.</p>
+
+<p>And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable,
+as I shall now try to show you.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to
+the Coliseum and within those wind-swept walls they are
+shown the hallowed ground where thousands of Christian
+martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.</p>
+
+<p>But while it is true that upon several occasions there were
+persecutions of the adherents of the new faith, these had
+very little to do with religious intolerance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span></p>
+
+<p>They were purely political.</p>
+
+<p>The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed
+the greatest possible freedom.</p>
+
+<p>But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious
+objector, who bragged of his pacifism even when
+the country was threatened with foreign invasion and openly
+defied the laws of the land upon every suitable and unsuitable
+occasion, such a Christian was considered an enemy of
+the state and was treated as such.</p>
+
+<p>That he acted according to his most sacred convictions
+did not make the slightest impression upon the mind of the
+average police judge. And when he tried to explain the
+exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary looked puzzled
+and was entirely unable to follow him.</p>
+
+<p>A Roman police judge after all was only human. When
+he suddenly found himself called upon to try people who
+made an issue of what seemed to him a very trivial matter, he
+simply did not know what to do. Long experience had
+taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies.
+Besides he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing
+public servants to use “tact” in their dealings with the new
+sect. Hence he used tact and argued. But as the whole
+dispute boiled down to a question of principles, very little
+was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.</p>
+
+<p>In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of
+surrendering the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete
+and unqualified vindication of the supreme power of
+the state. But prison and torture meant nothing to people
+who firmly believed that life did not begin until after death
+and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to
+leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out
+between the authorities and their Christian subjects was long<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span>
+and painful. We possess very few authentic figures upon
+the total number of victims. According to Origen, the famous
+church father of the third century, several of whose own
+relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one of the
+persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for
+their convictions could easily be enumerated.”</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early
+saints we find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of
+bloodshed that we begin to wonder how a religion exposed
+to these constant and murderous persecutions could ever
+have survived at all.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call
+me a prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to
+myself and let my readers draw their own conclusions. By
+studying the lives of the Emperors Decius (249-251) and
+Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a fairly accurate
+opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance
+during the worst era of persecution.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and
+liberal minded a ruler as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself
+unable to handle the problem of his Christian subjects successfully,
+they will derive some idea about the difficulties
+which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of the
+empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful
+to their oath of office or execute those of their relatives
+and neighbors who could not or would not obey those
+few and very simple ordinances upon which the imperial
+government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality
+towards their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily
+extending the sphere of their influence.</p>
+
+<p>Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the
+request of the Christian members of the Roman senate who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>
+complained that it hurt their feelings to gather in the
+shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the removal of the
+statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years
+had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators
+protested. This did very little good and only caused
+a number of them to be sent into exile.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted
+patriot of great personal distinction, wrote his famous letter
+in which he tried to suggest a compromise.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian
+neighbors not live in peace and harmony? We look up
+to the same stars, we are fellow-passengers on the same
+planet and dwell beneath the same sky. What matters it
+along which road each individual endeavors to find the ultimate
+truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there
+should be only one path leading to an answer.”</p>
+
+<p>He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the
+danger which threatened the old Roman tradition of a
+broadminded religious policy. Simultaneously with the removal
+of the statue of Victory in Rome a violent quarrel
+had broken out between two contending factions of the Christians
+who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute
+gave rise to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance
+to which the world had ever listened. Themistius the
+philosopher, who was the author, had remained faithful to
+the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor Valens took
+sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox
+Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of
+his true duty.</p>
+
+<p>“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can
+hope to exercise any authority. That is the domain of the
+virtues and especially that of the religious beliefs of individuals.
+Compulsion within that field causes hypocrisy and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>
+conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence it is much
+better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only by
+toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance
+is a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated
+his desire for a number of different religions. And
+God alone can judge the methods by which humanity aspires
+to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery. God
+delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him.
+He likes the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others,
+the Egyptians again others.”</p>
+
+<p>Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was
+dead and all efforts to set back the clock of history were
+doomed beforehand. Life means progress, and progress
+means suffering. The old order of society was rapidly disintegrating.
+The army was a mutinous mob of foreign
+mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England
+and the other outlying districts had long since been surrendered
+to the barbarians.</p>
+
+<p>When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant
+young men who in centuries past had entered the service of
+the state found themselves deprived of all but one chance for
+advancement. That was a career in the Church. As Christian
+archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise the
+power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors,
+they could be certain of a fairly large public if they were
+willing to devote themselves exclusively to theological subjects.
+As Christian diplomats, they could be sure of rapid
+promotion if they were willing to represent the bishop of
+Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake
+the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous
+chieftain in the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And
+finally, as Christian financiers, they could hope to make fortunes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>
+administering those rapidly increasing estates which
+had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest
+landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.</p>
+
+<p>We have seen something of the same nature during the
+last five years. Up to the year 1914 the young men of
+Europe who were ambitious and did not depend upon manual
+labor for their support almost invariably entered the
+service of the state. They became officers of the different
+imperial and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher
+judicial positions, administered the finances or spent years
+in the colonies as governors or military commanders. They
+did not expect to grow very rich, but the social prestige of
+the offices which they held was very great and by the application
+of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty,
+they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable
+old age.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of
+the old feudal fabric of society. The lower classes took hold
+of the government. Some few among the former officials
+were too old to change the habits of a lifetime. They
+pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however,
+surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had
+been educated to regard business as a low profession, not
+worthy of their attention. Perhaps business was a low
+profession, but they had to choose between an office and the
+poor house. The number of people who will go hungry for
+the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And
+so within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most
+of the former officers and state officials doing the sort of work
+which they would not have touched ten years ago and doing
+it not unwillingly. Besides, as most of them belonged to
+families which for generations had been trained in executive
+work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>
+have found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new
+careers and are today a great deal happier and decidedly
+more prosperous than they had ever expected to be.</p>
+
+<p>What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries
+ago.</p>
+
+<p>It may not always have been easy for young men who
+traced their ancestry back to Hercules or to Romulus or to
+the heroes of the Trojan war to take orders from a simple
+cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple cleric who
+was the son of a slave had something to give which the young
+men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus
+and the heroes of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly.
+And therefore if they were both bright fellows (as they well
+may have been) they soon learned to appreciate the other
+fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully. For it is
+one of the other strange laws of history that the more things
+appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.</p>
+
+<p>Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that
+there shall be one small group of clever men and women who
+do the ruling and a much larger group of not-quite-so-bright
+men and women who shall do the obeying. The stakes for
+which these two groups play are at different periods known
+by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and
+Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance
+on the other. They have been called Empire and Church and
+Knighthood and Monarchy and Democracy and Slavery and
+Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious law which
+governs human development works the same in Moscow as
+it does in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound
+to neither time nor place. It has often manifested itself
+under strange forms and disguises. More than once it has
+worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its love for
+humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>
+about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath
+such pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and
+continues to hide the grim truth of that primeval law which
+insists that the first duty of man is to keep alive. People
+who resent the fact that they were born in a world of mammals
+are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us
+“materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they
+have always regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they
+are shocked to discover that it is a science which obeys the
+same iron rules which govern the rest of the universe. They
+might as well fight against the habits of parallel lines or the
+results of the tables of multiplication.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>For then and only then can history some day be turned
+into something that shall have a practical value to the human
+race and cease to be the ally and confederate of those who
+profit by racial prejudice, tribal intolerance and the ignorance
+of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.</p>
+
+<p>And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him
+look for the proof in the chronicles of those centuries of
+which I was writing a few pages back.</p>
+
+<p>Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church
+during the first four centuries.</p>
+
+<p>Almost without exception he will find that they came from
+the ranks of the old Pagan society, that they had been
+trained in the schools of the Greek philosophers and had only
+drifted into the Church afterwards, when they had been
+obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were
+attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ
+with heart and soul. But the great majority changed its
+allegiance from a worldly master to a Heavenly ruler because
+the chances for advancement with the latter were
+infinitely greater.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Church from her side, always very wise and very
+understanding, did not look too closely into the motives
+which had impelled many of her new disciples to take this
+sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to be all
+things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical
+and worldly existence were given a chance to make good
+in the field of politics and economics. While those of a
+different temperament, who took their faith more emotionally,
+were offered every possible opportunity to escape from
+the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence upon
+the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of
+personal holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal
+happiness of their souls.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life
+of devotion and contemplation.</p>
+
+<p>The Church during the first centuries of her existence
+had been merely a loose spiritual bond between humble folks
+who dwelled far away from the mansions of the mighty. But
+when the Church succeeded the empire as ruler of the world,
+and became a strong political organization with vast real-estate
+holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were
+less opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men
+and women began to harken back to the “good old days”
+when all true Christians had spent their waking hours in
+works of charity and in prayer. That they might again be
+happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been
+a natural development of the times.</p>
+
+<p>This movement for a monastic form of life which was to
+exercise such an enormous influence upon the political and
+economic development of the next thousand years and which
+was to give the Church a devoted group of very useful
+shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was
+of Oriental origin.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span></p>
+
+<p>This need not surprise us.</p>
+
+<p>In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the
+Mediterranean, civilization was very, very old and the human
+race was tired to the point of exhaustion. In Egypt alone,
+ten different and separate cycles of culture had succeeded
+each other since the first settlers had occupied the valley of
+the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between
+the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter
+futility of all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands
+of bygone temples and palaces. The younger races of
+Europe might accept Christianity as an eager promise of
+life, a constant appeal to their newly regained energy and
+enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious
+experiences in a different mood.</p>
+
+<p>To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from
+the curse of being alive. And in anticipation of the joyful
+hour of death, they escaped from the charnel-house of their
+own memories and they fled into the desert that they might
+be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore look
+upon the reality of existence.</p>
+
+<p>For some curious reason the business of reform always
+seems to have had a particular appeal to soldiers. They,
+more than all other people, have come into direct contact
+with the cruelty and the horrors of civilization. Furthermore
+they have learned that nothing can be accomplished
+without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors to
+fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the
+army of the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first
+gathered the spiritual stragglers into a single organization
+had been a private in the army of the Emperor Constantine.
+His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian. When
+he got through with his military service, he joined a small
+group of hermits who under the leadership of a certain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span>
+Anthony, who hailed from his own country, had left the
+cities and were living peacefully among the jackals of the
+desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead to all sorts
+of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very
+regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend
+their days on the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a
+deserted grave (thereby giving cause for great mirth to
+the pagans and serious reason for grief to the true believers)
+Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a more
+practical basis and in this way he became the founder of
+the first religious order. From that day on (the middle of
+the fourth century) hermits living together in small groups
+obeyed one single commander who was known as the “superior
+general” and who in turn appointed the abbots who were
+responsible for the different monasteries which they held
+as so many fortresses of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been
+carried from Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop
+Athanasius and thousands of people had availed themselves
+of this opportunity to flee the world, its wickedness and its
+too insistent creditors.</p>
+
+<p>The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the
+people made it necessary that the original plans of the
+founder be slightly changed. Hunger and cold were not
+quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in the valley of
+the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was
+disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and
+squalor which seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental
+ideal of holiness.</p>
+
+<p>“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves,
+“is to become of those good works upon which the
+early Church has laid so much stress? Are the widows and
+the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span>
+self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who
+live in the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away
+from everywhere?”</p>
+
+<p>The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification
+of the monastic institution along more reasonable lines, and
+credit for this innovation goes to a native of the town of
+Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His name was Benedict
+and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His parents
+had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had
+filled his Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the
+village of Subiaco in the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted
+ruins of an old country palace that once upon a time had
+belonged to the Emperor Nero.</p>
+
+<p>There he had lived for three years in complete solitude.
+Then the fame of his great virtue began to spread throughout
+the countryside and the number of those who wished to
+be near him was soon so great that he had enough recruits
+for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.</p>
+
+<p>He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the
+lawgiver of European monasticism. First of all he drew
+up a constitution. In every detail it showed the influence
+of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to obey
+his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those
+hours which they did not devote to prayer and meditation
+were to be filled with work in the fields. If they were too
+old for farm work, they were expected to teach the young
+how to become good Christians and useful citizens and so
+well did they acquit themselves of this task that the Benedictine
+monasteries for almost a thousand years had a
+monopoly of education and were allowed to train most of
+the young men of exceptional ability during the greater part
+of the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>In return for their labors, the monks were decently<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span>
+clothed, received a sufficient amount of eatable food and
+were given a bed upon which they could sleep the two or
+three hours of each day that were not devoted to work or
+to prayer.</p>
+
+<p>But most important, from an historical point of view, was
+the fact that the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely
+run away from this world and their obligations to prepare
+their souls for the hereafter. They became the servants of
+God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity
+by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore
+they were expected to take a direct and active part in
+spreading the power and the glory of the kingdom of God.</p>
+
+<p>The first elementary missionary work among the heathen
+of Europe had already been done. But lest the good accomplished
+by the apostles come to naught, the labors of the individual
+preachers must be followed up by the organized effort
+of permanent settlers and administrators. The monks
+now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book
+into the wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia
+and far-away Iceland. They plowed and they harvested and
+they preached and they taught school and brought unto
+those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a civilization
+which most people only knew by hearsay.</p>
+
+<p>In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the
+entire Church, make use of all the manifold forces of the
+human spirit.</p>
+
+<p>The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of
+an opportunity to distinguish himself as the dreamer who
+found happiness in the silence of the woods. There was
+no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste. And
+the result was such an increase of power that soon neither
+emperor nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>
+humble attention to the wishes of those of his subjects
+who confessed themselves the followers of the Christ.</p>
+
+<p>The way in which the final victory was gained is not
+without interest. For it shows that the triumph of Christianity
+was due to practical causes and was not (as is sometimes
+believed) the result of a sudden and overwhelming
+outburst of religious ardor.</p>
+
+<p>The last great persecution of the Christians took place
+under the Emperor Diocletian.</p>
+
+<p>Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of
+the worst among those many potentates who ruled Europe
+by the grace of their body-guards. But he suffered from
+a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who
+are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely
+ignorant upon the subject of elementary economics.</p>
+
+<p>He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly
+going to pieces. Having spent all his life in the army, he
+believed the weak point lay in the organization of the
+Roman military system, which entrusted the defenses of the
+outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had gradually
+lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics,
+selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom
+they were supposed to keep at a safe distance from the
+frontiers.</p>
+
+<p>It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable
+system. He therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating
+a new field army, composed of young and agile men who at
+a few weeks’ notice could be marched to any particular part
+of the empire that was threatened with an invasion.</p>
+
+<p>This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a
+military nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money
+had to be produced in the form of taxes by the people in the
+interior of the country. As was to be expected, they raised<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>
+a great hue and cry and claimed that they could not pay
+another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor
+answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his
+tax-gatherers certain powers thus far only possessed by the
+hangman. But all to no avail. For the subjects, rather
+than work at a regular trade which assured them a deficit at
+the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house and home and
+family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos.
+His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures
+and he solved the difficulty by a decree which shows how
+completely the old Roman Republic had degenerated into
+an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of his pen he made all
+government offices and all forms of handicraft and commerce
+hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers
+were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or
+not. The sons of bakers must themselves become bakers,
+although they might have greater aptitude for music or
+pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed to a
+life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they
+rowed across the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although
+technically they continued to be freemen, were constrained
+to live and die on the same piece of soil on which
+they had been born and were henceforth nothing but a very
+ordinary variety of slaves.</p>
+
+<p>To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence
+in his own ability either could or would tolerate the continued
+existence of a relatively small number of people who only
+obeyed such parts of his regulations and edicts as pleased
+them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for his
+harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember
+that he was fighting with his back against the wall and that
+he had good cause to suspect the loyalty of several million
+of his subjects who profited by the measures he had taken<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span>
+for their protection but refused to carry their share of the
+common burden.</p>
+
+<p>You will remember that the earliest Christians had not
+taken the trouble to write anything down. They expected
+the world to come to an end at almost any moment. Therefore
+why waste time and money upon literary efforts which
+in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from
+Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and
+when the story of Christ (after a hundred years of patient
+waiting) was beginning to be repeated with such strange
+additions and variations that a true disciple hardly knew
+what to believe and what not, the need was felt for some
+authentic book upon the subject and a number of short
+biographies of Jesus and such of the original letters of the
+apostles as had been preserved were combined into one large
+volume which was called the New Testament.</p>
+
+<p>This book contained among others a chapter called the
+Book of Revelations and therein were to be found certain
+references and certain prophecies about and anent a city
+built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built on seven
+hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days
+of Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this
+curious chapter carefully called the city of his abomination
+Babylon. But it took no great degree of perspicacity on the
+part of the imperial magistrate to understand what was
+meant when he read these pleasant references to the “Mother
+of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town
+that was drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs,
+foredoomed to become the habitation of all devils, the home
+of every foul spirit, the cage of every unclean and hateful
+bird, and more expressions of a similar and slightly uncomplimentary
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>Such sentences might have been explained away as the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>
+ravings of a poor fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he
+thought of his many friends who had been killed during the
+last fifty years. But they were part of the solemn services
+of the Church. Week after week they were repeated in
+those places where the Christians came together and it was
+no more than natural that outsiders should think that they
+represented the true sentiments of all Christians towards the
+mighty city on the Tiber. I do not mean to imply that the
+Christians may not have had excellent reason to feel the
+way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because
+he failed to share their enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>But that was not all.</p>
+
+<p>The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with
+an expression which the world thus far had never heard.
+That was the word “heretics.” Originally the name “heretic”
+was given only to those people who had “chosen” to
+believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.” But
+gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had
+chosen to believe certain doctrines which were not held
+“correct” or “sound” or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly
+established authorities of the Church and which therefore,
+to use the language of the Apostles, were “heretical, unsound,
+false and eternally wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were
+technically free from the charge of heresy because they had
+remained outside of the fold of the Church and therefore
+could not, strictly speaking, be held to account for their
+private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter the imperial
+pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that
+“heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness,
+lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder,
+sedition and drunkenness” and a few other things which
+common decency prevents me from repeating on this page.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span></p>
+
+<p>All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction
+and misunderstanding led to persecution and once more
+Roman jails were filled with Christian prisoners and Roman
+executioners added to the number of Christian martyrs and
+a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was accomplished
+and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his
+home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from
+the business of ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the
+even more exciting pastime of raising great big cabbages
+in his back yard.</p>
+
+<p>His successor did not continue the policy of repression.
+On the contrary, since he could not hope to eradicate the
+Christian evil by force, he decided to make the best of a
+bad bargain and gain the good will of his enemies by offering
+them some special favors.</p>
+
+<p>This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having
+been the first to “recognize” the Christian church officially
+belongs to a man by the name of Constantine.</p>
+
+<p>Some day we shall possess an International Board of
+Revisioning Historians before whom all emperors, kings,
+pontiffs, presidents and mayors who now enjoy the title of
+the “great” shall have to submit their claims for this specific
+qualification. One of the candidates who will have to be
+watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal
+is the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.</p>
+
+<p>This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle
+field of Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the
+shores of the Bosphorus, was among other things the murderer
+of his wife, the murderer of his brother-in-law, the
+murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the executioner
+of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.
+Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a
+moment of panic just before he marched against his most<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>
+dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had made a bold bid for
+Christian support, he gained great fame as the “second
+Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the
+Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and
+died a barbarian who had outwardly accepted Christianity,
+yet until the end of his days tried to read the riddle of the
+future from the steaming entrails of sacrificial sheep, all
+this was most considerately overlooked in view of the famous
+Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto
+his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess
+their private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place
+without fear of molestation.”</p>
+
+<p>For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the
+fourth century, as I have repeatedly stated before, were
+practical politicians and when they had finally forced the
+Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree, they elevated
+Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity
+of the official church of the state. But they knew how and
+in what manner this had been accomplished and the successors
+of Constantine knew it, and although they tried to
+cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks the arrangement
+never quite lost its original character.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the
+Patriarch unto Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all
+the enemies of my church and in return I will give thee
+Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who disagree
+with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting
+down thine enemies.”</p>
+
+<p>There have been other bargains during the history of
+the last twenty centuries.</p>
+
+<p>But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which
+Christianity came to power.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V<br>
+<span class="smaller">IMPRISONMENT</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Just before the curtain rings down for the last time
+upon the ancient world, a figure crosses the stage
+which had deserved a better fate than an untimely
+death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”</p>
+
+<p>The Emperor Julian, to whom I refer, was a nephew of
+Constantine the Great and was born in the new capital of
+the empire in the year 331. In 337 his famous uncle died.
+At once his three sons fell upon their common heritage and
+upon each other with the fury of famished wolves.</p>
+
+<p>To rid themselves of all those who might possibly lay
+claim to part of the spoils, they ordered that those of their
+relatives who lived in or near the city be murdered. Julian’s
+father was one of the victims. His mother had died a few
+years after his birth. In this way, at the age of six, the boy
+was left an orphan. An older half-brother, an invalid,
+shared his loneliness and his lessons. These consisted mostly
+of lectures upon the advantages of the Christian faith, given
+by a kindly but uninspired old bishop by the name of
+Eusebius.</p>
+
+<p>But when the children grew older, it was thought wiser
+to send them a little further away where they would be less
+conspicuous and might possibly escape the usual fate of
+junior Byzantine princes. They were removed to a little
+village in the heart of Asia Minor. It was a dull life, but it
+gave Julian a chance to learn many useful things. For his
+neighbors, the Cappadocian mountaineers, were a simple
+people and still believed in the gods of their ancestors.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span></p>
+
+<p>There was not the slightest chance that the boy would
+ever hold a responsible position and when he asked permission
+to devote himself to a life of study, he was told to go
+ahead.</p>
+
+<p>First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places
+where the old Greek philosophy continued to be taught.
+There he crammed his head so full of literature and science
+that there was no space left for the things he had learned
+from Eusebius.</p>
+
+<p>Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might
+study on the very spot hallowed by the recollections of
+Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and
+Constantius, his cousin and the one and only remaining son
+of Constantine, remembering that he and his cousin, the boy
+philosopher, were by this time the only two surviving male
+members of the imperial family, sent for Julian, received
+him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his
+own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and
+defend that province against the barbarians.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that Julian had learned something more practical
+from his Greek teachers than an ability to argue. When in
+the year 357 the Alamanni threatened France, he destroyed
+their army near Strassburg, and for good measure added all
+the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his own
+province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a
+fresh supply of books by his favorite authors and was as
+happy as his serious nature allowed him to be.</p>
+
+<p>When news of these victories reached the ears of the
+Emperor, little Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the
+event. On the contrary, elaborate plans were laid to get rid
+of a competitor who might be just a trifle too successful.</p>
+
+<p>But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span>
+they heard that their commander-in-chief had been ordered
+to return home (a polite invitation to come and have one’s
+head cut off), they invaded his palace and then and there
+proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it be
+known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.</p>
+
+<p>Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.</p>
+
+<p>Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been
+in a remarkably good state of preservation. Julian was able
+to break all records by the speed with which he marched his
+troops from the heart of France to the shores of the Bosphorus.
+But ere he reached the capital, he heard that his
+cousin Constantius had died.</p>
+
+<p>And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the
+western world.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do
+was impossible. It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent
+a man should have been under the impression that the
+dead past could ever be brought back to life by the use of
+force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by reconstructing
+an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating
+the deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed
+up in togas of a bygone age and talking to each other in a
+tongue that had disappeared from the face of the earth more
+than five centuries before.</p>
+
+<p>And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.</p>
+
+<p>All his efforts during the two short years of his reign
+were directed towards the reëstablishment of that ancient
+science which was now held in profound contempt by the
+majority of his people; towards the rekindling of a spirit
+of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt
+certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a
+single book and that independent study and investigation
+could only lead to unbelief and hell fire; towards the requickening<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>
+of the joy-of-living among those who had the vitality
+and the enthusiasm of ghosts.</p>
+
+<p>Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have
+been driven to madness and despair by the spirit of opposition
+which met him on all sides. As for Julian, he simply
+went to pieces under it. Temporarily at least he clung to
+the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The
+Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and
+mud, yet he refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks
+might try to provoke him into another era of persecution,
+yet the Emperor persistently continued to instruct his officials
+“not to make any martyrs.”</p>
+
+<p>In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end
+to this strange career.</p>
+
+<p>It was the best thing that could have happened to this,
+the last and greatest of the Pagan rulers.</p>
+
+<p>Had he lived any longer, his sense of tolerance and his
+hatred of stupidity would have turned him into the most
+intolerant man of his age. Now, from his cot in the hospital,
+he could reflect that during his rule, not a single person had
+suffered death for his private opinions. For this mercy, his
+Christian subjects rewarded him with their undying hatred.
+They boasted that an arrow from one of his own soldiers (a
+Christian legionary) had killed the Emperor and with rare
+delicacy they composed eulogies in praise of the murderer.
+They told how, just before he collapsed, Julian had confessed
+the errors of his ways and had acknowledged the power
+of Christ. And they emptied the arsenal of foul epithets
+with which the vocabulary of the fourth century was so
+richly stocked to disgrace the fame of an honest man who
+had lived a life of ascetic simplicity and had devoted all his
+energies to the happiness of the people who had been entrusted
+to his care.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span></p>
+
+<p>When he had been carried to his grave the Christian
+bishops could at last consider themselves the veritable
+rulers of the Empire and immediately began the task of
+destroying whatever opposition to their domination might
+remain in isolated corners of Europe, Asia and Africa.</p>
+
+<p>Under Valentinian and Valens, two brothers who ruled
+from 364 to 378, an edict was passed forbidding all Romans
+to sacrifice animals to the old Gods. The pagan priests were
+thereby deprived of their revenue and forced to look for
+other employment.</p>
+
+<p>But the regulations were mild compared to the law by
+which Theodosius ordered all his subjects not only to accept
+the Christian doctrines, but to accept them only in the form
+laid down by the “universal” or “Catholic” church of which
+he had made himself the protector and which was to have a
+monopoly in all matters spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>All those who after the promulgation of this ordinance
+stuck to their “erroneous opinions”—who persisted in their
+“insane heresies”—who remained faithful to their “scandalous
+doctrines”—were to suffer the consequences of their willful
+disobedience and were to be exiled or put to death.</p>
+
+<p>From then on the old world marched rapidly to its final
+doom. In Italy and Gaul and Spain and England hardly
+a pagan temple remained. They were either wrecked by the
+contractors who needed stones for new bridges and streets
+and city-walls and water-works, or they were remodeled to
+serve as meeting places for the Christians. The thousands
+of golden and silver images which had been accumulated since
+the beginning of the Republic were publicly confiscated and
+privately stolen and such statues as remained were made
+into mortar.</p>
+
+<p>The Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple which Greeks and
+Romans and Egyptians alike had held in the greatest veneration<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>
+for more than six centuries, was razed to the ground.
+There remained the university, famous all over the world
+ever since it had been founded by Alexander the Great. It
+had continued to teach and explain the old philosophies and
+as a result attracted a large number of students from all
+parts of the Mediterranean. When it was not closed at the
+behest of the Bishop of Alexandria, the monks of his diocese
+took the matter into their own hands. They broke into the
+lecture rooms, lynched Hypatia, the last of the great Platonic
+teachers, and threw her mutilated body into the streets
+where it was left to the mercy of the dogs.</p>
+
+<p>In Rome things went no better.</p>
+
+<p>The temple of Jupiter was closed, the Sibylline books,
+the very basis of the old Roman faith, were burned. The
+capital was left a ruin.</p>
+
+<p>In Gaul, under the leadership of the famous bishop of
+Tours, the old Gods were declared to be the predecessors
+of the Christian devils and their temples were therefore
+ordered to be wiped off the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>If, as sometimes happened in remote country districts, the
+peasants rushed forth to the defense of their beloved shrines,
+the soldiers were called out and by means of the ax and
+the gallows made an end to such “insurrections of Satan.”</p>
+
+<p>In Greece, the work of destruction proceeded more slowly.
+But finally in the year 394, the Olympic games were
+abolished. As soon as this center of Greek national life
+(after an uninterrupted existence of eleven hundred and
+seventy years) had come to an end, the rest was comparatively
+easy. One after the other, the philosophers were expelled
+from the country. Finally, by order of the Emperor
+Justinian, the University of Athens was closed. The funds
+established for its maintenance were confiscated. The last
+seven professors, deprived of their livelihood, fled to Persia<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>
+where King Chosroes received them hospitably and allowed
+them to spend the rest of their days peacefully playing the
+new and mysterious Indian game called “chess.”</p>
+
+<p>In the first half of the fifth century, archbishop Chrysostomus
+could truthfully state that the works of the old
+authors and philosophers had disappeared from the face of
+the earth. Cicero and Socrates and Virgil and Homer (not
+to mention the mathematicians and the astronomers and the
+physicians who were an object of special abomination to all
+good Christians) lay forgotten in a thousand attics and cellars.
+Six hundred years were to go by before they were
+called back to life, and in the meantime the world would be
+obliged to subsist on such literary fare as it pleased the
+theologians to place before it.</p>
+
+<p>A strange diet, and not exactly (in the jargon of the
+medical faculty) a balanced one.</p>
+
+<p>For the Church, although triumphant over its pagan
+enemies, was beset by many and serious tribulations. The
+poor peasant in Gaul and Lusitania, clamoring to burn incense
+in honor of his ancient Gods, could be silenced easily
+enough. He was a heathen and the law was on the side of
+the Christian. But the Ostrogoth or the Alaman or the
+Longobard who declared that Arius, the priest of Alexandria,
+was right in his opinion upon the true nature of Christ
+and that Athanasius, the bishop of that same city and Arius’
+bitter enemy, was wrong (or vice versa)—the Longobard or
+Frank who stoutly maintained that Christ was not “of the
+same nature” but of a “like nature only” with God (or vice
+versa)—the Vandal or the Saxon who insisted that Nestor
+spoke the truth when he called the Virgin Mary the “mother
+of Christ” and not the “mother of God” (or vice versa)—the
+Burgundian or Frisian who denied that Jesus was possessed
+of two natures, one human and one divine (or vice versa)—all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>
+these simple-minded but strong-armed barbarians who
+had accepted Christianity and were, outside of their unfortunate
+errors of opinion, staunch friends and supporters of
+the Church—these indeed could not be punished with a general
+anathema and a threat of perpetual hell fire. They
+must be persuaded gently that they were wrong and must be
+brought within the fold with charitable expressions of love
+and devotion. But before all else they must be given a
+definite creed that they might know for once and for all what
+they must hold to be true and what they must reject as false.</p>
+
+<p>It was that desire for unity of some sort in all matters
+pertaining to the faith which finally caused those famous
+gatherings which have become known as Oecumenical or
+Universal Councils, and which since the middle of the fourth
+century have been called together at irregular intervals to
+decide what doctrine is right and what doctrine contains
+the germ of heresy and should therefore be adjudged erroneous,
+unsound, fallacious and heretical.</p>
+
+<p>The first of those Oecumenical councils was held in the
+town of Nicaea, not far from the ruins of Troy, in the year
+325. The second one, fifty-six years later, was held in
+Constantinople. The third one in the year 431 in Ephesus.
+Thereafter they followed each other in rapid succession in
+Chalcedon, twice again in Constantinople, once more in
+Nicaea and finally once again in Constantinople in the
+year 869.</p>
+
+<p>After that, however, they were held in Rome or in some
+particular town of western Europe designated by the Pope.
+For it was generally accepted from the fourth century on
+that although the emperor had the technical right to call
+together such meetings (a privilege which incidentally
+obliged him to pay the traveling expenses of his faithful
+bishops) that very serious attention should be paid to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>
+suggestions made by the powerful Bishop of Rome. And
+although we do not know with any degree of certainty who
+occupied the chair in Nicaea, all later councils were dominated
+by the Popes and the decisions of these holy gatherings
+were not regarded as binding unless they had obtained
+the official approval of the supreme pontiff himself or one
+of his delegates.</p>
+
+<p>Hence we can now say farewell to Constantinople and
+travel to the more congenial regions of the west.</p>
+
+<p>The field of Tolerance and Intolerance has been fought
+over so repeatedly by those who hold tolerance the greatest
+of all human virtues and those who denounce it as an evidence
+of moral weakness, that I shall pay very little attention
+to the purely theoretical aspects of the case. Nevertheless
+it must be confessed that the champions of the Church
+follow a plausible line of reasoning when they try to explain
+away the terrible punishments which were inflicted upon all
+heretics.</p>
+
+<p>“A church,” so they argue, “is like any other organization.
+It is almost like a village or a tribe or a fortress.
+There must be a commander-in-chief and there must be a
+definite set of laws and by-laws, which all members are forced
+to obey. It follows that those who swear allegiance to the
+Church make a tacit vow both to respect the commander-in-chief
+and to obey the law. And if they find it impossible to
+do this, they must suffer the consequences of their own decisions
+and get out.”</p>
+
+<p>All of which, so far, is perfectly true and reasonable.</p>
+
+<p>If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in
+the articles of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn
+Methodist, and if for some reason he ceases to believe in the
+creed as laid down by the Methodist Church, he can become
+a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that matter, a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>
+Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open.
+There is no one outside his own hungry family to say him
+nay.</p>
+
+<p>But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and
+unlimited economic opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple.
+It was far from easy to discover a region where the influence
+of the Bishop of Rome did not make itself felt. One could
+of course go to Persia or to India, as a good many heretics
+did, but the voyage was long and the chances of survival were
+small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self
+and one’s children.</p>
+
+<p>And finally, why should a man surrender his good right
+to believe what he pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception
+of the idea of Christ was the right one and that it was
+only a question of time for him to convince the Church that
+its doctrines needed a slight modification?</p>
+
+<p>For that was the crux of the whole matter.</p>
+
+<p>The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics,
+dealt with ideas which had a relative and not a positive value.</p>
+
+<p>A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the
+gallows because they cannot agree upon the absolute value
+of x would be no more absurd than a council of learned theologians
+trying to define the undefinable and endeavoring to
+reduce the substance of God to a formula.</p>
+
+<p>But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and
+intolerance got hold of the world that until very recently all
+those who advocated tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot
+ever possibly know who is right and who is wrong” did so
+at the risk of their lives and usually couched their warnings
+in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or
+two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they
+meant.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE PURE OF LIFE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Here is a little problem in mathematics which is
+not out of place in a book of history.
+Take a piece of string and make it into a circle,
+like this:</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp80" id="figure1" style="max-width: 25em;">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>I</p></figcaption>
+  <img class="w100" src="images/figure1.jpg" alt=" ">
+</figure>
+
+<p>In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.</p>
+
+<p>AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.</p>
+
+<p>But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two
+sides. Then the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The
+diameters are thrown out of gear. A few like AB and EF
+have been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>
+greatly shortened. Others, and especially CD, have been
+lengthened.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp80" id="figure2" style="max-width: 25em;">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>II</p></figcaption>
+  <img class="w100" src="images/figure2.jpg" alt=" ">
+</figure>
+
+<p>Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history.
+Let us for the sake of argument suppose that</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td>AB</td>
+    <td>represents</td>
+    <td>politics</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>CD</td>
+    <td class="tdc">”</td>
+    <td>trade</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>EF</td>
+    <td class="tdc">”</td>
+    <td>art</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GH</td>
+    <td class="tdc">”</td>
+    <td>militarism</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>In the <a href="#figure1">figure I</a> the perfectly balanced state, all lines are
+equally long and quite as much attention is paid to politics
+as to trade and art and militarism.</p>
+
+<p>But in <a href="#figure2">figure II</a> (which is no longer a perfect circle)
+trade has got an undue advantage at the expense of politics
+and art has almost entirely disappeared, while militarism
+shows a gain.</p>
+
+<p>Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the
+others will tend to disappear altogether.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span></p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp70" id="figure3" style="max-width: 23.4375em;">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>III</p></figcaption>
+  <img class="w100" src="images/figure3.jpg" alt=" ">
+</figure>
+
+<p>You will find this a handy key to a great many historical
+problems.</p>
+
+<p>Try it on the Greeks.</p>
+
+<p>For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain
+a perfect circle of all-around accomplishments. But the
+foolish quarrels between the different political parties soon
+grew to such proportions that all the surplus energy of the
+nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil wars. The
+soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending
+the country against foreign aggression. They were turned
+loose upon their own neighbors, who had voted for a different
+candidate, or who believed in a slightly modified form of
+taxation.</p>
+
+<p>Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at
+first became difficult, then became entirely impossible and
+fled to other parts of the world, where business enjoyed a
+greater degree of stability.</p>
+
+<p>The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the
+city, the arts escaped by way of the back door, never to be
+seen again. Capital sailed away on the fastest ship it could<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span>
+find within a hundred miles, and since intellectualism is a very
+expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible to maintain
+good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to
+Alexandria.</p>
+
+<p>What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who
+subsisted upon tradition and routine.</p>
+
+<p>And all this happened because the line of politics had
+grown out of all proportion, because the perfect circle had
+been destroyed, and the other lines, art, science, philosophy,
+etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.</p>
+
+<p>If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find
+that there the particular line called “political power” grew
+and grew and grew until there was nothing left of any of
+the others. The circle which had spelled the glory of the
+Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight,
+narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.</p>
+
+<p>And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the
+history of the medieval Church to this sort of mathematics,
+this is what you will find.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain
+a circle of conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they
+had rather neglected the diameter of science, but since they
+were not interested in the life of the world, they could not
+very well be expected to pay much attention to medicine
+or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of
+small appeal to men and women who were making ready for
+the last judgment and who regarded this world merely as
+the ante-room to Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored
+(however imperfectly) to lead the good life and
+to be as industrious as they were charitable and as kindly
+as they were honest.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span></p>
+
+<p>As soon, however, as their little communities had been
+united into a single powerful organization, the perfect balance
+of the old spiritual circle was rudely upset by the
+obligations and duties of the new international responsibilities.
+It was easy enough for small groups of half-starved
+carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of
+poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was
+founded. But the heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the
+Pontifex Maximus of the western world, the richest landowner
+of the entire continent, could not live as simply as if
+he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in
+Pomerania or Spain.</p>
+
+<p>Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter
+representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing
+“foreign policy” were lengthened to such an
+extent that the diameters representing “humility” and “poverty”
+and “self-negation” and the other elementary Christian
+virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly
+of the benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all
+know, lived in utter darkness. It is true they burned wax
+tapers in their churches and went to bed by the uncertain
+light of a sconce, they possessed few books, they were ignorant
+of many things which are now being taught in our
+grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums.
+But knowledge and intelligence are two very different things
+and of the latter, these excellent burghers, who constructed
+the political and social structure in which we ourselves continue
+to live, had their full share.</p>
+
+<p>If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently
+helpless before the many and terrible abuses in their
+Church, let us judge them mercifully. They had at least
+the courage of their convictions and they fought whatever<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>
+they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for personal
+happiness and comfort that they frequently ended
+their lives on the scaffold.</p>
+
+<p>More than that we can ask of no one.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that during the first thousand years of our era,
+comparatively few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not,
+however, because the Church felt less strongly about heresy
+than she did at a later date, but because she was too much
+occupied with more important questions to have any time
+to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe
+where Odin and the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.</p>
+
+<p>And in the second place, something very unpleasant had
+happened, which had wellnigh threatened the whole of
+Europe with destruction.</p>
+
+<p>This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance
+of a brand-new prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the
+conquest of western Asia and northern Africa by the followers
+of a new God who was called Allah.</p>
+
+<p>The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of
+“infidel dogs” and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us
+under the impression that Jesus and Mahomet represented
+ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as fire and water.</p>
+
+<p>But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the
+same race, they spoke dialects which belonged to the same
+linguistic group, they both claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather
+and they both looked back upon a common
+ancestral home, which a thousand years before had
+stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who
+were such close relatives have always regarded each other
+with bitter scorn and have fought a war which has lasted<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>
+more than twelve centuries and which has not yet come
+to an end.</p>
+
+<p>At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon
+what might have happened, but there was a time when
+Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might have easily been
+gained for the Christian faith.</p>
+
+<p>The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of
+their time tending their flocks and therefore were much given
+to meditation. People in cities can drug their souls with the
+pleasures of a perennial county-fair. But shepherds and
+fisher folk and farmers lead solitary lives and want something
+a little more substantial than noise and excitement.</p>
+
+<p>In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions,
+but had shown a distinct preference for Judaism.
+This is easily explained, as Arabia was full of Jews. In
+the tenth century B.C., a great many of King Solomon’s
+subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism
+of their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred
+years later in 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered
+Judah, there had been a second wholesale exodus of Jews
+towards the desert lands of the south.</p>
+
+<p>Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the
+quest of the Jews after the one and only true God was
+entirely in line with the aspirations and ideals of the Arabian
+tribes.</p>
+
+<p>Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet
+will know how much the Medinite had borrowed from the
+wisdom contained in some of the books of the Old Testament.</p>
+
+<p>Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with
+his mother Hagar lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the
+heart of Arabia) hostile to the ideas expressed by the young
+reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary, they followed
+Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>
+loving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept
+those miracles of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter
+made so much. And as for the resurrection, they
+flatly refused to believe in it. But generally speaking, they
+felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were
+willing to give it a chance.</p>
+
+<p>But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the
+hands of certain Christian zealots who with their usual
+lack of discretion had denounced him as a liar and a false
+prophet before he had fairly opened his mouth. That and
+the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that the
+Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods
+instead of one, made the people of the desert finally turn
+their backs upon Christianity and declare themselves in
+favor of the Medinese camel driver who spoke to them of
+one and only one God and did not confuse them with references
+to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one,
+but were one or three as it might please the convenience of
+the moment and the interests of the officiating priest.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the western world found itself possessed of two
+religions, each of which proclaimed its own God to be the
+One True God and each of which insisted that all other
+Gods were impostors.</p>
+
+<p>Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.</p>
+
+<p>Mahomet died in 632.</p>
+
+<p>Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia
+and Egypt had been conquered and Damascus had become
+the capital of a great Arab empire.</p>
+
+<p>Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa
+had accepted Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a
+century after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina,
+the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake, all
+communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span>
+and the European continent was placed in a state of siege
+which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the
+Church to carry her doctrines eastward. All she could hope
+to do was to hold on to what she already possessed. Germany
+and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and Sweden
+and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen
+as a profitable field for intensive spiritual cultivation and
+on the whole, the work was done with great success. Occasionally
+a hardy Christian of the variety of Charlemagne,
+well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might revert
+to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects
+who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner.
+By and large, however, the Christian missionaries were well
+received, for they were honest men who told a simple and
+straightforward story which all the people could understand
+and because they introduced certain elements of order and
+neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife
+and highway robbery.</p>
+
+<p>But while this was happening along the frontier, things
+had not gone so well in the heart of the pontifical empire.
+Incessantly (to revert to the mathematics explained in the
+first pages of this chapter) the line of worldliness had been
+lengthened until at last the spiritual element in the Church
+had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a
+purely political and economic nature and although Rome
+was to grow in power and exercise a tremendous influence
+upon the development of the next twelve centuries, certain
+elements of disintegration had already made their appearance
+and were being recognized as such by the more intelligent
+among the laity and the clergy.</p>
+
+<p>We modern people of the Protestant north think of a
+“church” as a building which stands empty six days out of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span>
+every seven and a place where people go on a Sunday to
+hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We know that some
+of our churches have bishops and occasionally these bishops
+hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves
+surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their
+collars turned backwards and we read in the papers that
+they have declared themselves in favor of dancing or against
+divorce, and then they go home again and nothing has
+happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.</p>
+
+<p>We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to
+be our own) with the sum total of all our experiences, both
+in life and in death.</p>
+
+<p>The State, of course, is something very different. The
+State may take our money and may kill us if it feels that
+such a course is desirable for the public good. The State
+is our owner, our master, but what is now generally called
+“the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or, if we
+happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.</p>
+
+<p>But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different.
+Then, the Church was something visible and tangible, a
+highly active organization which breathed and existed, which
+shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than the State
+would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes
+who accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced
+the ancient ideal of poverty did not foresee the
+consequences to which such a policy was bound to lead. In
+the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and quite
+appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow
+upon the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own
+worldly goods. Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated
+administration which reached all the way from
+John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage to Upsala.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span>
+Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks and
+scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different
+departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed.
+Think of the amount spent upon a courier service across an
+entire continent; the traveling expenses of diplomatic agents
+now going to London, then returning from Novgorod; the
+sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers in the style
+that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly
+princes on a footing of complete equality.</p>
+
+<p>All the same, looking back upon what the Church came
+to stand for and contemplating what it might have been
+under slightly more favorable circumstances, this development
+seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew into a
+gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the
+pope became an international autocrat who held all the nations
+of western Europe in a bondage compared to which
+the rule of the old emperors had been mild and generous.</p>
+
+<p>And then, when complete success seemed within certain
+reach, something happened which proved fatal to the ambition
+for world dominion.</p>
+
+<p>The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir
+among the masses and that is one of the most uncomfortable
+things that can happen to any religious organization.</p>
+
+<p>Heretics were nothing new.</p>
+
+<p>There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a
+single rule of faith from which people could possibly dissent
+and disputes, which had divided Europe and Africa and
+western Asia into hostile camps for centuries at a time, were
+almost as old as the Church herself.</p>
+
+<p>But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and
+Sabellianists and Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians
+hardly come within the scope of this book. As a
+rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as the other and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span>
+there was little to choose between the intolerance of a follower
+of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain
+obscure points of theology which are gradually beginning
+to be forgotten. Heaven forbid that I should drag
+them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting my
+time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh
+outbreak of theological fury. Rather, I am writing these
+pages to tell our children of certain ideals of intellectual
+liberty for which some of their ancestors fought at the risk
+of their lives and to warn them against that attitude of
+doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused
+such a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand
+years.</p>
+
+<p>But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very
+different story.</p>
+
+<p>Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious
+fellow with a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong
+translation of an obscure sentence in the Apocalypse or the
+mis-spelling of a holy word in the gospel of St. John.</p>
+
+<p>Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which
+during the reign of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the
+village of Nazareth went to his death, and behold! he stands
+revealed as the only true Christian!</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE INQUISITION</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni,
+succeeded to the high honors which his uncle Paolo
+had held only a few years before and as Innocent III
+took possession of the papal chair.</p>
+
+<p>He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided
+in the Lateran Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time
+of his ascension. An honor-student in the universities of
+Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever, full of energy and high
+ambition, he used his office so well that he could rightly
+claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone
+but of the entire world.”</p>
+
+<p>He set Italy free from German interference by driving the
+imperial governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering
+those parts of the peninsula which were held by imperial
+troops; and finally by excommunicating the candidate to
+the imperial throne until that poor prince found himself
+beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew entirely from
+his domains on the other side of the Alps.</p>
+
+<p>He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never
+even came within sight of the Holy Land but sailed for
+Constantinople, murdered a goodly number of the inhabitants
+of that town, stole whatever could be carried away
+and generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no
+crusader could show himself in a Greek port without running
+the chance of being hanged as an outlaw. It is true
+that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these proceedings<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>
+which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable
+minority of Christendom with disgust and despair.
+But Innocent was a practical man of affairs. He soon
+accepted the inevitable and appointed a Venetian to the
+vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this clever
+stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under
+Roman jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good
+will of the Venetian Republic which henceforth regarded the
+Byzantine domains as part of her eastern colonies and
+treated them accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a
+most accomplished and tactful person.</p>
+
+<p>The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation,
+had at last begun to insist that marriage was not merely
+a civil contract between a man and a woman but a most
+holy sacrament which needed the public blessing of a priest
+to be truly valid. When Philip August of France and
+Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic
+affairs according to their own particular preferences, they
+were speedily reminded of their duties and being men of
+great prudence they hastened to comply with the papal
+wishes.</p>
+
+<p>Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity,
+people were shown in unmistakable manner who
+was their master. King Haakon IV (known familiarly
+among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just conquered
+a neat little empire including besides his own Norway,
+part of Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the
+Orkneys and the Hebrides, was obliged to submit the somewhat
+tangled problem of his birth to a Roman tribunal
+before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of
+Trondhjem.</p>
+
+<p>And so it went.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span></p>
+
+<p>The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his
+Greek prisoners of war, and was not above torturing an
+occasional Byzantine emperor, who therefore was not the
+sort of person one might expect to take a deep interest
+in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and
+humbly asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness.
+While in England, certain barons who had undertaken
+to discipline their sovereign master were rudely informed
+that their charter was null and void because “it had been
+obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated
+for having given unto this world the famous document
+known as Magna Charta.</p>
+
+<p>From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not
+the sort of person who would deal lightly with the pretensions
+of a few simple linen-weavers and illiterate shepherds
+who undertook to question the laws of his Church.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, some there were found who had the courage
+to do this very thing as we shall now see.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.</p>
+
+<p>Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have
+small gift for publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets
+they write to explain their ideas and to defend themselves
+against their enemies fall an easy prey to the ever
+watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to be
+in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed.
+Hence we depend for our knowledge of most heresies
+upon such information as we are able to glean from
+the records of their trials and upon such articles as have
+been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the
+express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan”
+to the truly faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized
+and warned against doing likewise.</p>
+
+<p>As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>
+individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty
+cellar somewhere in the lowest part of the slums, who refuses
+to touch decent Christian food but subsists entirely
+upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who keeps
+away from the company of women and mumbles strange
+prophecies about the second coming of the Messiah, who
+reproves the clergy for their worldliness and wickedness
+and generally disgusts his more respectable neighbors by
+his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in
+making a nuisance of themselves, for that seems to be
+the fate of people who take themselves too seriously.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost
+unholy zeal for a holy life, were dirty, looked like
+the devil and did not smell pleasantly and generally upset
+the quiet routine of their home town by their strange ideas
+anent a truly Christian existence.</p>
+
+<p>But let us give them credit for their courage and their
+honesty.</p>
+
+<p>They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, they lost it.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized.
+Eventually even those who believe in no organization
+at all must form a Society for the Promotion of
+Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish anything. And
+the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and wallowed
+in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct
+of self-preservation made them flock together and
+their feeling of insecurity forced them to surround their
+sacred doctrines by a double barrier of mystic rites and
+esoteric ceremonials.</p>
+
+<p>But of course the masses of the people, who remained
+faithful to the Church, were unable to make any distinction<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>
+between these different groups and sects. And they
+bunched them all together and called them dirty Manichaeans
+or some other unflattering name and felt that that
+solved the problem.</p>
+
+<p>In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists
+of the Middle Ages. Of course I do not use the latter
+name as indicating membership in a certain well-defined
+political party which a few years ago established itself as
+the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer
+to a vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays
+bestow upon all their personal enemies from the landlord
+who comes to collect the rent down to the elevator boy
+who neglects to stop at the right floor.</p>
+
+<p>A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a
+most objectionable person. But as he could not very well
+try him upon any positive charges, he condemned him upon
+hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable advantages
+over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure
+followed by the regular courts of law but which
+sometimes suffers from a lack of accuracy and is responsible
+for a great many judicial murders.</p>
+
+<p>What made this all the more reprehensible in the case
+of the poor Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of
+the original sect, a Persian by the name of Mani, had been
+the very incarnation of benevolence and charity. He was
+an historical figure and was born during the first quarter
+of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his
+father, Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.</p>
+
+<p>He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and
+spent the years of his youth in a community as international,
+as polyglot, as pious, as godless, as material and as
+idealistically-spiritual as the New York of our own day.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>
+Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of
+east and west and south and north had its followers among
+the crowds that visited the great commercial centers of
+Mesopotamia. Mani listened to all the different preachers
+and prophets and then distilled a philosophy of his own
+which was a <i>mixtum-compositum</i> of Buddhism, Christianity,
+Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a
+dozen old Babylonian superstitions.</p>
+
+<p>Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his
+followers sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated
+that Mani merely revived the old Persian myth of the Good
+God and the Evil God who are eternally fighting for the
+soul of man and that he associated the ancient God of Evil
+with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became
+his Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that
+Heavenly Father whom we find revealed within the pages
+of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that is where
+Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that
+the body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing;
+that all people should try to rid themselves of their worldly
+ambitions by the constant mortification of the flesh and
+should obey the strictest rules of diet and behavior lest they
+fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil) and burn
+in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos
+about things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed
+for his followers a menu composed exclusively of cold water,
+dried vegetables and dead fish. This latter ordinance may
+surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea, being cold-blooded
+animals, have always been regarded as less harmful
+to man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren
+of the dry land, and the self-same people who would rather
+suffer death than eat a veal chop cheerfully consume
+quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of conscience.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span></p>
+
+<p>Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for
+women. He forbade his disciples to marry and advocated
+the slow extinction of the human race.</p>
+
+<p>As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally
+by the Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been
+the exponent, Mani regarded them all with horror and instead
+of being submerged in water, his candidates for holy
+orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to
+explain his ideas unto all mankind. First he visited
+India and China where he was fairly successful. Then he
+turned homeward to bring the blessings of his creed to his
+own neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived
+of much secret revenue by the success of these unworldly
+doctrines turned against him and asked that he be
+killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the protection of
+the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded
+by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious
+questions, Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They
+took him to the walls of the town and crucified him and
+flayed his corpse and publicly exposed his skin before the
+city gate as an example to all those who might feel inclined
+to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.</p>
+
+<p>By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean
+church itself was broken up. But little bits of the
+prophet’s ideas, like so many spiritual meteors, were showered
+far and wide upon the landscape of Europe and Asia
+and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc among
+the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them
+up, had examined them and had found them singularly to
+their taste.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span></p>
+
+<p>Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I
+do not know.</p>
+
+<p>Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea
+and the Danube. Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed
+immense popularity in Germany and France. There the
+followers of the new creed called themselves by the Oriental
+name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,”
+and so widespread was the affliction that all over western
+Europe the word “Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the
+same as “heretic.”</p>
+
+<p>But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a
+definite religious denomination. No effort was made to establish
+a new sect. The Manichaean ideas exercised great
+influence upon a large number of people who would have
+stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout
+sons of the Church. And that made this particular form of
+heresy so dangerous and so difficult of detection.</p>
+
+<p>It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose
+a disease caused by microbes of such gigantic structure
+that their presence can be detected by the microscope of a
+provincial board-of-health.</p>
+
+<p>But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who
+can maintain their incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet
+illumination, for they shall inherit the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was
+therefore the most dangerous expression of all social epidemics
+and it filled the higher authorities of that organization
+with a terror not felt before the more common varieties
+of spiritual afflictions.</p>
+
+<p>It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of
+the staunchest supporters of the early Christian faith had
+shown unmistakable symptoms of the disease. Yea, great
+Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and indefatigable warrior<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span>
+of the Cross, who had done more than any one else to
+destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have
+been at heart considerable of a Manichaean.</p>
+
+<p>Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the
+stake in the year 385 and who gained the distinction of
+being the first victim of the law against heretics, was accused
+of Manichaean tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have
+fallen under the spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.</p>
+
+<p>They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading
+the Old Testament and finally, during the twelfth century,
+promulgated that famous order by which all clergymen
+were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not to
+forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of
+abstinence were soon to make upon one of the greatest
+leaders of spiritual reform, causing that most lovable of
+men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish a new monastic
+order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly earned
+him the title of the Buddha of the West.</p>
+
+<p>But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty
+and humility of soul began to filter down to the common
+people, at the very moment when the world was filled with
+the din of yet another war between emperor and pope, when
+foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross and
+the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable
+bits of territory along the Mediterranean shores, when
+hordes of Crusaders were rushing home with the ill-gotten
+plunder they had taken from friend and enemy alike, when
+abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a staff of
+courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass
+that they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed
+something very unpleasant was bound to happen, and it
+did.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span></p>
+
+<p>Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent
+with the state of the Church made themselves felt in that
+part of France where the old Roman tradition of culture
+had survived longest and where civilization had never been
+quite absorbed by barbarism.</p>
+
+<p>You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence
+and consists of a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean,
+the Rhone and the Alps. Marseilles, a former
+colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is its most important
+harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns
+and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and
+it enjoyed an abundance of sunshine and rain.</p>
+
+<p>While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the
+barbaric deeds of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours,
+the poets of the Provence, had already invented that new
+form of literature which in time was to give birth to our
+modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations
+of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans
+of Spain and Sicily, were making the people familiar
+with the latest publications in the field of science
+at a time when the number of such books in the northern
+part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.</p>
+
+<p>In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement
+had begun to make itself manifest as early as the first decade
+of the eleventh century.</p>
+
+<p>But there had not been anything which, however remotely,
+could be construed into open rebellion. Here and
+there in certain small villages certain people were beginning
+to hint that their priests might live as simply and as unostentatiously
+as their parishioners; who refused (oh, memory
+of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went
+forth to war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they
+might read and study the Gospels for themselves; who let it<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>
+be known that they did not approve of capital punishment;
+who denied the existence of that Purgatory which six centuries
+after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed
+as part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important
+detail) refused to surrender a tenth of their income to
+the Church.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions
+against clerical authority were sought out and sometimes, if
+they were deaf to persuasion, they were discreetly put out
+of the way.</p>
+
+<p>But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed
+necessary to call together a meeting of all the bishops of
+the Provence to discuss what measures should be taken to
+put a stop to this very dangerous and highly seditious
+agitation. They duly convened and continued their debates
+until the year 1056.</p>
+
+<p>By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary
+forms of punishment and excommunication did not produce
+any noticeable results. The simple country folk who desired
+to lead a “pure life” were delighted whenever they were
+given a chance to demonstrate their principles of Christian
+charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail
+and if perchance they were condemned to death, they
+marched to the stake with the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore,
+as always happens in such cases, the place left
+vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a
+dozen fresh candidates for holiness.</p>
+
+<p>Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between
+the papal delegates who insisted upon more severe
+persecutions and the local nobility and clergy who (knowing
+the true nature of their subjects) refused to comply
+with the orders from Rome and protested that violence only
+encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span>
+voice of reason and therefore was a waste both of time and
+energy.</p>
+
+<p>And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement
+received a fresh impetus from the north.</p>
+
+<p>In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way
+of the Rhone, there lived a merchant by the name of Peter
+Waldo. A very serious man, a good man, a most generous
+man, almost fanatically obsessed by his eagerness to follow
+the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that it was
+easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than
+for a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
+Thirty generations of Christians had tried to explain just
+what Jesus had actually meant when he uttered these words.
+Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He divided
+whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and
+refused to accumulate fresh wealth.</p>
+
+<p>John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”</p>
+
+<p>Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and
+had carefully stipulated under what conditions it might
+perhaps be desirable for the laity to study the holy books
+directly and without the assistance of a priest.</p>
+
+<p>Peter Waldo did not see it that way.</p>
+
+<p>John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”</p>
+
+<p>Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.</p>
+
+<p>And when he discovered that the things he found did
+not tally with the conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated
+the New Testament into his own language and spread copies
+of his manuscript throughout the good land of Provence.</p>
+
+<p>At first his activities did not attract much attention.
+His enthusiasm for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most
+likely he could be persuaded to found some new and very
+ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those who wished
+to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>
+existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.</p>
+
+<p>Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets
+for those people whose excess of faith might make them
+troublesome.</p>
+
+<p>But all things must be done according to rule and precedent.
+And in that respect the “pure men” of the Provence
+and the “poor men” of Lyons were terrible failures. Not
+only did they neglect to inform their bishops of what they
+were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed
+the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good
+Christian without the assistance of a professional member
+of the priesthood and that the Bishop of Rome had no more
+right to tell people outside of his jurisdiction what to do
+and what to believe than the Grand Duke of Tartary or the
+Caliph of Bagdad.</p>
+
+<p>The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and
+truth compels me to state that she waited a long time before
+she finally decided to exterminate this heresy by force.</p>
+
+<p>But an organization based upon the principle that there
+is only one right way of thinking and living and that all
+other ways are infamous and damnable is bound to take
+drastic measures whenever its authority is being openly
+questioned.</p>
+
+<p>If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive
+and this consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite
+action and devise a series of punishments that should put
+terror into the hearts of all future dissenters.</p>
+
+<p>The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of
+Albi which was a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the
+Waldenses (who bore the name of their founder, Peter
+Waldo) living in countries without great political value<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>
+and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected
+as the first of her victims.</p>
+
+<p>The murder of a papal delegate who for several years
+had ruled the Provence as if it were so much conquered
+territory, gave Innocent III an excuse to interfere.</p>
+
+<p>He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses
+and the Waldenses.</p>
+
+<p>Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition
+against the heretics would be excused from paying
+interest on their debts; they would be absolved from all
+past and future sins and for the time being they would
+be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts
+of law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the
+people of northern Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Why should they bother about going all the way to
+Palestine when a campaign against the rich cities of the
+Provence offered the same spiritual and economic rewards
+as a trip to the Orient and when a man could gain an equal
+amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term of
+service?</p>
+
+<p>For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and
+the worst elements among the nobility and gentry of northern
+France and southern England, of Austria, Saxony and
+Poland came rushing southward to escape the local sheriff
+and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense
+of the prosperous Provençals.</p>
+
+<p>The number of men, women and children hanged, burned,
+drowned, decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders
+is variously given. I have not any idea how many
+thousands perished. Here and there, whenever a formal
+execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete
+figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty
+thousand, according to the size of each town.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span></p>
+
+<p>After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers
+were in a quandary how to know who were heretics and
+who were not. They placed their problem before the papal
+delegate, who followed the army as a sort of spiritual adviser.</p>
+
+<p>“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and
+kill them all. The Lord will know his own people.”</p>
+
+<p>But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de
+Montfort, a veteran of the real crusades, who distinguished
+himself most of all by the novelty and the ingenuity of his
+cruelties. In return for his valuable services, he afterwards
+received large tracts of land in the country which he had
+just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.</p>
+
+<p>As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre,
+they fled to the more inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and
+there maintained a church of their own until the days of
+the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of
+flogging and hanging, their name disappears from the court
+reports of the Inquisition. But three centuries later, in a
+slightly modified form, their doctrines were to crop up again
+and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin Luther,
+they were to cause that reform which was to break the
+monopoly which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost
+fifteen hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of
+Innocent III. As far as he was concerned, the difficulty was
+at an end and the principle of absolute obedience had been
+triumphantly re-asserted. The famous command in Luke
+xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished
+to give a party, finding that there still was room in his
+banqueting hall and that several of the guests had remained<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>
+away, had said unto his servant, “Go out into the highways
+and compel them to come in,” had once more been fulfilled.</p>
+
+<p>“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.</p>
+
+<p>The problem how to make them stay in still faced the
+Church and this was not solved until many years later.</p>
+
+<p>Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local
+tribunals, special courts of inquiry, such as had been used
+for the first time during the Albigensian uprising, were
+instituted in the different capitals of Europe. They were
+given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they came
+to be known simply as the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased
+to function, the mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling
+of unrest. We have visions of dark dungeons in Havanna,
+of torture chambers in Lisbon, of rusty cauldrons
+and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow
+hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw
+leering at an endless row of old men and women, slowly
+shuffling to the gibbet.</p>
+
+<p>Several popular novels written during the latter half of
+the nineteenth century have undoubtedly had something
+to do with this impression of sinister brutality. Let us therefore
+deduct twenty-five per cent for the phantasy of our
+romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant
+prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to
+justify those who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable
+evil and should never again be tolerated in a community
+of civilized people.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition
+in eight ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce
+these to two or three pages, and it will be quite impossible
+to give a concise account of one of the most complicated
+problems of medieval history within so short a space. For<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span>
+there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court
+or an International Court of Arbitration.</p>
+
+<p>There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries
+and created for all sorts of purposes.</p>
+
+<p>The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of
+Spain and the Holy Inquisition of Rome. The former was
+a local affair which watched over the heretics in the Iberian
+peninsula and in the American colonies.</p>
+
+<p>The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and
+burned Joan of Arc in the northern part of the continent
+as it burned Giordano Bruno in the southern.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never
+killed any one.</p>
+
+<p>After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical
+judges, the convicted heretic was surrendered to the secular
+authorities. These could then do with him what they
+thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death
+penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience
+and might even find themselves excommunicated
+or deprived of their support at the papal court. If, as
+sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped this fate and
+was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only
+increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement
+for the rest of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial
+prisons.</p>
+
+<p>As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror
+of going insane in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many
+prisoners confessed all sorts of crimes of which they were
+totally innocent that they might be found guilty of heresy
+and thus be put out of their misery.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing
+to be hopelessly biased.</p>
+
+<p>It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>
+of thousands of harmless people in all parts of the
+world were overnight lifted from their beds at the mere
+whispered hearsay of some loquacious neighbors; that they
+were held for months or for years in filthy cells awaiting
+an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and
+qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never
+informed of the nature of the accusation that was brought
+against them; that they were not allowed to know the
+names of those who had acted as witnesses against them;
+that they were not permitted to communicate with their
+relatives or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest
+their innocence, they could be tortured until all the
+limbs of their body were broken; that other heretics could
+testify against them but were not listened to if they offered
+to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally
+that they could be sent to their death without the haziest
+notion as to the cause of their terrible fate.</p>
+
+<p>It seems even more incredible that men and women who
+had been buried for fifty or sixty years could be dug out
+of their graves, could be found guilty “in absentia” and
+that the heirs of people who were condemned in this fashion
+could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a century
+after the death of the offending parties.</p>
+
+<p>But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended
+for their maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods
+that were confiscated, absurdities of this sort were by no
+means an uncommon occurrence and frequently the grandchildren
+were driven to beggary on account of something
+which their grandfather was supposed to have done two
+generations before.</p>
+
+<p>Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago
+when Czarist Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember
+the agent provocateur. As a rule the agent provocateur<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>
+was a former burglar or a retired gambler with a
+winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly
+known that his sorrow had made him join the revolution
+and in this way he often gained the confidence of those
+who were genuinely opposed to the imperial government.
+But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new
+friends, he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward
+and went to the next city, there to repeat his vile practices.</p>
+
+<p>During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
+southern and western Europe was overrun by this nefarious
+tribe of private spies.</p>
+
+<p>They made a living denouncing those who were supposed
+to have criticized the Church or who had expressed doubts
+upon certain points of doctrine.</p>
+
+<p>If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the
+business of such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.</p>
+
+<p>As he could rest assured that torture would make his
+victims confess, no matter how innocent they might be, he
+ran no risks and could continue his trade ad infinitum.</p>
+
+<p>In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced
+by this system of allowing anonymous people to denounce
+those whom they suspected of spiritual deficiencies.
+At last, no one dared trust his nearest and dearest friends.
+Members of the same family were forced to be on their
+guard against each other.</p>
+
+<p>The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the
+inquisitorial work made excellent use of the panic which
+their methods created and for almost two centuries they
+lived on the fat of the land.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying
+causes of the Reformation was the disgust which a large
+number of people felt for those arrogant beggars who
+under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the homes<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>
+of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable
+beds, who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they
+be treated as honored guests and who were able to maintain
+themselves in comfort by the mere threat that they would
+denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition if ever they
+were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had
+come to regard as their just due.</p>
+
+<p>The Church of course could answer to all this that the
+Inquisition merely acted as a spiritual health officer whose
+sworn duty it was to prevent contagious errors from spreading
+among the masses. It could point to the leniency shown
+to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could
+not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even
+claim that few people ever suffered the penalty of death
+unless they were apostates and were caught in a new offense
+after having forsworn their former errors.</p>
+
+<p>But what of it?</p>
+
+<p>The same trick by which an innocent man was changed
+into a desperate criminal could afterwards be used to place
+him in an apparent position of recantation.</p>
+
+<p>The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been
+close friends.</p>
+
+<p>And what are a few faked documents between spies?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_VIII">CHAPTER VIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE CURIOUS ONES</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided
+into three parts; the intolerance of laziness, the
+intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance
+of self-interest.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to
+be met with in every country and among all classes of
+society. It is most common in small villages and old-established
+towns, and it is not restricted to human beings.</p>
+
+<p>Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five
+years of his placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town,
+resents the equally warm barn of Westport for no other
+reason than that he has always lived in Coley Town, is
+familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and
+knows that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him
+on his daily ambles through that pleasant part of the Connecticut
+landscape.</p>
+
+<p>Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time
+learning the defunct dialects of Polynesian islands that the
+language of dogs and cats and horses and donkeys has been
+sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude says to
+his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an
+outburst of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For
+Dude is no longer young and therefore is “set” in his ways.
+His horsey habits were all formed years and years ago and
+therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and habits
+seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>
+and habits will be declared wrong until the end of his
+days.</p>
+
+<p>It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes
+parents shake their heads over the foolish behavior of their
+children, which has caused the absurd myth of “the good
+old days”; which makes savages and civilized creatures
+wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a
+great deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all
+people with a new idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively
+harmless.</p>
+
+<p>We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later.
+In ages past it has caused millions of people to leave home,
+and in this way it has been responsible for the permanent
+settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited land which otherwise
+would still be a wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>The second variety is much more serious.</p>
+
+<p>An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance,
+a very dangerous person.</p>
+
+<p>But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack
+of mental faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then
+he erects within his soul a granite bulwark of self-righteousness
+and from the high pinnacle of this formidable fortress,
+he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not share
+his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed
+to live.</p>
+
+<p>People suffering from this particular affliction are both
+uncharitable and mean. Because they live constantly in a
+state of fear, they easily turn to cruelty and love to torture
+those against whom they have a grievance. It was among
+people of this ilk that the strange notion of a predilected
+group of a “chosen people” first took its origin. Furthermore,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>
+the victims of this delusion are forever trying to
+bolster up their own courage by an imaginary relationship
+which exists between themselves and the invisible Gods.
+This, of course, in order to give a flavor of spiritual approbation
+to their intolerance.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging
+Danny Deever because we consider him a menace to our
+own happiness, because we hate him with a thousand hates
+and because we just love to hang him.” Oh, no! They get
+together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and for
+days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever.
+When finally sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps
+committed some petty sort of larceny, stands solemnly
+convicted as a most terrible person who has dared to offend
+the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect
+who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution
+therefore becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit
+upon the judges who have the courage to convict such an
+ally of Satan.</p>
+
+<p>That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people
+are quite as apt to fall under the spell of this most fatal
+delusion as their more brutal and blood-thirsty neighbors
+is a commonplace both of history and psychology.</p>
+
+<p>The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of
+a thousand poor martyrs were most assuredly not composed
+of criminals. They were decent, pious folk and they
+felt sure that they were doing something very creditable
+and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.</p>
+
+<p>Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have
+rejected the idea as an ignoble confession of Moral weakness.
+Perhaps they were intolerant, but in that case they
+were proud of the fact and with good right. For there,
+out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span>
+Deever, clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of
+pantaloons adorned with little devils, and he was going, going
+slowly but surely, to be hanged in the Market Place. While
+they themselves, as soon as the show was over, would return
+to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and
+beans.</p>
+
+<p>Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting
+and thinking correctly?</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would
+not the rôles be reversed?</p>
+
+<p>A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one
+and hard to answer when people feel sincerely convinced
+that their own ideas are the ideas of God and are unable
+to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.</p>
+
+<p>There remains as a third category the intolerance caused
+by self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of
+jealousy and as common as the measles.</p>
+
+<p>When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the
+favor of Almighty God could not be bought by the killing
+of a dozen oxen or goats, all those who made a living from
+the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple decried him as a
+dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed before
+he could do any lasting damage to their main source
+of income.</p>
+
+<p>When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus
+and there preached a new creed which threatened to interfere
+with the prosperity of the jewelers who derived great
+profit from the sale of little images of the local Goddess
+Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the unwelcome
+intruder.</p>
+
+<p>And ever since there has been open warfare between those
+who depend for their livelihood upon some established form<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>
+of worship and those whose ideas threaten to take the crowd
+away from one temple in favor of another.</p>
+
+<p>When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle
+Ages, we must constantly remember that we have to
+deal with a very complicated problem. Only upon very
+rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only
+one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance.
+Most frequently we can discover traces of all three
+varieties in the cases of persecution which are brought to
+our attention.</p>
+
+<p>That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering
+thousands of square miles of land and owning hundreds
+of thousands of serfs, should have turned the full vigor of
+its anger against a group of peasants who had undertaken
+to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth
+was entirely natural.</p>
+
+<p>And in that case, the extermination of heretics became
+a matter of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the
+intolerance of self-interest.</p>
+
+<p>But when we begin to consider another group of men
+who were to feel the heavy hand of official disapprobation,
+the scientists, the problem becomes infinitely more complicated.</p>
+
+<p>And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the
+Church authorities towards those who tried to reveal the
+secrets of nature, we must go back a good many centuries
+and study what had actually happened in Europe during
+the first six centuries of our era.</p>
+
+<p>The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the
+continent with the ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here
+and there a few pieces of the old Roman fabric of state had
+remained standing erect amidst the wastes of the turbulent
+waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>
+walls had perished. Their books had been carried away
+by the waves. Their art lay forgotten in the deep mud
+of a new ignorance. Their collections, their museums, their
+laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of scientific
+facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of uncouth
+savages from the heart of Asia.</p>
+
+<p>We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth
+century. Of Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople,
+then almost as far removed from central Europe as
+the Melbourne of today) the people of the west possessed
+hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely disappeared.
+A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters
+from the works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar
+of that time could find when he wanted to familiarize himself
+with the thoughts of the ancients. If he desired to learn
+their language, there was no one to teach it to him, unless
+a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of
+Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced
+them to find a temporary asylum in France or Italy.</p>
+
+<p>Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of
+those dated from the fourth and fifth centuries. The few
+manuscripts of the classics that survived had been copied
+so often and so indifferently that their contents were no
+longer understandable to any one who had not made a life
+study of paleography.</p>
+
+<p>As for books of science, with the possible exception of
+some of the simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer
+to be found in any of the available libraries and what was
+much more regrettable, they were no longer wanted.</p>
+
+<p>For the people who now ruled the world regarded science
+with a hostile eye and discouraged all independent labor
+in the field of mathematics, biology and zoology, not to
+mention medicine and astronomy, which had descended to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>
+such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of
+the slightest practical value.</p>
+
+<p>It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand
+such a state of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>We men and women of the twentieth century, whether
+rightly or wrongly, profoundly believe in the idea of progress.
+Whether we ever shall be able to make this world
+perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to be
+our most sacred duty to try.</p>
+
+<p>Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of
+progress seems to have become the national religion of our
+entire country.</p>
+
+<p>But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could
+not share such a view.</p>
+
+<p>The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and
+interesting things had lasted such a lamentably short time!
+It had been so rudely disturbed by the political cataclysm
+that had overtaken the unfortunate country that most
+Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed
+pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy
+fatherland, had become abject believers in the doctrine of
+the ultimate futility of all worldly endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw
+their conclusions from almost a thousand years of consecutive
+history, had discovered a certain upward trend in the
+development of the human race and their philosophers,
+notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task
+of educating the younger generation for a happier and
+better future.</p>
+
+<p>Then came Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>The center of interest was moved from this world to the
+other. Almost immediately people fell back into a deep
+and dark abyss of hopeless resignation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153"></a>[153]</span></p>
+
+<p>Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference.
+He was conceived in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he
+died repenting of his sins.</p>
+
+<p>But there was a difference between the old despair and
+the new.</p>
+
+<p>The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so)
+that they were more intelligent and better educated than
+their neighbors and they felt rather sorry for those unfortunate
+barbarians. But they never quite reached the point
+at which they began to consider themselves as a race that
+had been set apart from all others because it was the chosen
+people of Zeus.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape
+from its own antecedents. When the Christians adopted
+the Old Testament as one of the Holy Books of their own
+faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish doctrine that
+their race was “different” from all others and that only those
+who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines
+could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed
+to perdition.</p>
+
+<p>This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to
+those who were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to
+believe themselves predilected favorites among millions and
+millions of their fellow creatures. During many highly
+critical years it had turned the Christians into a closely-knit,
+self-contained little community which floated unconcernedly
+upon a vast ocean of paganism.</p>
+
+<p>What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched
+far and wide towards the north and the south and the
+east and the west was a subject of the most profound
+indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any of those
+other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the
+ideas of their Church into the concrete form of written<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154"></a>[154]</span>
+books. Eventually they hoped to reach a safe shore and
+there to build their city of God. Meanwhile, what those in
+other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve was none
+of their concern.</p>
+
+<p>Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions
+about the origin of man and about the limits of time
+and space. What the Egyptians and Babylonians and the
+Greeks and the Romans had discovered about these mysteries
+did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely
+convinced that all the old values had been destroyed
+with the birth of Christ.</p>
+
+<p>There was for example the problem of our earth.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of
+billion of other stars.</p>
+
+<p>The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the
+little round disk on which they lived was the heart and
+center of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>It had been created for the special purpose of providing
+one particular group of people with a temporary home.
+The way in which this had been brought about was very
+simple and was fully described in the first chapter of
+Genesis.</p>
+
+<p>When it became necessary to decide just how long this
+group of predilected people had been on this earth, the
+problem became a little more complicated. On all sides
+there were evidences of great antiquity, of buried cities, of
+extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But these could
+be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out
+of existence. And after this had been done, it was a very
+simple matter to establish a fixed date for the beginning
+of time.</p>
+
+<p>In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which
+had begun at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155"></a>[155]</span>
+year, and would end at another certain hour of a certain
+day in a certain year, which existed for the exclusive benefit
+of one and only one denomination, in such a universe there
+was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians
+and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who
+only cared for general principles and juggled with the
+idea of eternity and unlimitedness both in the field of time
+and in the realm of space.</p>
+
+<p>True enough, many of those scientific people protested
+that at heart they were devout sons of the Church. But
+the true Christians knew better. No man, who was sincere
+in his protestations of love and devotion for the faith, had
+any business to know so much or to possess so many books.</p>
+
+<p>One book was enough.</p>
+
+<p>That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every
+comma, every semicolon and exclamation point had been
+written down by people who were divinely inspired.</p>
+
+<p>A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly
+amused if he had been told of a supposedly holy volume
+which contained scraps of ill-digested national history,
+doubtful love poems, the inarticulate visions of half-demented
+prophets and whole chapters devoted to the foulest
+denunciation of those who for some reason or another were
+supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s
+many tribal deities.</p>
+
+<p>But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble
+respect for the “written word” which to him was one of
+the great mysteries of civilization, and when this particular
+book, by successive councils of his Church, was recommended
+to him as being without error, flaw or slip, he willingly
+enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum
+total of everything that man had ever known, or ever
+could hope to know, and joined in the denunciation and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156"></a>[156]</span>
+persecution of those who defied Heaven by extending their
+researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and Isaiah.</p>
+
+<p>The number of people willing to die for their principles
+has always been necessarily limited.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part
+of certain people is so irrepressible that some outlet must
+be found for their pent up energy. As a result of this
+conflict between curiosity and repression there grew up
+that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to
+be known as Scholasticism.</p>
+
+<p>It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was
+then that Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the
+Franks, gave birth to a son who has better claims to be
+considered the patron saint of the French nation than that
+good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of eight
+hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded
+his subjects’ loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their
+own.</p>
+
+<p>When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus,
+as you may see this very day at the bottom of many an
+ancient charter. The signature is a little clumsy. But
+Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As a boy
+he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took
+up writing, his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent
+fighting the Russians and the Moors that he had to give
+up the attempt and hired the best scribes of his day to act
+as his secretaries and do his writing for him.</p>
+
+<p>For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the
+fact that only twice within fifty years had he worn “city
+clothes” (the toga of a Roman nobleman), had a most genuine
+appreciation of the value of learning, and turned his
+court into a private university for the benefit of his own
+children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157"></a>[157]</span></p>
+
+<p>There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time,
+the new imperator of the west loved to spend his hours of
+leisure. And so great was his respect for academic democracy
+that he dropped all etiquette and as simple Brother
+David took an active share in the conversation and allowed
+himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.</p>
+
+<p>But when we come to examine the problems that interested
+this goodly company and the questions they discussed,
+we are reminded of the list of subjects chosen by
+the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.</p>
+
+<p>They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was
+true in the year 800 held equally good for 1400. This
+was not the fault of the medieval scholar, whose brain
+was undoubtedly quite as good as that of his successors
+of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the position
+of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete
+liberty of investigation, provided he does not say or do
+anything at variance with the chemical and medical information
+contained in the volumes of the first edition of
+the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when chemistry
+was practically an unknown subject and surgery was
+closely akin to butchery.</p>
+
+<p>As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the
+medieval scientist with his tremendous brain capacity and
+his very limited field of experimentation reminds one somewhat
+of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon the chassis of
+a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with
+a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove
+his strange contraption according to the rules and regulations
+of the road he became slightly ridiculous and wasted
+a terrible lot of energy without getting anywhere in particular.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158"></a>[158]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of course the best among these men were desperate at the
+rate of speed which they were forced to observe.</p>
+
+<p>They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting
+observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote
+ponderous volumes, trying to prove the exact opposite of
+what they held to be true, in order that they might give
+a hint of the things that were uppermost in their minds.</p>
+
+<p>They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus
+pocus; they wore strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles
+hanging from their ceilings; they displayed shelves
+full of bottled monsters and threw evil smelling herbs in
+the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors away
+from their front door and at the same time establish a
+reputation of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could
+be allowed to say whatever they liked without being held
+too closely responsible for their ideas. And gradually they
+developed such a thorough system of scientific camouflage
+that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they
+actually meant.</p>
+
+<p>That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves
+quite as intolerant towards science and literature
+as the Church of the Middle Ages had done is quite true,
+but it is beside the point.</p>
+
+<p>The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to
+their hearts’ content, but they were rarely able to turn
+their threats into positive acts of repression.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed
+the power to crush its enemies but it made use of it, whenever
+the occasion presented itself.</p>
+
+<p>The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like
+to indulge in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values
+of tolerance and intolerance.</p>
+
+<p>But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159"></a>[159]</span>
+placed before the choice of a public recantation or an equally
+public flogging.</p>
+
+<p>And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what
+they held to be true, and preferred to waste their time on
+cross-word puzzles made up exclusively from the names of
+the animals mentioned in the Book of Revelations, let us not
+be too hard on them.</p>
+
+<p>I am quite certain that I never would have written the
+present volume, six hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160"></a>[160]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IX">CHAPTER IX<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am
+rather like a man who has been trained to be a fiddler
+and then at the age of thirty-five is suddenly given
+a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of the
+Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in
+one sort of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different
+one. I was taught to look upon all events of the past in
+the light of a definitely established order of things; a universe
+more or less competently managed by emperors and
+kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by
+congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury.
+Furthermore, in the days of my youth, the good Lord was
+still tacitly recognized as the ex-officio head of everything,
+and a personage who had to be treated with great respect
+and decorum.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the war.</p>
+
+<p>The old order of things was completely upset, emperors
+and kings were abolished, responsible ministers were superseded
+by irresponsible secret committees, and in many parts
+of the world, Heaven was formally closed by an order in
+council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially
+proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient
+times.</p>
+
+<p>Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization
+several centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161"></a>[161]</span></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will
+not be easy.</p>
+
+<p>Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in
+that Holy Land, some twenty years ago, fully one quarter
+of the pages of the foreign papers that reached us were
+covered with a smeary black substance, known technically
+as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which
+a careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.</p>
+
+<p>The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as
+an insufferable survival of the Dark Ages and we of the
+great republic of the west saved copies of the American
+comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks at home
+what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually
+were.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the great Russian revolution.</p>
+
+<p>For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist
+had howled that he was a poor, persecuted creature who
+enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as evidence thereof he had
+pointed to the strict supervision of all journals devoted to
+the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog
+turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the
+victorious friends of freedom abolish censorship of the press?
+By no means. They padlocked all papers and magazines
+which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the new
+masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia
+or Archangel (not much to choose) and in general showed
+themselves a hundred times more intolerant than the much
+maligned ministers and police sergeants of the Little White
+Father.</p>
+
+<p>It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community,
+which heartily believed in the motto of Milton that
+the “liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according
+to our own conscience, is the highest form of liberty.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162"></a>[162]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see
+the day when the Sermon on the Mount was declared to
+be a dangerous pro-German document which must not be
+allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million sovereign
+citizens and the publication of which would expose the
+editors and the printers to fines and imprisonment.</p>
+
+<p>In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to
+drop the further study of history and to take up short
+story writing or real estate.</p>
+
+<p>But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall
+stick to my job, trying to remember that in a well regulated
+state, every decent citizen is supposed to have the
+right to say and think and utter whatever he feels to be
+true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and
+comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners
+of polite society or break one of the rules of the local
+police.</p>
+
+<p>This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all
+official censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought
+to watch out for certain magazines and papers which are
+being printed for the purpose of turning pornography
+into private gain. But for the rest, I would let every one
+print whatever he liked.</p>
+
+<p>I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical
+person who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with
+the history of the last five hundred years. That period
+shows clearly that violent methods of suppression of the
+printed or spoken word have never yet done the slightest
+good.</p>
+
+<p>Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is
+contained in a small and hermetically closed space and subjected
+to a violent impact from without. A poor devil, full
+of half-baked economic notions, when left to himself will<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163"></a>[163]</span>
+attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and as a rule
+will be laughed at for his pains.</p>
+
+<p>The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate
+sheriff, dragged to jail and condemned to thirty-five years
+of solitary confinement, will become an object of great pity
+and in the end will be regarded and honored as a martyr.</p>
+
+<p>But it will be well to remember one thing.</p>
+
+<p>There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as
+martyrs for good causes. They are tricky people and one
+never can tell what they will do next.</p>
+
+<p>Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If
+they have anything to say that is good, we ought to know
+it, and if not, they will soon be forgotten. The Greeks
+seem to have felt that way, and the Romans did until the
+days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief
+of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine
+personage, a second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand
+miles removed from all ordinary mortals, this was
+changed.</p>
+
+<p>The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of
+“offering insult to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a
+purely political misdemeanor and from the time of Augustus
+until the days of Justinian, many people were sent to prison
+because they had been a little too outspoken in their opinions
+about their rulers. But if one let the person of the
+emperor alone, there was practically no other subject of
+conversation which the Roman must avoid.</p>
+
+<p>This happy condition came to an end when the world
+was brought under the domination of the Church. The
+line between good and bad, between orthodox and heretical,
+was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead more than
+a few years. During the second half of the first century,
+the apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164"></a>[164]</span>
+of Ephesus in Asia Minor, a place famous for its
+amulets and charms. He went about preaching and casting
+out devils, and with such great success that he convinced
+many people of the error of their heathenish ways.
+As a token of repentance they came together one fine day
+with all their books of magic and burned more than ten
+thousand dollars worth of secret formulae, as you may read
+in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part
+of a group of repentant sinners and it is not stated that
+Paul made an attempt to forbid the other Ephesians from
+reading or owning similar books.</p>
+
+<p>Such a step was not taken until a century later.</p>
+
+<p>Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this
+same city of Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul
+was condemned and the faithful were admonished not to
+read it.</p>
+
+<p>During the next two hundred years, there was very little
+censorship. There also were very few books.</p>
+
+<p>But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian
+Church had become the official church of the Empire,
+the supervision of the written word became part of
+the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were absolutely
+forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the
+people were warned that they must read them at their own
+risk. Until authors found it more convenient to assure
+themselves of the approval of the authorities before they
+published their works and made it a rule to send their manuscripts
+to the local bishops for their approbation.</p>
+
+<p>Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his
+works would be allowed to exist. A book which one Pope
+had pronounced harmless might be denounced as blasphemous
+and indecent by his successor.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165"></a>[165]</span></p>
+
+<p>On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes
+quite effectively against the risk of being burned together
+with their parchment offspring and the system worked well
+enough as long as books were copied by hand and it took five
+whole years to get out an edition of three volumes.</p>
+
+<p>All this of course was changed by the famous invention
+of Johann Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.</p>
+
+<p>After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising
+publisher was able to produce as many as four or five hundred
+copies in less than two weeks’ time and in the short
+period between 1453 and 1500 the people of western and
+southern Europe were presented with not less than forty
+thousand different editions of books that had thus far been
+obtainable only in some of the better stocked libraries.</p>
+
+<p>The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the
+number of available books with very serious misgivings.
+It was difficult enough to catch a single heretic with a single
+home made copy of the Gospels. What then of twenty million
+heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited
+volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority
+and it was deemed necessary to appoint a special
+tribunal to inspect all forthcoming publications at their
+source and say which could be published and which must
+never see the light of day.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the different lists of books which from time to time
+were published by this committee as containing “forbidden
+knowledge” grew that famous Index which came to enjoy
+almost as nefarious a reputation as the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>But it would be unfair to create the impression that such
+a supervision of the printing-press was something peculiar
+to the Catholic Church. Many states, frightened by the
+sudden avalanche of printed material that threatened to
+upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their local<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166"></a>[166]</span>
+publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and
+had forbidden them to print anything that did not bear
+the official mark of approbation.</p>
+
+<p>But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued
+until today. And even there it has been greatly
+modified since the middle of the sixteenth century. It had
+to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously that even
+that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called
+Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to
+inspect all printed works, was soon years behind in its task.
+Not to mention the flood of rag-pulp and printers-ink which
+was poured upon the landscape in the form of newspapers
+and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however
+diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify,
+in less than a couple of thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion
+how terribly this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon
+the rulers who force it upon their unfortunate subjects.</p>
+
+<p>Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman
+Empire, had declared himself against the persecution of
+authors as “a foolish thing which tended to advertise books
+which otherwise would never attract any public attention.”</p>
+
+<p>The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner
+had the Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden
+books was promoted to a sort of handy guide for those
+who wished to keep themselves thoroughly informed upon
+the subject of current literature. More than that. During
+the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany
+and in the Low Countries maintained special agents
+in Rome whose business it was to get hold of advance copies
+of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon as they had obtained
+these, they entrusted them to special couriers who raced
+across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167"></a>[167]</span>
+valuable information might be delivered to their patrons with
+the least possible loss of time. Then the German and the
+Dutch printing shops would set to work and would get out
+hastily printed special editions which were sold at an exorbitant
+profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory
+by an army of professional book-leggers.</p>
+
+<p>But the number of copies that could be carried across
+the frontier remained necessarily very small and in such
+countries as Italy and Spain and Portugal, where the Index
+was actually enforced until a short time ago, the results of
+this policy of repression became very noticeable.</p>
+
+<p>If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for
+progress, the reason was not difficult to find. Not only
+were the students in their universities deprived of all foreign
+text-books, but they were forced to use a domestic product
+of very inferior quality.</p>
+
+<p>And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from
+occupying themselves seriously with literature or science.
+For no man in his senses would undertake to write a book
+when he ran the risk of seeing his work “corrected” to
+pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond recognition
+by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial
+Board of Investigators.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes
+in a wine-shop.</p>
+
+<p>Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his
+people, he wrote the story of Don Quixote.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168"></a>[168]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_X">CHAPTER X<br>
+<span class="smaller">CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN
+GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend
+most eagerly to those who are tired of modern fiction,
+there occurs a stereotype sort of warning in many of
+the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his more
+timid friends.</p>
+
+<p>“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the
+Lutheran controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very
+careful how you handle it, because you might easily offend
+the Pope, who wishes you well.”</p>
+
+<p>Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge
+tells me that you are about to publish a book of
+short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do not incur the displeasure
+of the Emperor, who might be in a position to
+do you great harm.”</p>
+
+<p>Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England
+or the faculty of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor
+of theology in Cambridge who must be treated with
+special consideration, lest the author be deprived of his
+income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into
+the clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion)
+is relegated to the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition
+has closed its doors these hundred years, protection is of
+little practical use in a career devoted to literature and the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169"></a>[169]</span>
+word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where historians
+come together.</p>
+
+<p>But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended
+to write a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort
+of letters of admonition and advice began to find their way
+to my cloistered cell.</p>
+
+<p>“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,”
+writes the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure
+that you mention this most regrettable fact in your forthcoming
+book.”</p>
+
+<p>Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has
+started to boycott a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic.
+You will want to say something about this in your
+story of tolerance.”</p>
+
+<p>And so on.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly
+and altogether reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come
+within the jurisdiction of a volume on tolerance. They are
+merely manifestations of bad manners and a lack of decent
+public spirit. They are very different from that official
+form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the
+laws of the Church and the State and which made persecution
+a holy duty on the part of all good citizens.</p>
+
+<p>History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching
+by Rembrandt. It must cast a vivid light upon certain
+selected causes, on those which are best and most important,
+and leave all the rest in the shadow and unseen.</p>
+
+<p>Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the
+modern spirit of intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled
+in our news sheets, it is possible to discern signs of a
+more hopeful future.</p>
+
+<p>For nowadays many things which previous generations
+would have accepted as self-evident and which would have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170"></a>[170]</span>
+been passed by with the remark that “it has always been that
+way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often our neighbors
+rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded
+as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our
+fathers and our grandfathers and not infrequently they are
+successful in their warfare upon some particularly obnoxious
+demonstration of the mob spirit.</p>
+
+<p>This book must be kept very short.</p>
+
+<p>I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful
+pawn-brokers, the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic
+supremacy, the dark ignorance of backwoods evangelists,
+the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis. These
+good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.</p>
+
+<p>But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the
+State, they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized
+countries, such a possibility is entirely precluded.</p>
+
+<p>Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more
+discomfort in any given community than the combined efforts
+of measles, small-pox and a gossiping woman. But private
+intolerance does not possess executioners of its own. If,
+as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes
+the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law
+and becomes a proper subject for police supervision.</p>
+
+<p>Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot
+prescribe to an entire nation what it shall think and say and
+eat and drink. If it tries to do this, it creates such a terrific
+resentment among all decent folk, that the new ordinance
+becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out even
+in the District of Columbia.</p>
+
+<p>In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the
+indifference of the majority of the citizens of a free country
+will allow it to go, and no further. Whereas official
+intolerance is practically almighty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171"></a>[171]</span></p>
+
+<p>It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.</p>
+
+<p>It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims
+of its meddlesome fury. It will listen to no argument.
+And ever again it backs up its decisions by an appeal to
+the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain the will
+of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were
+an exclusive possession of those who had been successful at
+the most recent elections.</p>
+
+<p>If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used
+in the sense of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention
+to the private variety, have patience with me.</p>
+
+<p>I can only do one thing at a time.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172"></a>[172]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XI">CHAPTER XI<br>
+<span class="smaller">RENAISSANCE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes
+pleasure in asking himself, what do billiard-balls
+and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles and boiled
+shirts and door-mats think of this world?</p>
+
+<p>But what I would like to know is the exact psychological
+reaction of the men who are ordered to handle the big modern
+siege guns. During the war a great many people performed
+a great many strange tasks, but was there ever a
+more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?</p>
+
+<p>All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.</p>
+
+<p>A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red
+glow whether he had hit the gas factory or not.</p>
+
+<p>The submarine commander could return after a couple
+of hours to judge by the abundance of flotsam in how far
+he had been successful.</p>
+
+<p>The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of
+realizing that by his mere continued presence in a particular
+trench he was at least holding his own.</p>
+
+<p>Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible
+object, could take down the telephone and could ask
+his colleague, hidden in a dead tree seven miles away, whether
+the doomed church tower was showing signs of deterioration
+or whether he should try again at a different angle.</p>
+
+<p>But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange
+and unreal world of their own. Even with the assistance<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173"></a>[173]</span>
+of a couple of full-fledged professors of ballistics, they were
+unable to foretell what fate awaited those projectiles which
+they shot so blithely into space. Their shells might actually
+hit the object for which they were destined. They
+might land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart
+of a fortress. But then again they might strike a
+church or an orphan asylum or they might bury themselves
+peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing
+any harm whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the
+siege-gunners. They too handle a sort of heavy artillery.
+Their literary missiles may start a revolution or a conflagration
+in the most unlikely spots. But more often they
+are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until
+they are used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand
+or a flower pot.</p>
+
+<p>Surely there never was a period in history when so much
+rag-pulp was consumed within so short a space as the era
+commonly known as the Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula,
+every Doctor Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and
+Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton plain rushed into
+print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention
+the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation
+of the Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the
+best pattern of their Roman grandfathers, and the countless
+lovers of coins, statuary, images, pictures, manuscripts
+and ancient armor who for almost three centuries kept themselves
+busy classifying, ordering, tabulating, listing, filing
+and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral
+ruins and who then published their collections in countless
+folios illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings
+and the most ponderous of wood-cuts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174"></a>[174]</span></p>
+
+<p>This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for
+the Frobens and the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other
+new firms of printers who were making a fortune out of the
+invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but otherwise the
+literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly
+affect the state of that world in which the authors of the
+fifteenth and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves.
+The distinction of having contributed something
+new was restricted to only a very few heroes of the quill
+and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely
+discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had
+been successful and how much damage their writings had
+actually done. But first and last they managed to demolish
+a great many of the obstacles which stood in the way
+of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude
+for the thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of
+rubbish which otherwise would continue to clutter our intellectual
+front yard.</p>
+
+<p>Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily
+a forward-looking movement. It turned its back
+in disgust upon the recent past, called the works of its immediate
+predecessors “barbaric” (or “Gothic” in the language
+of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the same
+reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest
+upon those arts which seem to be pervaded with that
+curious substance known as the “classical spirit.”</p>
+
+<p>If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow
+for the liberty of conscience and for tolerance and for a
+better world in general, it was done in spite of the men
+who were considered the leaders of the new movement.</p>
+
+<p>Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there
+had been people who had questioned the rights of a Roman
+bishop to dictate to Bohemian peasants and to English yeomen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175"></a>[175]</span>
+in what language they should say their prayers, in
+what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much
+they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should
+read and how they should bring up their children. And
+all of them had been crushed by the strength of that super-state,
+the power of which they had undertaken to defy.
+Even when they had acted as champions and representatives
+of a national cause, they had failed.</p>
+
+<p>The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously
+into the river Rhine, were a warning to all the
+world that the Papal Monarchy still ruled supreme.</p>
+
+<p>The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner,
+told the humble peasants of Leicestershire that councils and
+Popes could reach beyond the grave.</p>
+
+<p>Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.</p>
+
+<p>The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully
+during fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could
+not be taken by assault. The scandals which had taken
+place within these hallowed enclosures; the wars between
+three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate and
+exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption
+of the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws
+were made for the purpose of being broken by those who
+were willing to pay for such favors; the utter demoralization
+of monastic life; the venality of those who used the
+recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to
+blackmail poor parents into paying large sums of money
+for the benefit of their dead children; all these things, although
+widely known, never really threatened the safety of
+the Church.</p>
+
+<p>But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and
+women who were not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters,
+who had no particular grievance against either pope or<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176"></a>[176]</span>
+bishop, these caused the damage which finally made the old
+edifice collapse.</p>
+
+<p>What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish
+with his high ideals of Christian virtue was brought
+about by a motley crowd of private citizens who had no
+other ambition than to live and die (preferably at a ripe
+old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of this world
+and faithful sons of the Mother Church.</p>
+
+<p>They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They
+represented every sort of profession and they would have
+been very angry, had an historian told them what they were
+doing.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.</p>
+
+<p>We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen
+such wondrous sights that his neighbors, accustomed to the
+smaller scale of their western cities, called him “Million
+Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he told them
+of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls
+that would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black
+Sea.</p>
+
+<p>All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important
+rôle in the history of progress. He was not much
+of a writer. He shared the prejudice of his class and his
+age against the literary profession. A gentleman (even
+a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar with
+double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a
+goose-quill. Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to
+turn author. But the fortunes of war carried him into a
+Genoese prison. And there, to while away the tedious hours
+of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened
+to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout
+way the people of Europe learned many things about
+this world which they had never known before. For although<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177"></a>[177]</span>
+Polo was a simple-minded fellow who firmly believed
+that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor
+had been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who
+wanted to show the heathen “what true faith could do,”
+and who swallowed all the stories about people without heads
+and chickens with three legs which were so popular in his
+day, his report did more to upset the geographical theories
+of the Church than anything that had appeared during
+the previous twelve hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the
+Church. He would have been terribly upset if any one
+had compared him with his near-contemporary, the famous
+Roger Bacon, who was an out and out scientist and paid
+for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of enforced
+literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.</p>
+
+<p>And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could
+follow Bacon when he went chasing rainbows, and spun those
+fine evolutionary theories which threatened to upset all the
+ideas held sacred in his own time, every citizen who had
+been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the
+world was full of a number of things the existence of which
+the authors of the Old Testament had never even suspected.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single
+book caused that rebellion against scriptural authority
+which was to occur before the world could gain a modicum
+of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever the result of
+centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and
+straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators
+and the travelers, understandable to all the people,
+did a great deal to bring about that spirit of scepticism which
+characterizes the latter half of the Renaissance and which
+allowed people to say and write things which only a few<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178"></a>[178]</span>
+years before would have brought them into contact with the
+agents of the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio
+listened on the first day of their agreeable exile from
+Florence. All religious systems, so it told, were probably
+equally true and equally false. But if this were true, and
+they were all equally true and false, then how could people
+be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither
+be proven nor contradicted?</p>
+
+<p>Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar
+like Lorenzo Valla. He died as a highly respectable member
+of the government of the Roman Church. Yet in the
+pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly proven
+that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the
+provinces of the West,” which Constantine the Great was
+supposed to have made to Pope Sylvester (and upon which
+the Popes had ever since based their claims to be regarded
+as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but a clumsy
+fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the
+Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.</p>
+
+<p>Or to return to more practical questions, what were
+faithful Christians, carefully reared in the ideas of Saint
+Augustine who had taught that a belief in the presence
+of people on the other side of the earth was both blasphemous
+and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be
+able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had
+no reason to exist, what indeed were the good people of
+the year 1499 to think of this doctrine when Vasco da Gama
+returned from his first voyage to the Indies and described
+the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other
+side of this planet?</p>
+
+<p>What were these same simple folk, who had always been
+told that our world was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179"></a>[179]</span>
+the center of the universe, what were they to believe when
+the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage around the
+globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was
+shown to contain some rather serious errors?</p>
+
+<p>I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was
+not an era of conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual
+matters it often showed a most regrettable lack of real interest.
+Everything during these three hundred years was
+dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment. Even
+the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous
+doctrines of some of their subjects, were only too happy
+to invite those self-same rebels for dinner if they happened
+to be good conversationalists and knew something about
+printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue, like
+Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives
+as the bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked
+the fundaments of the Christian faith with a great
+deal more violence than good taste.</p>
+
+<p>But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest
+in the business of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe
+undercurrent of discontent with the existing order of society
+and the restrictions put upon the development of human
+reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.</p>
+
+<p>Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus,
+there is an interval of almost two centuries. During these
+two centuries, the copyist and the printer never enjoyed an
+idle moment. And outside of the books published by the
+Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important
+piece of work which did not contain some indirect reference
+to the sad plight into which the world had fallen when
+the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome had been superseded
+by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180"></a>[180]</span>
+western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant
+monks.</p>
+
+<p>The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’
+Medici were not particularly interested in ethics. They
+were practical men who made the best of a practical world.
+Outwardly they remained at peace with the Church because
+it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which
+was capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously
+took part in any of the several attempts at reform
+or questioned the institutions under which they lived.</p>
+
+<p>But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their
+continual search after new emotions, the very instability
+of their restless minds, caused a world which had been
+brought up in the conviction “We know” to ask the question
+“Do we really know?”</p>
+
+<p>And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future
+generations than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the
+assembled works of Raffael.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181"></a>[181]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XII">CHAPTER XII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE REFORMATION</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Modern psychology has taught us several useful
+things about ourselves. One of them is the fact
+that we rarely do anything actuated by one single
+motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university
+or refuse a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we
+proclaim that the true life of intellectual freedom can only
+be lived abroad or vow that we will never again leave the
+shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black
+white or white black, there are always a number of divergent
+reasons which have caused us to make our decision,
+and way down deep in our hearts we know this to be true.
+But as we would cut a sorry figure with the world in general
+if we should ever dare to be quite honest with ourselves
+or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable
+and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit
+for public consumption and then expose it for all the world
+to behold as “the reason why we did so and so.”</p>
+
+<p>But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that
+it is quite possible to fool most of the people most of the
+time, no one has as yet discovered a method by which the
+average individual can fool himself for more than a few
+minutes.</p>
+
+<p>We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing
+truth and therefore ever since the beginning of civilization
+people have tacitly agreed with each other that this should
+never under any circumstances be referred to in public.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182"></a>[182]</span></p>
+
+<p>What we think in private, that is our own business. As
+long as we maintain an outward air of respectability, we
+are perfectly satisfied with ourselves and merrily act upon
+the principle “You believe my fibs and I will believe yours.”</p>
+
+<p>Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception
+to this generous rule of conduct. As a result, nature is
+rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.
+And as history thus far has been a pastime of the few, the
+poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull life, especially
+when we compare it to the career of many of her less respectable
+sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing
+and have been invited to every party ever since the beginning
+of time. This of course has been a source of great
+annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her own subtle
+way she has managed to get her revenge.</p>
+
+<p>A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one
+and ofttimes very expensive in the matter of human lives
+and property.</p>
+
+<p>For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that
+systematic lying, continued during the course of centuries,
+will eventually play hob with the peace and happiness of
+the entire world, our planet is at once enveloped in the
+smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry begin
+to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers
+commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And
+ere all these people have been safely returned to their respective
+homes or cemeteries, whole countries have been
+laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been drained
+down to the last kopek.</p>
+
+<p>Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn
+upon the members of our guild that history is a science as
+well as an art and is therefore subject to certain of the immutable
+laws of nature which thus far have only been respected<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183"></a>[183]</span>
+in chemical laboratories and astronomical observatories.
+And as a result we are now doing some very useful
+scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit
+to all coming generations.</p>
+
+<p>Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the
+head of this chapter, to wit: the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions
+regarding this great social and spiritual upheaval. It was
+either wholly good or wholly bad.</p>
+
+<p>According to the adherents of the former opinion it had
+been the result of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on
+the part of a number of noble theologians who, profoundly
+shocked by the wickedness and the venality of the papal
+super-state, had established a separate church of their own
+where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those
+who were seriously trying to be true Christians.</p>
+
+<p>Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.</p>
+
+<p>The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond
+the Alps, was the result of a damnable and most reprehensible
+conspiracy on the part of a number of despicable princes
+who wanted to get unmarried and who besides hoped to
+acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their
+Holy Mother the Church.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, both sides were right and both sides were
+wrong.</p>
+
+<p>The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with
+all sorts of motives. And it is only within very recent times
+that we have begun to realize how religious discontent played
+only a minor rôle in this great upheaval and that it was
+really an unavoidable social and economic revolution with
+a slightly theological background.</p>
+
+<p>Of course it is much easier to teach our children that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184"></a>[184]</span>
+good Prince Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took
+a profound personal interest in the reformed doctrines, than
+to explain to them the complicated machinations of an unscrupulous
+politician who willingly accepted the help of the
+infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In consequence
+whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years
+made a magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave
+who hoped to see the house of Hesse play the rôle thus
+far played by the rival house of Hapsburg.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope
+Clement into a loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants
+of his declining strength trying to prevent his flocks
+from following false leaders, than to depict him as a typical
+prince of the house of Medici who regarded the Reformation
+as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks
+and used the power of the Church to further the interests
+of his own Italian fatherland, that we need feel no surprise
+if such a fabulous figure smiles at us from the pages of
+most Catholic text-books.</p>
+
+<p>But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe,
+we fortunate settlers in a new world are under no obligation
+to persist in the errors of our continental ancestors and are
+at liberty to draw a few conclusions of our own.</p>
+
+<p>Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter
+of Luther, was a man dominated by an enormous
+political ambition, it does not necessarily follow that he was
+insincere in his religious convictions.</p>
+
+<p>By no means.</p>
+
+<p>When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the
+year 1529, he knew as well as his fellow signers that they
+were about to “expose themselves to the violence of a terrible
+storm,” and might end their lives on the scaffold.
+If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185"></a>[185]</span>
+would never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually
+played.</p>
+
+<p>But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is
+exceedingly difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an
+historical character (or for that matter, any of our immediate
+neighbors) without a profound knowledge of all
+the many motives which have inspired him to do what he
+has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted
+to do.</p>
+
+<p>The French have a proverb that “to know everything is
+to forgive everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I
+would like to offer an amendment and change it as follows:
+“To know everything is to understand everything.” We
+can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who
+ages ago reserved that right to himself.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand”
+and that is more than enough for our limited human ability.</p>
+
+<p>And now let me return to the Reformation, which started
+me upon this slight detour.</p>
+
+<p>As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily
+a manifestation of a new spirit which had been born
+as a result of the economic and political development of
+the last three centuries and which came to be known as “nationalism”
+and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that
+foreign super-state into which all European countries had
+been forced during the course of the last five centuries.</p>
+
+<p>Without the common denominator of some such grievance,
+it would never have been possible to unite Germans
+and Finns and Danes and Swedes and Frenchmen and Englishmen
+and Norsemen into a single cohesive party, strong
+enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they
+had been held for such a long time.</p>
+
+<p>If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186"></a>[186]</span>
+had not been temporarily bound together by one great ideal,
+far surpassing their own private grudges and aspirations,
+the Reformation could never have succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>It would have degenerated into a series of small local
+uprisings, easily suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries
+and half a dozen energetic inquisitors.</p>
+
+<p>The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their
+followers would have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses
+and Albigenses had been slaughtered before them.
+And the Papal Monarchy would have scored another easy
+triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those
+guilty of a “breach of discipline.”</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded
+by the smallest of all possible margins. And as soon as
+the victory had been won and the menace which had threatened
+the existence of all the rebels had been removed, the
+Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number
+of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished
+scale to repeat all the errors of which their enemies had been
+guilty in the heyday of their power.</p>
+
+<p>A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten,
+but a very wise fellow) once said that we must learn
+to love humanity in spite of itself.</p>
+
+<p>To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries
+upon this era of great hope and even greater disappointment,
+to think of the sublime courage of so many
+men and women who wasted their lives on the scaffold and
+on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be realized,
+to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure
+citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to
+remember the utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as
+a movement towards a more liberal and more intelligent
+world, is to put one’s charity to a most severe test.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187"></a>[187]</span></p>
+
+<p>For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away
+from this world many things that were good and noble and
+beautiful and it added a great many others that were narrow
+and hateful and graceless. And instead of making the
+history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it
+made it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however,
+was not so much the fault of the Reformation as of
+certain inherent weaknesses in the mental habits of most
+people.</p>
+
+<p>They refuse to be hurried.</p>
+
+<p>They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their
+leaders.</p>
+
+<p>They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will
+all cross the bridge that leads into the newly discovered
+territory. But they will do so in their own good time and
+bringing with them as much of the ancestral furniture as
+they can possibly carry.</p>
+
+<p>As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish
+an entirely new relationship between the individual Christian
+and his God, which was to do away with all the prejudices
+and all the corruptions of a bygone era, became so
+thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its
+trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor
+backward and soon looked for all the world like a replica
+of that papal establishment which it held in such great
+abhorrence.</p>
+
+<p>For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion.
+It could not rise above the mean average of intelligence of
+the majority of its adherents.</p>
+
+<p>And as a result the people of western and northern Europe
+did not progress as much as might have been expected.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188"></a>[188]</span>
+Reformation gave the world a book which was held to be
+infallible.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose
+a thousand and one little potentates, each one of whom in
+his own way tried to rule supreme.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined
+halves, the ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics,
+it created endless little groups of dissenters who had nothing
+in common but a most intense hatred for all those who failed
+to share their own opinions. Instead of establishing a reign
+of tolerance, it followed the example of the early Church
+and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched
+behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions,
+it declared bitter warfare upon those who dared to
+disagree with the officially established doctrines of the community
+in which they happened to live.</p>
+
+<p>All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.</p>
+
+<p>But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development
+of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.</p>
+
+<p>To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin,
+there exists only one word, and rather a terrible word,
+“colossal.”</p>
+
+<p>A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater
+college somewhere in the backwoods of the German
+hinterland, who boldly burns a Papal Bull and hammers
+his own rebellious opinions to the door of a church; a sickly
+French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a fortress
+which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy;
+such men present us with examples of fortitude so unique
+that the modern world can offer no adequate comparison.</p>
+
+<p>That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters,
+friends with a purpose of their own and supporters who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189"></a>[189]</span>
+hoped to fish successfully in troubled waters, all this is
+neither here nor there.</p>
+
+<p>When these men began to gamble with their lives for the
+sake of their conscience, they could not foresee that this
+would happen and that most of the nations of the north
+would eventually enlist under their banners.</p>
+
+<p>But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of
+their own making, they were obliged to go whither the current
+carried them.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water
+took all of their strength. In far away Rome the Pope
+had at last learned that this contemptible disturbance was
+something more serious than a personal quarrel between a
+few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue
+on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great
+joy of his many creditors, he temporarily ceased building
+his pet cathedral and called together a council of war. The
+papal bulls and excommunications flew fast and furiously.
+Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the rebellion,
+with their backs against the wall, were forced to
+stand and fight.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the first time in history that great men in the
+midst of a desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion.
+The same Luther who at one time proclaims that it is
+“against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,” a few years
+later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of
+the wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have
+a leaning towards the ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems
+to have lost his reason.</p>
+
+<p>The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting
+that we must not force our own system of logic upon God,
+ends his days by burning an opponent whose power of
+reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190"></a>[190]</span></p>
+
+<p>The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters
+of tomorrow.</p>
+
+<p>And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has
+at last followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained
+faithful sons of the Middle Ages as long as they lived.</p>
+
+<p>Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to
+them in the light of a virtue. As long as they themselves
+were outcasts, they were willing to invoke the divine right
+of freedom of conscience that they might use it as an argument
+against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this
+trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the
+Protestant junk-room, already cluttered with so many other
+good intentions that had been discarded as unpractical.
+There it lay, forgotten and neglected, until a great many
+years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk full of
+old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off
+the rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different
+nature from those who had fought the good fight in
+the early days of the sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly
+to the cause of tolerance. Not through what it accomplished
+directly. In that field the gain was small indeed.
+But indirectly the results of the Reformation were all on
+the side of progress.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible.
+The Church had never positively forbidden people to read
+the Bible, but neither had it encouraged the study of the
+sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at last every honest
+baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the holy
+work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and
+could draw his own conclusions without running the risk
+of being burned at the stake.</p>
+
+<p>Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191"></a>[191]</span>
+fear which we feel before the mysteries of the unknown.
+During the first two hundred years which followed immediately
+upon the Reformation, pious Protestants believed
+everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s
+ass to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a
+single comma (the “inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham
+Colovius!) knew better than to let their sceptical tittering
+be heard by the community at large. Not because
+they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant
+pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly
+unpleasant and the economic consequences of a public
+ministerial censure were often very serious, not to say disastrous.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book
+which was really the national history of a small nation of
+shepherds and traders was to bear results which Luther
+and Calvin and the other reformers had never foreseen.</p>
+
+<p>If they had, I am certain they would have shared the
+Church’s dislike of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept
+the scriptures carefully out of the hands of the uninitiated.
+For in the end, an increasing number of serious students
+began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly
+interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling
+tales of cruelty, greed and murder that it could
+not possibly have been inspired and must, by the very nature
+of its contents, be the product of a people who had still lived
+in a state of semi-barbarism.</p>
+
+<p>After that, of course, it was impossible for many people
+to regard the Bible as the only font of all true wisdom.
+And once this obstacle to free speculation had been removed,
+the current of scientific investigation, dammed up for almost
+a thousand years, began to flow in its natural channel
+and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192"></a>[192]</span>
+philosophers were picked up where they had been left off
+twenty centuries before.</p>
+
+<p>And in the second place, and this is even more important
+from the point of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered
+northern and western Europe from the dictatorship
+of a power which under the guise of a religious organization
+had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and highly
+despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.</p>
+
+<p>With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly
+agree. But they too have reason to be grateful to a movement
+which was not only unavoidable, but which was to render
+a most salutary service to their own faith. For, thrown
+upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic effort
+to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once
+sacred name a byword for rapacity and tyranny.</p>
+
+<p>And she succeeded most brilliantly.</p>
+
+<p>After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias
+were tolerated in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before
+continued to be Italians. A deflection from this rule
+was practically impossible, as the Roman proletariat would
+have turned the city upside down if the cardinals entrusted
+with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German
+or a Frenchman or any other foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care
+and only candidates of the highest character could hope
+to be considered. And these new masters, faithfully aided
+by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries, began a thorough
+house-cleaning.</p>
+
+<p>The sale of indulgences came to an end.</p>
+
+<p>Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth
+to obey) the rules laid down by their founders.</p>
+
+<p>Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized
+cities.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193"></a>[193]</span></p>
+
+<p>And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance
+was replaced by an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent
+in good deeds and in humble service towards those unfortunate
+people who were not strong enough to carry the
+burden of existence by themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been
+lost was never regained. Speaking with a certain geographical
+freedom, the northern half of Europe remained
+Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>But when we translate the result of the Reformation into
+the language of pictures, the actual changes which took
+place in Europe become more clearly revealed.</p>
+
+<p>During the Middle Ages there had been one universal
+spiritual and intellectual prison-house.</p>
+
+<p>The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building
+and out of part of the available material it had constructed
+a jail of its own.</p>
+
+<p>After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons,
+one reserved exclusively for the Catholics, the other for
+the Protestants.</p>
+
+<p>At least that had been the original plan.</p>
+
+<p>But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage
+of centuries of training along the lines of persecution and
+repression, failed to make their lockup dissenter-proof.</p>
+
+<p>Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large
+number of the unruly inmates escaped.</p>
+
+<p>Ere long the entire building was a wreck.</p>
+
+<p>At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads
+of stones and beams and iron bars which they used
+the next morning to build a little fortress of their own.
+But although this had the outward appearance of that original
+jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194"></a>[194]</span>
+the Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a
+new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates,
+than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled
+trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been
+deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication,
+torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were
+absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were
+forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such
+a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and
+proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their
+temporary convictions.</p>
+
+<p>This process was repeated so often that finally there
+developed a sort of spiritual no-man’s-land between the
+different lockups where curious souls could roam at random
+and where honest people could think whatever they
+pleased without hindrance or molestation.</p>
+
+<p>And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered
+to the cause of tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195"></a>[195]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIII">CHAPTER XIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">ERASMUS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis.
+Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon
+other occasions it does not make itself manifest until
+the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book without
+a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles.
+There probably is something the matter with it.</p>
+
+<p>The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes
+ago, for I have now reached the point where the idea of
+a work upon the subject of tolerance in the year of grace
+1925 seems quite preposterous; where all the labor spent
+thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light of
+so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of
+all to make a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and
+Montaigne and White and use the carbon copies of my own
+work to light the stove.</p>
+
+<p>How to explain this?</p>
+
+<p>There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the
+inevitable feeling of boredom which overtakes an author
+when he has been living with his topic on a very intimate
+footing for too long a time. In the second place, the suspicion
+that books of this sort will not be of the slightest
+practical value. And in the third place the fear that the
+present volume will be merely used as a quarry from which
+our less tolerant fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts
+with which to bolster up their own bad causes.</p>
+
+<p>But apart from these arguments (which hold good for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196"></a>[196]</span>
+most serious books) there is in the present case the almost
+insurmountable difficulty of “system.”</p>
+
+<p>A story in order to be a success must have a beginning
+and an end. This book has a beginning, but can it ever
+have an end?</p>
+
+<p>What I mean is this.</p>
+
+<p>I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in
+the name of righteousness and justice, but really caused
+by intolerance.</p>
+
+<p>I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell
+when intolerance was elevated to the rank of one of the
+major virtues.</p>
+
+<p>I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers
+shout with one accord, “Down with this curse, and let us
+all be tolerant!”</p>
+
+<p>But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how
+this highly desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks
+which undertake to give us instruction in everything
+from after-dinner speaking to ventriloquism. In an advertisement
+of a correspondence course last Sunday I read
+of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which
+the institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange
+for a very small gratuity. But no one thus far has offered
+to explain in forty (or in forty thousand) lessons “how to
+become tolerant.”</p>
+
+<p>And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to
+so many secrets, refuses to be of any use in this emergency.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to
+slavery or free trade or capital punishment or the growth
+and development of Gothic architecture, for slavery and
+free trade and capital punishment and Gothic architecture
+are very definite and concrete things. For lack of all other
+material we could at least study the lives of the men and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197"></a>[197]</span>
+women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery
+and capital punishment and Gothic architecture or those
+who had opposed them. And from the manner in which
+those excellent people had approached their subjects, from
+their personal habits, their associations, their preferences
+in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches
+they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about
+the ideals which they had so energetically espoused or so
+bitterly denounced.</p>
+
+<p>But there never were any professional protagonists of
+tolerance. Those who worked most zealously for the great
+cause did so incidentally. Their tolerance was a by-product.
+They were engaged in other pursuits. They were statesmen
+or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans.
+In the midst of the king business or their medical practice
+or making steel engravings they found time to say a few
+good words for tolerance, but the struggle for tolerance
+was not the whole of their careers. They were interested
+in it as they may have been interested in playing chess or
+fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted
+group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great
+and Thomas Jefferson and Montaigne as boon companions!)
+it is almost impossible to discover that common trait of
+character which as a rule is to be found in all those who
+are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing
+or delivering the world from sin.</p>
+
+<p>In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams.
+Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for
+every dilemma. But upon this particular subject, the Bible
+and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even old Benham
+leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote
+from memory) came nearest to the problem when he said
+that most men had just enough religion to hate their neighbors<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198"></a>[198]</span>
+but not quite enough to love them. Unfortunately that
+bright remark does not quite cover our present difficulty.
+There have been people possessed of as much religion as any
+one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors
+as cordially as the best of them. There have been
+others who were totally devoid of the religious instinct who
+squandered their affection upon all the stray cats and dogs
+and human beings of Christendom.</p>
+
+<p>No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And
+upon due cogitation (but with a feeling of great uncertainty)
+I shall now state what I suspect to be the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their
+differences, had all of them one thing in common; their
+faith was tempered by doubt; they might honestly believe
+that they themselves were right, but they never reached
+the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute
+conviction.</p>
+
+<p>In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic
+clamoring for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent
+that, it may be well to point to the lesson
+taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional
+aversion to any such ideal of standardization.</p>
+
+<p>Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who
+are apt to die because no one is present to take them out
+of the rain. Hundred-percent pure iron has long since
+been discarded for the composite metal called steel. No
+jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent
+pure gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must
+be made of six or seven different varieties of wood. And
+as for a meal composed entirely of a hundred-percent mush,
+I thank you, no!</p>
+
+<p>In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds
+and I see no reason why faith should be an exception.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199"></a>[199]</span>
+Unless the base of our “certainty” contains a certain
+amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith will sound as
+tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a trombone
+made of brass.</p>
+
+<p>It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set
+the heroes of tolerance apart from the rest of the world.</p>
+
+<p>As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction,
+unselfish devotion to duty and all the other household virtues,
+most of these men could have passed muster before
+a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would go further than
+that and state that at least half of them lived and died in
+such a way that they would now be among the saints, if
+their peculiar trend of conscience had not forced them to
+be the open and avowed enemies of that institution which
+has taken upon itself the exclusive right of elevating ordinary
+human beings to certain celestial dignities.</p>
+
+<p>But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.</p>
+
+<p>They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known
+before them) that the problem which faced them was so
+vast that no one in his right senses would ever expect it
+to be solved. And while they might hope and pray that
+the road which they had taken would eventually lead them
+to a safe goal, they could never convince themselves that
+it was the only right one, that all other roads were wrong
+and that the enchanting by-paths which delighted the
+hearts of so many simple people were evil thoroughfares
+leading to damnation.</p>
+
+<p>All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in
+most of our catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These
+preach the superior virtue of a world illuminated by the
+pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps so. But during
+those centuries when that flame was supposed to be
+burning at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200"></a>[200]</span>
+cannot be said to have been either particularly
+happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I don’t want to
+suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we
+might try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren
+of the tolerant guild have been in the habit of examining
+the affairs of the world. If that does not prove
+successful, we can always go back to the system of our
+fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable
+luster upon a society containing a little more kindness and
+forbearance, a community less beset by ugliness and greed
+and hatred, a good deal would have been gained and the
+expense, I am sure, would be quite small.</p>
+
+<p>And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth,
+I must go back to my history.</p>
+
+<p>When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the
+world (in the best and broadest sense of the word) perished.
+And it was a long time before society was once more
+placed upon such a footing of security that the old spirit
+of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been characteristic
+of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely
+return to this earth.</p>
+
+<p>That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>The revival of international commerce brought fresh
+capital to the poverty stricken countries of the west. New
+cities arose. A new class of men began to patronize the
+arts, to spend money upon books, to endow those universities
+which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity. And
+it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,”
+of those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind
+as their field of experiment, arose in rebellion against the
+narrow limitations of the old scholasticism and strayed
+away from the flock of the faithful who regarded their<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201"></a>[201]</span>
+interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients
+as a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small
+group of pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up
+the rest of this book, few deserve greater credit than that
+very timid soul who came to be known as Erasmus.</p>
+
+<p>For timid he was, although he took part in all the great
+verbal encounters of his day and successfully managed to
+make himself the terror of his enemies, by the precision
+with which he handled that most deadly of all weapons,
+the long-range gun of humor.</p>
+
+<p>Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of
+his wit were shot into the enemy’s country. And those
+Erasmian bombs were of a very dangerous variety. At
+a first glance they looked harmless enough. There was no
+sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance
+of an amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help
+those who took them home and allowed the children to play
+with them. The poison was sure to get into their little
+minds and it was of such a persistent nature that four centuries
+have not sufficed to make the race immune against
+the effects of the drug.</p>
+
+<p>It is strange that such a man should have been born
+in one of the dullest towns of the mudbanks which are situated
+along the eastern coast of the North Sea. In the
+fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet attained
+the glories of an independent and fabulously rich
+commonwealth. They formed a group of little insignificant
+principalities, somewhere on the outskirts of civilized society.
+They smelled forever of herring, their chief article
+of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it was some
+helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their
+dismal shores.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202"></a>[202]</span></p>
+
+<p>But the very horror of a childhood spent among such
+unpleasant surroundings may have spurred this curious infant
+into that fury of activity which eventually was to set
+him free and make him one of the best known men of his
+time.</p>
+
+<p>From the beginning of life, everything was against him.
+He was an illegitimate child. The people of the Middle
+Ages, being on an intimate and friendly footing both with
+God and with nature, were a great deal more sensible about
+such children than we are. They were sorry. Such things
+ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved.
+For the rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish
+a helpless creature in a cradle for a sin which most certainly
+was not of its own making. The irregularity of his
+birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in so far
+as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly
+muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling
+the situation and leaving their children to the care
+of relatives who were either boobs or scoundrels.</p>
+
+<p>These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do
+with their two little wards and after the mother had died,
+the children never had a home of their own. First of all
+they were sent to a famous school in Deventer, where several
+of the teachers belonged to the Society of the Brothers of
+the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters
+which Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were
+only “common” in a very different sense of the word. Next
+the two boys were separated and the younger was taken to
+Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate supervision
+of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also
+one of the three guardians appointed to administer his
+slender inheritance. If that school in the days of Erasmus
+was as bad as when I visited it four centuries later,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203"></a>[203]</span>
+I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make matters
+worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every
+penny of his money and in order to escape prosecution
+(for the old Dutch courts were strict upon such matters)
+they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed him into holy
+orders and bade him be happy because “now his future
+was secure.”</p>
+
+<p>The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this
+terrible experience into something of great literary value.
+But I hate to think of the many terrible years this sensitive
+youngster was forced to spend in the exclusive company
+of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics who during
+the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully
+half of all monasteries.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted
+Erasmus to spend most of his time among the Latin manuscripts
+which a former abbot had collected and which lay
+forgotten in the library. He absorbed those volumes until
+he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical learning.
+In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever
+on the move, he rarely was within reach of a reference
+library. But that was not necessary. He could quote from
+memory. Those who have ever seen the ten gigantic folios
+which contain his collected works, or who have managed
+to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays)
+will appreciate what a “knowledge of the classics” meant
+in the fifteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old
+monastery. People like him are never influenced by circumstances.
+They make their own circumstances and they
+make them out of the most unlikely material.</p>
+
+<p>And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204"></a>[204]</span>
+restlessly after a spot where he might work without
+being disturbed by a host of admiring friends.</p>
+
+<p>But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to
+the “lieve God” of his childhood he allowed his soul to slip
+into the slumber of death, did he enjoy a moment of that
+“true leisure” which has always appeared as the highest
+good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates
+and Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.</p>
+
+<p>These peregrinations have often been described and I
+need not repeat them here in detail. Wherever two or more
+men lived together in the name of true wisdom, there Erasmus
+was sooner or later bound to make his appearance.</p>
+
+<p>He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost
+died of hunger and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He
+printed books in Basel. He tried (quite in vain) to carry
+a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold of orthodox
+bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent
+much of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor
+of Divinity in the University of Turin. He was familiar
+with the Grand Canal of Venice and cursed as familiarly
+about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those of Lombardy.
+The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome
+made such a profound impression upon him that even the
+waters of Lethe could not wash the Holy City out of his
+memory. He was offered a liberal pension if he would only
+move to Venice and whenever a new university was opened,
+he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair
+he wished to take or to no chair at all, provided he would
+grace the Campus with his occasional presence.</p>
+
+<p>But he steadily refused all such invitations because they
+seemed to contain a threat of permanence and dependency.
+Before all things he wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable
+room to a bad one, he preferred amusing companions<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205"></a>[205]</span>
+to dull ones, he knew the difference between the good
+rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red
+ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own
+terms and this he could not do if he had to call any man
+“master.”</p>
+
+<p>The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that
+of an intellectual search-light. No matter what object
+appeared above the horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus
+immediately let the brilliant rays of his intellect play
+upon it, did his best to make his neighbors see the thing
+as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of that
+“folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.</p>
+
+<p>That he was able to do this during the most turbulent
+period of our history, that he managed to escape the fury
+of the Protestant fanatics while keeping himself aloof from
+the fagots of his friends of the Inquisition, this is the one
+point in his career upon which he has been most often condemned.</p>
+
+<p>Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom
+as long as it applies to the ancestors.</p>
+
+<p>“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther
+and take his chance together with the other reformers?”
+has been a question which seems to have puzzled at least
+twelve generations of otherwise intelligent citizens.</p>
+
+<p>The answer is, “Why should he?”</p>
+
+<p>It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never
+regarded himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly
+lacked that sense of self-righteous assurance which
+is so characteristic of those who undertake to tell the world
+how the millennium ought to be brought about. Besides
+he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the old
+home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our
+quarters. Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206"></a>[206]</span>
+repairs. The drainage was old-fashioned. The garden was
+all cluttered up with dirt and odds and ends left behind
+by people who had moved out long before. But all this
+could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to
+his promises and would only spend some money upon immediate
+improvements. Beyond that, Erasmus did not wish
+to go. And although he was what his enemies sneeringly
+called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or
+more) than those out and out “radicals” who gave the
+world two tyrannies where only one had been before.</p>
+
+<p>Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems.
+He believed that the salvation of this world lies in our individual
+endeavors. Make over the individual man and
+you have made over the entire world!</p>
+
+<p>Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way
+of a direct appeal to the average citizen. And he did
+this in a very clever way.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters.
+He wrote them to kings and to emperors and to popes and
+to abbots and to knights and to knaves. He wrote them
+(and this in the days before the stamped and self-addressed
+envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach
+him and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for
+at least eight pages.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, he edited a large number of classical
+texts which had been so often and so badly copied that
+they no longer made any sense. For this purpose he had
+been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts to get
+hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of
+the reasons why so many pious Catholics insisted that at
+heart he must be as bad as a real heretic. This of course
+sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the fifteenth century,
+respectable Christians would never have dreamed of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207"></a>[207]</span>
+trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue
+of evil repute like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek
+might lead a man into all sorts of difficulties. It might
+tempt him to compare the original gospels with those translations
+that had been given to him with the assurance that
+they were a true reproduction of the original. And that
+would only be the beginning. Soon he would make a descent
+into the Ghetto to get hold of a Hebrew grammar. From
+that point to open rebellion against the authority of the
+Church was only a step and for a long time the possession
+of a book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded
+as ipso facto evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities
+in search of this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who
+were trying to eke out an existence by teaching their native
+tongue were not infrequently forced to leave the city
+in which they had found an asylum.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had
+learned Greek and in the asides which he added to his editions
+of Cyprian and Chrysostom and the other Church
+fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current events
+which could never have been printed had they been the
+subject of a separate pamphlet.</p>
+
+<p>But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself
+in an entirely different sort of literature of which he was
+the inventor. I mean his famous collections of Greek and
+Latin proverbs which he had brought together in order
+that the children of his time might learn to write the classics
+with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are
+filled with clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative
+neighbors were by no means what one had the right<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208"></a>[208]</span>
+to expect of a man who enjoyed the friendship of the
+Pope.</p>
+
+<p>And finally he was the author of one of those strange little
+books which are born of the spirit of the moment, which
+are really a joke conceived for the benefit of a few friends
+and then assume the dignity of a great literary classic before
+the poor author quite realizes what he has done. It was
+called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how
+it came to be written.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled
+by a pamphlet written so cleverly that no one could tell
+whether it was meant as an attack upon the friars or as a
+defense of the monastic life. No name appeared upon the
+title page, but those who knew what was what in the world
+of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one
+Ulrich von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented
+young man, poet laureate and town bum extraordinary,
+had taken no mean share in the production of this
+gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud of it.
+When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the
+famous champion of the New Learning in England, had
+spoken well of his work, he wrote to Erasmus and asked
+him for particulars.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind
+(reflected in his orderly way of living) did not take kindly to
+those blowsy Teuton Ritters who spent their mornings and
+afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier for the cause
+of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house
+that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking
+endless bumpers of sour beer.</p>
+
+<p>But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of
+genius and Erasmus answered him civilly enough. Yea,
+as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon the virtues of his London<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209"></a>[209]</span>
+friend and depicted so charming a scene of domestic contentment
+that the household of Sir Thomas might well
+serve as a model for all other families until the end of time.
+It was in this letter that he mentions how More, himself
+a humorist of no small parts, had given him the original
+idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely it was the
+good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a
+veritable Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and
+daughters and sons-in-law and birds and dogs and a private
+zoo and private theatricals and bands of amateur fiddlers)
+which had inspired him to write that delightful piece of
+nonsense with which his name is forever associated.</p>
+
+<p>In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and
+Judy shows which for so many centuries were the only
+amusement of little Dutch children. Those Punch and
+Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their dialogue,
+invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness.
+The hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene.
+One by one the other actors were forced to appear before
+this ragged hero and give an account of themselves. And
+one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful audience,
+they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel
+and were thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.</p>
+
+<p>In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the
+age is carefully taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired
+Coroner, stands by and favors the public at large
+with her comments. No one is spared. The whole of
+Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters.
+And of course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars
+of salvation with all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their
+gross ignorance and the futile pomposity of their arguments,
+came in for a drubbing which was never forgotten and
+never forgiven.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210"></a>[210]</span></p>
+
+<p>But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous
+successors to the poverty stricken fishermen and
+carpenters from the land of Galilee, were also on the bill
+and held the stage for several chapters.</p>
+
+<p>The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial
+personage than the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous
+literature. Throughout this little book (as indeed
+throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel
+of his own which one might call the philosophy of
+tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence
+upon the spirit of the divine law rather than upon the
+commas and the semi-colons in the original version of that
+divine law; this truly human acceptance of religion as a
+system of ethics rather than as a form of government which
+made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh
+against Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all
+true religion who “slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions
+behind the funny phrases of a clever little book.</p>
+
+<p>This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did
+not have any effect. The little man with the long pointed
+nose, who lived until the age of seventy at a time when the
+addition or omission of a single word from an established
+text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking at all
+for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He
+expected nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses
+and knew only too well the risk the world was running when
+a minor theological dispute was allowed to degenerate into
+an international religious war.</p>
+
+<p>And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night
+to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which
+he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance
+and intolerance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211"></a>[211]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those
+floods of ill-will and hatred which were sweeping down from
+the mountains of Germany and the Alps, and a few years
+after his death his work had been completely washed away.</p>
+
+<p>But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage,
+thrown upon the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly
+good material for those irrepressible optimists who believe
+that some day we shall have a set of dykes that will actually
+hold.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.</p>
+
+<p>His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the
+house of his publisher.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212"></a>[212]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIV">CHAPTER XIV<br>
+<span class="smaller">RABELAIS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows.</p>
+
+<p>The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable
+book intended for the entire family. But
+to mention Rabelais in public is considered little short of
+a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this
+fellow that laws have been passed in our country to keep
+his wicked works out of the hands of our innocent children
+and that in many states copies of his books can only be obtained
+from the more intrepid among our book-leggers.</p>
+
+<p>This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have
+been forced upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average
+citizen of the twentieth century are about as dull reading
+as “Tom Jones” or “The House of the Seven Gables.” Few
+people ever get beyond the first interminable chapter.</p>
+
+<p>And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally
+suggestive in what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary
+of his time. That does not happen to be the common
+vernacular of our own day. But in the era of the
+bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived
+close to the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs
+were not “lady-dogs.”</p>
+
+<p>No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished
+surgeon go much deeper than a mere disapproval
+of his rich but somewhat outspoken collection of idioms.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213"></a>[213]</span>
+They are caused by the horror which many excellent people
+experience when they come face to face with the point of
+view of a man who point blank refuses to be defeated by
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The human race, as far as I can make out, is divided
+into two sorts of people; those who say “yes” unto life and
+those who say “no.” The former accept it and courageously
+they endeavor to make the best of whatever bargain fate has
+handed out to them.</p>
+
+<p>The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?)
+but they hold the gift in great contempt and fret about it
+like children who have been given a new little brother when
+they really wanted a puppy or a railroad train.</p>
+
+<p>But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing
+to accept their morose neighbors at their own valuation and
+tolerate them, and do not hinder them when they fill the
+landscape with their lamentations and the hideous monuments
+to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely
+extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would
+immediately purge this planet of the “yeas.”</p>
+
+<p>As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands
+of their jealous souls by the incessant persecution
+of those who claim that the world belongs to the living and
+not to the dead.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his
+patients or his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery.
+This, no doubt, was very regrettable, but we cannot all be
+grave-diggers. There have to be a few Poloniuses and a
+world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a terrible
+place of abode.</p>
+
+<p>As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very
+mysterious about it. The few details which are omitted<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214"></a>[214]</span>
+in the books written by his friends are found in the works
+of his enemies and as a result we can follow his career with
+a fair degree of accuracy.</p>
+
+<p>Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately
+upon Erasmus but he was born into a world still
+largely dominated by monks, nuns, deacons, and a thousand
+and one varieties of mendicant friars. He was born in
+Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer
+in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth
+century) and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send
+his son to a good school. There young François was thrown
+into the company of the scions of a famous local family
+called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their father,
+had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion
+they could fight well. They were men of the world in the
+good sense of that oft misunderstood expression. They were
+faithful servitors of their master the king, held endless public
+offices, became bishops and cardinals and ambassadors,
+translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill and
+ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services
+that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when
+a title condemned a man to a life of few pleasures and
+many duties and responsibilities.</p>
+
+<p>The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed
+upon Rabelais shows that he must have been something
+more than an amusing table companion. During
+the many ups and downs of his life he could always count
+upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates.
+Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors
+he found the door of their castle wide open and if
+perchance the soil of France became a little too hot for
+this blunt young moralist, there was always a du Bellay,
+conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215"></a>[215]</span>
+need of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician
+besides being a polished Latin scholar.</p>
+
+<p>This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed
+that the career of our learned doctor was about to come
+to an abrupt and painful end, the influence of his old friends
+saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne or from the anger
+of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted upon
+him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when
+he pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as
+mercilessly as he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of
+his erstwhile colleagues in Fontenay and Maillezais.</p>
+
+<p>Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the
+more dangerous. Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content,
+but outside of the narrow boundaries of a small Swiss
+canton, his lightning was as harmless as a fire-cracker.</p>
+
+<p>The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with
+the University of Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and
+the Old Learning, knew of no mercy when her authority
+was questioned and could always count upon the hearty coöperation
+of the king of France and his hangman.</p>
+
+<p>And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked
+man. Not because he liked to drink good wine and told
+funny stories about his fellow-monks. He had done much
+worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the wicked Greek
+tongue.</p>
+
+<p>When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his
+cloister, it was decided to search his cell. It was found to
+be full of literary contraband, a copy of Homer, one of
+the New Testament, one of Herodotus.</p>
+
+<p>This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great
+deal of wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends
+to get him out of this scrape.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious period in the development of the Church.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216"></a>[216]</span></p>
+
+<p>Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been
+advance posts of civilization and both friars and nuns had
+rendered inestimable service in promoting the interest of the
+Church. More than one Pope, however, had foreseen the
+danger that might come from a too powerful development
+of the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just
+because every one knew that something ought to be done
+about these cloisters, nothing was ever done.</p>
+
+<p>Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that
+the Catholic Church is a placid institution which is run
+silently and almost automatically by a small body of
+haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those inner
+upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization
+composed of ordinary mortals.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is further from the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been
+caused by the misinterpretation of a single word.</p>
+
+<p>A world addicted to democratic ideals is easily horrified
+at the idea of an “infallible” human being.</p>
+
+<p>“It must be easy,” so the popular argument runs, “to
+administer this big institution when it is enough for one
+man to say that a thing is so to have all the others fall upon
+their knees and shout amen and obey him.”</p>
+
+<p>It is extremely difficult for one brought up in Protestant
+countries to get a correct and fair view of this rather intricate
+subject. But if I am not mistaken, the “infallible”
+utterances of the supreme pontiff are as rare as constitutional
+amendments in the United States.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, such important decisions are never reached
+until the subject has been thoroughly discussed and the
+debates which precede the final verdict often rock the very
+body of the Church. Such pronunciamentos are therefore
+“infallible” in the sense that our own constitutional<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217"></a>[217]</span>
+amendments are infallible, because they are “final” and because
+all further argument is supposed to come to an end
+as soon as they have been definitely incorporated into the
+highest law of the land.</p>
+
+<p>If any one were to proclaim that it is an easy job to
+govern these United States because in case of an emergency
+all the people are found to stand firmly behind the Constitution,
+he would be just as much in error as if he were
+to state that all Catholics who in supreme matters of faith
+recognize the absolute authority of their pope are docile
+sheep and have surrendered every right to an opinion of
+their own.</p>
+
+<p>If this were true, the occupants of the Lateran and the
+Vatican palaces would have had an easy life. But even the
+most superficial study of the last fifteen hundred years
+will show the exact opposite. And those champions of the
+reformed faith who sometimes write as if the Roman authorities
+had been ignorant of the many evils which Luther
+and Calvin and Zwingli denounced with such great vehemence
+are either ignorant of the facts or are not quite fair
+in their zeal for the good cause.</p>
+
+<p>Such men as Adrian VI and Clement VII knew perfectly
+well that something very serious was wrong with their
+Church. But it is one thing to express the opinion that
+there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is
+quite a different matter to correct the evil, as even poor
+Hamlet was to learn.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was that unfortunate prince the last victim of the
+pleasant delusion that hundreds of years of misgovernment
+can be undone overnight by the unselfish efforts of an
+honest man.</p>
+
+<p>Many intelligent Russians knew that the old official structure<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218"></a>[218]</span>
+which dominated their empire was corrupt, inefficient
+and a menace to the safety of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>They made Herculean efforts to bring about reforms
+and they failed.</p>
+
+<p>How many of our citizens who have ever given the matter
+an hour’s thought fail to see that a democratic instead of
+a representative form of government (as intended by the
+founders of the Republic) must eventually lead to systematized
+anarchy?</p>
+
+<p>And yet, what can they do about it?</p>
+
+<p>Such problems, by the time they have begun to attract
+public attention, have become so hopelessly complicated that
+they are rarely solved except by a social cataclysm. And
+social cataclysms are terrible things from which most men
+shy away. Rather than run to such extremes, they try to
+patch up the old, decrepit machinery and meanwhile they
+pray that some miracle will occur which will make it work.</p>
+
+<p>An insolent religious and social dictatorship, set up and
+maintained by a number of religious orders, was one of the
+most flagrant evils of the out-going Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>For the so-many-eth time in history, the army was about
+to run away with the commander-in-chief. In plain words,
+the situation had grown entirely beyond the control of the
+popes. All they could do was to sit still, improve their own
+party organization, and meanwhile try to mitigate the fate
+of those who had incurred the displeasure of their common
+enemies, the friars.</p>
+
+<p>Erasmus was one of the many scholars who had frequently
+enjoyed the protection of the Pope. Let Louvain storm
+and the Dominicans rave, Rome would stand firm and woe
+unto him who disregarded her command, “Leave the old
+man alone!”</p>
+
+<p>And after these few introductory remarks, it will be no<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219"></a>[219]</span>
+matter of surprise that Rabelais, a mutinous soul but a
+brilliant mind withal, could often count upon the support
+of the Holy See when the superiors of his own order wished
+to punish him and that he readily obtained permission to
+leave his cloister when constant interference with his studies
+began to make his life unbearable.</p>
+
+<p>And so with a sigh of relief, he shook the dust of
+Maillezais off his feet and went to Montpellier and to Lyons
+to follow a course in medicine.</p>
+
+<p>Surely here was a man of extraordinary talents! Within
+less than two years the former Benedictine monk had become
+chief physician of the city hospital of Lyons. But
+as soon as he had achieved these new honors, his restless
+soul began to look for pastures new. He did not give up
+his powders and pills but in addition to his anatomical
+studies (a novelty almost as dangerous as the study of
+Greek) he took up literature.</p>
+
+<p>Lyons, situated in the center of the valley of the Rhone,
+was an ideal city for a man who cared for belles lettres.
+Italy was nearby. A few days easy travel carried the traveler
+to the Provence and although the ancient paradise of
+the Troubadours had suffered dreadfully at the hands of
+the Inquisition, the grand old literary tradition had not
+yet been entirely lost. Furthermore, the printing-presses
+of Lyons were famous for the excellence of their product
+and her book stores were well stocked with all the latest
+publications.</p>
+
+<p>When one of the master printers, Sebastian Gryphius by
+name, looked for some one to edit his collection of medieval
+classics, it was natural that he should bethink himself of
+the new doctor who was also known as a scholar. He hired
+Rabelais and set him to work. In rapid succession almanachs
+and chap-books followed upon the learned treatises<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220"></a>[220]</span>
+of Galen and Hippocrates. And out of these inconspicuous
+beginnings grew that strange tome which was to make
+its author one of the most popular writers of his time.</p>
+
+<p>The same talent for novelty which had turned Rabelais
+into a successful medical practitioner brought him his success
+as a novelist. He did what few people had dared to do
+before him. He began to write in the language of his
+own people. He broke with a thousand-year-old tradition
+which insisted that the books of a learned man must be
+in a tongue unknown to the vulgar multitude. He used
+French and, furthermore, he used the unadorned vernacular
+of the year 1532.</p>
+
+<p>I gladly leave it to the professors of literature to decide
+where and how and when Rabelais discovered his two pet
+heroes, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Maybe they were old
+heathenish Gods who, after the nature of their species, had
+managed to live through fifteen hundred years of Christian
+persecution and neglect.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, he may have invented them in an outburst
+of gigantic hilarity.</p>
+
+<p>However that be, Rabelais contributed enormously to the
+gayety of nations and greater praise no author can gain
+than that he has added something to the sum total of human
+laughter. But at the same time, his works were not
+funny books in the terrible modern sense of the word. They
+had their serious side and struck a bold blow for the cause
+of tolerance by their caricature of the people who were responsible
+for that clerical reign of terror which caused such
+untold misery during the first fifty years of the sixteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>Rabelais, a skillfully trained theologian, was able to avoid
+all such direct statements as might have got him into trouble,
+and acting upon the principle that one cheerful humorist out<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_221"></a>[221]</span>
+of jail is better than a dozen gloomy reformers behind the
+bars, refrained from a too brazen exposition of his highly
+unorthodox opinions.</p>
+
+<p>But his enemies knew perfectly well what he was trying
+to do. The Sorbonne condemned his books in unmistakable
+terms and the Parliament of Paris put him on their index
+and confiscated and burned all such copies of his works
+as could be found within their jurisdiction. But notwithstanding
+the activities of the hangman (who in those days
+was also the official book destroyer) the “Lives and Heroic
+Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and his Sonne Pantagruel”
+remained a popular classic. For almost four centuries it
+has continued to edify those who can derive pleasure from
+a clever mixture of good-natured laughter and bantering
+wisdom and it will never cease to irritate those others who
+firmly believe that the Goddess of Truth, caught with a
+smile on her lips, cannot possibly be a good woman.</p>
+
+<p>As for the author himself, he was and is a “man of one
+book.” His friends, the du Bellays, remained faithful to
+him until the end, but most of his life Rabelais practiced
+the virtue of discretion and kept himself at a polite distance
+from the residence of that Majesty by whose supposed
+“privilege” he published his nefarious works.</p>
+
+<p>He ventured however upon a visit to Rome and met with
+no difficulties, but on the contrary was received with every
+manifestation of a cordial welcome. In the year 1550 he
+returned to France and went to live in Meudon. Three
+years later he died.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course quite impossible to measure the exact and
+positive influence exercised by such a man. After all, he
+was a human being and not an electric current or a barrel
+of gasoline.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that he was merely destructive.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_222"></a>[222]</span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps so.</p>
+
+<p>But he was destructive in an age when there was a great
+and crying need for a social wrecking crew, headed by just
+such people as Erasmus and Rabelais.</p>
+
+<p>That many of the new buildings were going to be just
+as uncomfortable and ugly as the old ones which they
+were supposed to replace was something which no one was
+able to foresee.</p>
+
+<p>And, anyway, that was the fault of the next generation.</p>
+
+<p>They are the people we ought to blame.</p>
+
+<p>They were given a chance such as few people ever enjoyed
+to make a fresh start.</p>
+
+<p>May the Lord have mercy upon their souls for the way
+in which they neglected their opportunities.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_223"></a>[223]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XV">CHAPTER XV<br>
+<span class="smaller">NEW SIGNBOARDS FOR OLD</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large
+ocean upon which sailed many ships. Whenever
+these little vessels bumped against each other, they
+made a “wonderful music” which people call history.</p>
+
+<p>I would like to borrow Heine’s ocean, but for a purpose
+and a simile of my own. When we were children it was fun
+to drop pebbles into a pond. They made a nice splash and
+then the pretty little ripples caused a series of ever widening
+circles and that was very nice. If bricks were handy
+(which sometimes was the case) one could make an Armada
+of nutshells and matches and submit this flimsy fleet to a
+nice artificial storm, provided the heavy projectile did not
+create that fatal loss of equilibrium which sometimes overtakes
+small children who play too near the water’s edge and
+sends them to bed without their supper.</p>
+
+<p>In that special universe reserved for grown-ups, the same
+pastime is not entirely unknown, but the results are apt to
+be far more disastrous.</p>
+
+<p>Everything is placid and the sun is shining and the water-wigglers
+are skating merrily, and then suddenly a bold, bad
+boy comes along with a piece of mill-stone (Heaven only
+knows where he found it!) and before any one can stop
+him he has heaved it right into the middle of the old duck
+pond and then there is a great ado about who did it and
+how he ought to be spanked and some say, “Oh, let him go,”
+and others, out of sheer envy of the kid who is attracting all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_224"></a>[224]</span>
+the attention, pick up any old thing that happens to lie
+around and they dump it into the water and everybody gets
+splashed and one thing leading to another, the usual result is
+a free-for-all fight and a few million broken heads.</p>
+
+<p>Alexander was such a bold, bad boy.</p>
+
+<p>And Helen of Troy, in her own charming way, was such
+a bad, bold girl, and history is just full of them.</p>
+
+<p>But by far the worst offenders are those wicked citizens
+who play this game with ideas and use the stagnant pool
+of man’s spiritual indifference as their playground. And
+I for one don’t wonder that they are hated by all right-thinking
+citizens and are punished with great severity if ever
+they are unfortunate enough to let themselves be caught.</p>
+
+<p>Think of the damage they have done these last four hundred
+years.</p>
+
+<p>There were the leaders of the rebirth of the ancient world.
+The stately moats of the Middle Ages reflected the image of
+a society that was harmonious in both color and texture.
+It was not perfect. But people liked it. They loved to
+see the blending of the brick-red walls of their little homes
+with the somber gray of those high cathedral towers that
+watched over their souls.</p>
+
+<p>Came the terrible splash of the Renaissance and overnight
+everything was changed. But it was only a beginning. For
+just when the poor burghers had almost recovered from the
+shock, that dreadful German monk appeared with a whole
+cartload of specially prepared bricks and dumped them
+right into the heart of the pontifical lagoon. Really, that
+was too much. And no wonder that it took the world three
+centuries to recover from the shock.</p>
+
+<p>The older historians who studied this period often fell
+into a slight error. They saw the commotion and decided<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_225"></a>[225]</span>
+that the ripples had been started by a common cause, which
+they alternately called the Renaissance and the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>Today we know better.</p>
+
+<p>The Renaissance and the Reformation were movements
+which professed to be striving after a common purpose.
+But the means by which they hoped to accomplish their
+ultimate object were so utterly different that Humanist and
+Protestant not infrequently came to regard each other with
+bitter hostility.</p>
+
+<p>They both believed in the supreme rights of man. During
+the Middle Ages the individual had been completely
+merged in the community. He did not exist as John Doe,
+a bright citizen who came and went at will, who sold and
+bought as he liked, who went to any one of a dozen churches
+(or to none at all, as suited his tastes and his prejudices).
+His life from the time of his birth to the hour of his death
+was lived according to a rigid handbook of economic and
+spiritual etiquette. This taught him that his body was a
+shoddy garment, casually borrowed from Mother Nature
+and of no value except as a temporary receptacle for his
+immortal soul.</p>
+
+<p>It trained him to believe that this world was a halfway
+house to future glory and should be regarded with that
+profound contempt which travelers destined for New York
+bestow upon Queenstown and Halifax.</p>
+
+<p>And now unto the excellent John, living happily in the
+best of all possible worlds (since it was the only world he
+knew), came the two fairy god-mothers, Renaissance and
+Reformation, and said: “Arise, noble citizen, from now on
+thou art to be free.”</p>
+
+<p>But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers
+greatly differed.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_226"></a>[226]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance
+replied.</p>
+
+<p>“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished
+him.</p>
+
+<p>“Free to search the records of the past when the world
+was truly the realm of men. Free to realize those ideals
+which once filled the hearts of poets and painters and sculptors
+and architects. Free to turn the universe into thine
+eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her secrets,”
+was the promise of the Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find
+salvation for thy soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was
+the warning of the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe
+in the possession of a new freedom which was infinitely
+more embarrassing than the thralldom of his former days.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made
+her peace with the established order of things. The successors
+of Phidias and Horace discovered that a belief in
+the established Deity and outward conformity to the rules
+of the Church were two very different things and that one
+could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets
+with complete impunity if one took the precaution to call
+Hercules, John the Baptist, and Hera, the Virgin Mary.</p>
+
+<p>They were like tourists who go to India and who obey
+certain laws which mean nothing to them at all in order
+that they may gain entrance to the temples and travel freely
+without disturbing the peace of the land.</p>
+
+<p>But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most
+trifling of details at once assumed enormous importance.
+An erroneous comma in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As
+for a misplaced full stop in the Apocalypse, it called for
+instant death.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_227"></a>[227]</span></p>
+
+<p>To people like these who took what they considered their
+religious convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise
+of the Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.</p>
+
+<p>As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company,
+never to meet again.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon the Reformation, alone against all the world,
+buckled on the armor of righteousness and made ready to
+defend her holiest possessions.</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning, the army of revolt was composed almost
+exclusively of Germans. They fought and suffered with
+extreme bravery, but that mutual jealousy which is the
+bane and the curse of all northern nations soon lamed their
+efforts and forced them to accept a truce. The strategy
+which led to the ultimate victory was provided by a very
+different sort of genius. Luther stepped aside to make
+room for Calvin.</p>
+
+<p>It was high time.</p>
+
+<p>In that same French college where Erasmus had spent
+so many of his unhappy Parisian days, a black-bearded
+young Spaniard with a limp (the result of a Gallic gunshot)
+was dreaming of the day when he should march at
+the head of a new army of the Lord to rid the world of the
+last of the heretics.</p>
+
+<p>It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic.</p>
+
+<p>And only a man of granite, like Calvin, would have been
+able to defeat the plans of Loyola.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I am glad that I was not obliged to live in
+Geneva in the sixteenth century. At the same time I am
+profoundly grateful that the Geneva of the sixteenth century
+existed.</p>
+
+<p>Without it, the world of the twentieth century would<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_228"></a>[228]</span>
+have been a great deal more uncomfortable and I for one
+would probably be in jail.</p>
+
+<p>The hero of this glorious fight, the famous Magister
+Joannes Calvinus (or Jean Calvini or John Calvin) was a
+few years younger than Luther. Date of birth: July 10,
+1509. Place of birth: the city of Noyon in northern France.
+Background: French middle class. Father: a small clerical
+official. Mother: the daughter of an inn-keeper. Family:
+five sons and two daughters. Characteristic qualities of
+early education: thrift, simplicity, and a tendency to do
+all things in an orderly manner, not stingily, but with minute
+and efficient care.</p>
+
+<p>John, the second son, was meant for the priesthood. The
+father had influential friends, and could eventually get him
+into a good parish. Before he was thirteen years old, he
+already held a small office in the cathedral of his home city.
+This gave him a small but steady income. It was used to
+send him to a good school in Paris. A remarkable boy.
+Every one who came in contact with him said, “Watch out
+for that youngster!”</p>
+
+<p>The French educational system of the sixteenth century
+was well able to take care of such a child and make the best
+of his many gifts. At the age of nineteen, John was allowed
+to preach. His future as a duly established deacon seemed
+assured.</p>
+
+<p>But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement
+in the Church was slow. The law offered better opportunities.
+Besides, it was a time of great religious excitement
+and the future was uncertain. A distant relative,
+a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible
+into French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time
+with his cousin. It would never do to have two heretics in
+one family. John was packed off to Orleans and was apprenticed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_229"></a>[229]</span>
+to an old lawyer that he might learn the business
+of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.</p>
+
+<p>Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the
+end of the year, the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching
+his less industrious fellow-students in the principles of
+jurisprudence. And soon he knew all there was to know
+and was ready to start upon that course which, so his father
+fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those
+famous avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single
+opinion and who drove in a coach and four when they were
+called upon to see the king in distant Compiègne.</p>
+
+<p>But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never
+practiced law.</p>
+
+<p>Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests
+and his pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of
+theological works and started in all seriousness upon that
+task which was to make him one of the most important historical
+figures of the last twenty centuries.</p>
+
+<p>The years, however, which he had spent studying the
+principles of Roman law put their stamp upon all his
+further activities. It was impossible for him to approach
+a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things and he
+felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers
+who had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had
+been condemned to be roasted to death over slow burning coal
+fires. In their helpless agony they are as fine a bit of writing
+as anything of which we have a record. And they show
+such a delicate understanding of human psychology that
+the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of
+the man whose teaching had brought them into their predicament.</p>
+
+<p>No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said,
+a man without a heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_230"></a>[230]</span></p>
+
+<p>And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself
+and with his God that he must first reduce every question
+to certain fundamental principles of faith and doctrine
+before he dared to expose it to the touchstone of human
+sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked,
+“The power of that heretic lay in the fact that he was
+indifferent to money.” If His Holiness meant to pay his
+enemy the compliment of absolute personal disinterestedness,
+he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and refused
+to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness
+had made it impossible for him to earn that money as he
+should have done.”</p>
+
+<p>But his strength lay elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>He was a man of one idea, his life centered around one
+all-overpowering impulse; the desire to find the truth of
+God as revealed in the Scriptures. When he finally had
+reached a conclusion that seemed proof against every possible
+form of argument and objection, then at last he incorporated
+it into his own code of life. And thereafter
+he went his way with such utter disregard for the consequences
+of his decision that he became both invincible and
+irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>This quality, however, was not to make itself manifest
+until many years later. During the first decade after his
+conversion he was obliged to direct all his energies toward
+the very commonplace problem of keeping alive.</p>
+
+<p>A short triumph of the “new learning” in the University
+of Paris, an orgy of Greek declensions, Hebrew irregular
+verbs and other forbidden intellectual fruit had been followed
+by the usual reaction. When it appeared that even
+the rector of that famous seat of learning had been contaminated
+with the pernicious new German doctrines, steps<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_231"></a>[231]</span>
+were taken to purge the institution of all those who in terms
+of our modern medical science might be considered “idea
+carriers.” Calvin, who, ’twas said, had given the rector
+the material for several of his most objectionable speeches,
+was among those whose names appeared at the top of the
+list of suspects. His rooms were searched. His papers
+were confiscated and an order was issued for his arrest.</p>
+
+<p>He heard of it and hid himself in the house of a friend.</p>
+
+<p>But storms in an academic tea-pot never last very long.
+All the same, a career in the Church of Rome had become
+an impossibility. The moment had arrived for a definite
+choice.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1534 Calvin broke away from the old faith.
+Almost at the same moment, on the hills of Montmartre,
+high above the French capital, Loyola and a handful of
+his fellow students were taking that solemn vow which
+shortly afterwards was to be incorporated into the constitution
+of the Society of Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon they both left Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Ignatius set his face towards the east, but remembering
+the unfortunate outcome of his first assault upon the Holy
+Land, he retraced his steps, went to Rome and there began
+those activities which were to carry his fame (or otherwise)
+to every nook and corner of our planet.</p>
+
+<p>John was of a different caliber. His Kingdom of God
+was bound to neither time nor place and he wandered forth
+that he might find a quiet spot and devote the rest of his
+days to reading, to contemplation and to the peaceful expounding
+of his ideas.</p>
+
+<p>He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the
+outbreak of a war between Charles V and Francis I forced
+him to make a detour through western Switzerland. In
+Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_232"></a>[232]</span>
+stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary
+from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons.
+Farel welcomed him with open arms, spoke to him
+of the wondrous things that might be accomplished in this
+little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin asked
+time to consider. Then he stayed.</p>
+
+<p>In this way did the chances of war decree that the New
+Zion should be built at the foot of the Alps.</p>
+
+<p>It is a strange world.</p>
+
+<p>Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles
+upon a new continent.</p>
+
+<p>Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend
+the rest of his days in study and holy meditation, wanders
+into a third-rate Swiss town and makes it the spiritual capital
+of those who soon afterwards turn the domains of
+their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant
+empire.</p>
+
+<p>Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves
+all purposes?</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has
+been preserved. But if it still exists, the volume will show
+considerable wear on that particular page which contains
+the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel. The French reformer
+was a modest man, but often he must have found
+consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of
+the living God who also had been cast into a den of lions
+and whose innocence had saved him from a gruesome and
+untimely death.</p>
+
+<p>Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city
+inhabited by respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took
+life seriously, but not quite so seriously as that new master
+who was now holding forth in the pulpit of their Saint
+Peter.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_233"></a>[233]</span></p>
+
+<p>And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the
+form of a Duke of Savoy. It was during one of their interminable
+quarrels with the house of Savoy that the descendants
+of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make common
+cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation.
+The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg
+was a marriage of convenience, an engagement
+based upon common interests rather than common affection.</p>
+
+<p>But no sooner had the news spread abroad that “Geneva
+had gone Protestant,” than all the eager apostles of half
+a hundred new and crazy creeds flocked to the shores of
+Lake Leman. With tremendous energy they began to
+preach some of the queerest doctrines ever conceived by
+mortal man.</p>
+
+<p>Calvin detested these amateur prophets with all his heart.
+He fully appreciated what a menace they would prove to
+the cause of which they were such ardent but ill-guided
+champions. And the first thing he did as soon as he had
+enjoyed a few months leisure was to write down as precisely
+and briefly as he could what he expected his new parishioners
+to hold true and what he expected them to hold
+false. And that no man might claim the ancient and time-worn
+excuse, “I did not know the law,” he, together with
+his friend Farel, personally examined all Genevans in batches
+of ten and allowed only those to the full rights of citizenship
+who swore the oath of allegiance to this strange religious
+constitution.</p>
+
+<p>Next he composed a formidable catechism for the benefit
+of the younger generation.</p>
+
+<p>Next he prevailed upon the Town Council to expel all
+those who still clung to their old erroneous opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Then, having cleared the ground for further action, he
+set about to found him a state along the lines laid down<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_234"></a>[234]</span>
+by the political economists of the books of Exodus and
+Deuteronomy. For Calvin, like so many other of the great
+reformers, was really much more of an ancient Jew than a
+modern Christian. His lips did homage to the God of
+Jesus, but his heart went out to the Jehovah of Moses.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, is a phenomenon often observed during
+periods of great emotional stress. The opinions of the
+humble Nazarene carpenter upon the subject of hatred
+and strife are so definite and so clear cut that no compromise
+has ever been found possible between them and
+those violent methods by which nations and individuals
+have, during the last two thousand years, tried to accomplish
+their ends.</p>
+
+<p>Hence, as soon as a war breaks out, by silent consent
+of all concerned, we temporarily close the pages of the
+Gospels and cheerfully wallow in the blood and thunder
+and the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the Old Testament.</p>
+
+<p>And as the Reformation was really a war and a very
+atrocious one, in which no quarter was asked and very little
+quarter was given, it need not surprise us that the state
+of Calvin was in reality an armed camp in which all semblance
+of personal liberty was gradually suppressed.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, all this was not accomplished without tremendous
+opposition, and in the year 1538 the attitude of
+the more liberal elements in the community became so
+threatening that Calvin was forced to leave the city. But
+in 1541 his adherents returned to power. Amidst the ringing
+of many bells and the loud hosannas of the deacons,
+Magister Joannes returned to his citadel on the river Rhone.
+Thereafter he was the uncrowned King of Geneva and the
+next twenty-three years he devoted to the establishment and
+the perfection of a theocratic form of government, the like<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_235"></a>[235]</span>
+of which the world had not seen since the days of Ezekiel
+and Ezra.</p>
+
+<p>The word “discipline” according to the Oxford Concise
+Dictionary, means “to bring under control, to train to obedience
+and order, to drill.” It expresses best the spirit which
+permeated the entire political-clerical structure of Calvin’s
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Luther, after the nature of most Germans, had been a
+good deal of a sentimentalist. The Word of God alone,
+so it seemed to him, would show a man the way to the life
+everlasting.</p>
+
+<p>This was much too indefinite to suit the taste of the great
+French reformer. The Word of God might be a beacon
+light of hope, but the road was long and dark and many
+were the temptations that made people forget their true
+destination.</p>
+
+<p>The minister, however, could not go astray. He was a
+man set apart. He knew all pitfalls. He was incorruptible.
+And if perchance he felt inclined to wander from the straight
+path, the weekly meetings of the clergy, at which these
+worthy gentlemen were invited to criticize each other freely,
+would speedily bring him back to a realization of his duties.
+Hence he was the ideal held before all those who truly
+aspired after salvation.</p>
+
+<p>Those of us who have ever climbed mountains know that
+professional guides can upon occasion be veritable tyrants.
+They know the perils of a pile of rocks, the hidden dangers
+of an innocent-looking snowfield. Wherefore they assume
+complete command of the party that has entrusted itself
+to their care and profanity raineth richly upon the head
+of the foolish tourist who dares to disobey their orders.</p>
+
+<p>The ministers of Calvin’s ideal state had a similar conception
+of their duties. They were ever delighted to extend<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_236"></a>[236]</span>
+a helping hand to those who stumbled and asked that they
+be supported. But when willful people purposely left the
+beaten track and wandered away from the flock, then that
+hand was withdrawn and became a fist which meted out
+punishment that was both quick and terrible.</p>
+
+<p>In many other communities the dominies would have been
+delighted to exercise a similar power. But the civil authorities,
+jealous of their own prerogatives, rarely allowed the
+clergy to compete with the courts and the executioners.
+Calvin knew this and within his own bailiwick he established
+a form of church discipline which practically superseded the
+laws of the land.</p>
+
+<p>Among the curious historical misconceptions which have
+gained such popularity since the days of the great war,
+none is more surprising than the belief that the French
+people (in contrast to their Teuton neighbors) are a liberty-loving
+race and detest all regimentation. The French have
+for centuries submitted to the rule of a bureaucracy quite
+as complicated and infinitely less efficient than the one
+which existed in Prussia in the pre-war days. The officials
+are a little less punctual about their office hours and the
+spotlessness of their collars and they are given to sucking
+a particularly vile sort of cigarette. Otherwise they are
+quite as meddlesome and as obnoxious as those in the eastern
+republic, and the public accepts their rudeness with a meekness
+that is astonishing in a race so addicted to rebellion.</p>
+
+<p>Calvin was the ideal Frenchman in his love for centralization.
+In some details he almost approached the perfection
+for detail which was the secret of Napoleon’s success. But
+unlike the great emperor, he was utterly devoid of all personal
+ambition. He was just a dreadfully serious man with
+a weak stomach and no sense of humor.</p>
+
+<p>He ransacked the Old Testament to discover what would<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_237"></a>[237]</span>
+be agreeable to his particular Jehovah. And then the
+people of Geneva were asked to accept this interpretation
+of the Jewish chronicles as a direct revelation of the divine
+will.</p>
+
+<p>Almost over night the merry city on the Rhone became
+a community of rueful sinners. A civic inquisition composed
+of six ministers and twelve elders watched night and
+day over the private opinions of all citizens. Whosoever
+was suspected of an inclination towards “forbidden heresies”
+was cited to appear before an ecclesiastic tribunal
+that he might be examined upon all points of doctrine and
+explain where, how and in what way he had obtained the
+books which had given him the pernicious ideas which had
+led him astray. If the culprit showed a repentant spirit,
+he might escape with a sentence of enforced attendance at
+Sunday School. But in case he showed himself obstinate,
+he must leave the city within twenty-four hours and never
+again show himself within the jurisdiction of the Genevan
+commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>But a proper lack of orthodox sentiment was not the
+only thing that could get a man into trouble with the
+so-called Consistorium. An afternoon spent at a bowling-alley
+in a nearby village, if properly reported (as such
+things invariably are), could be reason enough for a severe
+admonition. Jokes, both practical and otherwise, were considered
+the height of bad form. An attempt at wit during
+a wedding ceremony was sufficient cause for a jail sentence.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the New Zion was so encumbered with laws,
+edicts, regulations, rescripts and decrees that life became
+a highly complicated affair and lost a great deal of its old
+flavor.</p>
+
+<p>Dancing was not allowed. Singing was not allowed.
+Card playing was not allowed. Gambling, of course, was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_238"></a>[238]</span>
+not allowed. Birthday parties were not allowed. County
+fairs were not allowed. Silks and satins and all manifestations
+of external splendor were not allowed. What was allowed
+was going to church and going to school. For Calvin
+was a man of positive ideas.</p>
+
+<p>The verboten sign could keep out sin, but it could not
+force a man to love virtue. That had to come through
+an inner persuasion. Hence the establishment of excellent
+schools and a first-rate university and the encouragement
+of all learning. And the establishment of a rather interesting
+form of communal life which absorbed a good deal
+of the surplus energy of the community and which made
+the average man forget the many hardships and restrictions
+to which he was submitted. If it had been entirely
+lacking in human qualities, the system of Calvin could
+never have survived and it certainly would not have played
+such a very decisive rôle in the history of the last three
+hundred years. All of which however belongs in a book
+devoted to the development of political ideas. This time
+we are interested in the question of what Geneva did for
+tolerance and we come to the conclusion that the Protestant
+Rome was not a whit better than its Catholic namesake.</p>
+
+<p>The extenuating circumstances I have enumerated a few
+pages back. In a world which was forced to stand by and
+witness such bestial occurrences as the massacre of St.
+Bartholomew and the wholesale extermination of scores of
+Dutch cities, it was unreasonable to expect that one side
+(the weaker one at that) should practice a virtue which was
+equivalent to a self-imposed sentence of death.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, does not absolve Calvin from the crime of
+having aided and abetted in the legal murder of Gruet and
+Servetus.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the former, Calvin might have put up the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_239"></a>[239]</span>
+excuse that Jacques Gruet was seriously suspected of having
+incited his fellow citizens to riot and that he belonged to
+a political party which was trying to bring about the downfall
+of the Calvinists. But Servetus could hardly be called
+a menace to the safety of the community, as far as Geneva
+was concerned.</p>
+
+<p>He was what the modern passport regulations call a
+“transient.” Another twenty-four hours and he would have
+been gone. But he missed his boat. And so he came to
+lose his life, and it is a pretty terrible story.</p>
+
+<p>Miguel Serveto, better known as Michael Servetus, was
+a Spaniard. His father was a respectable notary-public
+(a semi-legal position in Europe and not just a young man
+with a stamping machine who charges you a quarter for
+witnessing your signature) and Miguel was also destined
+for the law. He was sent to the University of Toulouse,
+for in those happy days when all lecturing was done in
+Latin learning was international and the wisdom of the entire
+world was open to those who had mastered five declensions
+and a few dozen irregular verbs.</p>
+
+<p>At the French university Servetus made the acquaintance
+of one Juan de Quintana who shortly afterwards became
+the confessor of the Emperor Charles V.</p>
+
+<p>During the Middle Ages, an imperial coronation was a
+good deal like a modern international exhibition. When
+Charles was crowned in Bologna in the year 1530, Quintana
+took his friend Michael with him as his secretary and the
+bright young Spaniard saw all there was to be seen. Like
+so many men of his time, he was of an insatiable curiosity
+and he spent the next ten years dabbling in an infinite
+variety of subjects, medicine, astronomy, astrology, Hebrew,
+Greek, and, most fatal of all, theology. He was a very
+competent doctor and in the pursuit of his theological<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_240"></a>[240]</span>
+studies he hit upon the idea of the circulation of the blood.
+It is to be found in the fifteenth chapter of the first one of
+his books against the doctrine of the Trinity. It shows the
+one-sidedness of the theological mind of the sixteenth century
+that none of those who examined the works of Servetus
+ever discovered that this man had made one of the greatest
+discoveries of all ages.</p>
+
+<p>If only Servetus had stuck to his medical practice! He
+might have died peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age.</p>
+
+<p>But he simply could not keep away from the burning
+questions of his day, and having access to the printing
+shops of Lyons, he began to give vent to his opinions upon
+sundry subjects.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays a generous millionaire can persuade a college
+to change its name from Trinity College to that of a popular
+brand of tobacco and nothing happens. The press says,
+“Isn’t it good of Mr. Dingus to be so generous with his
+money!” and the public at large shouts “Amen!”</p>
+
+<p>In a world which seems to have lost all capacity for being
+shocked by such a thing as blasphemy, it is not easy to
+write of a time when the mere suspicion that one of its
+fellow citizens had spoken disrespectfully of the Trinity
+would throw an entire community into a state of panic. But
+unless we fully appreciate this fact, we shall never be able
+to understand the horror in which Servetus was held by
+all good Christians of the first half of the sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>And yet he was by no means a radical.</p>
+
+<p>He was what today we would call a liberal.</p>
+
+<p>He rejected the old belief in the Trinity as held both by
+the Protestants and the Catholics, but he believed so sincerely
+(one feels inclined to say, so naïvely) in the correctness
+of his own views, that he committed the grave error of
+writing letters to Calvin suggesting that he be allowed to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_241"></a>[241]</span>
+visit Geneva for a personal interview and a thorough discussion
+of the entire problem.</p>
+
+<p>He was not invited.</p>
+
+<p>And, anyway, it would have been impossible for him to
+accept. The Inquisitor General of Lyons had already taken
+a hand in the affair and Servetus was in jail. This inquisitor
+(curious readers will find a description of him in the
+works of Rabelais who refers to him as Doribus, a pun upon
+his name, which was Ory) had got wind of the Spaniard’s
+blasphemies through a letter which a private citizen
+of Geneva, with the connivance of Calvin, had sent to his
+cousin in Lyons.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the case against him was further strengthened by
+several samples of Servetus’ handwriting, also surreptitiously
+supplied by Calvin. It really looked as if Calvin
+did not care who hanged the poor fellow as long as he got
+hung, but the inquisitors were negligent in their sacred
+duties and Servetus was able to escape.</p>
+
+<p>First he seems to have tried to reach the Spanish frontier.
+But the long journey through southern France would have
+been very dangerous to a man who was so well known and
+so he decided to follow the rather round-about route via
+Geneva, Milan, Naples and the Mediterranean Sea.</p>
+
+<p>Late one Saturday afternoon in August of the year 1553
+he reached Geneva. He tried to find a boat to cross to the
+other side of the lake, but boats were not supposed to sail
+so shortly before the Sabbath day and he was told to wait
+until Monday.</p>
+
+<p>The next day was Sunday. As it was a misdemeanor
+for both natives and strangers to stay away from divine
+service, Servetus went to church. He was recognized and
+arrested. By what right he was put into jail was never
+explained. Servetus was a Spanish subject and was not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_242"></a>[242]</span>
+accused of any crime against the laws of Geneva. But he
+was a liberal in the matter of doctrine, a blasphemous and
+profane person who dared to have opinions of his own upon
+the subject of the Trinity. It was absurd that such a person
+should invoke the protection of the law. A common
+criminal might do so. A heretic, never! And without further
+ado he was locked up in a filthy and damp hole, his
+money and his personal belongings were confiscated and
+two days later he was taken to court and was asked to answer
+a questionnaire containing thirty-eight different points.</p>
+
+<p>The trial lasted two months and twelve days.</p>
+
+<p>In the end he was found guilty of “heresies against the
+foundations of the Christian religion.” The answers which
+he had given during the discussions of his opinions had exasperated
+his judges. The usual punishment for cases of
+his sort, especially if the accused were a foreigner, was perpetual
+banishment from the territory of the city of Geneva.
+In the case of Servetus an exception was made. He was
+condemned to be burned alive.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime the French tribunal had re-opened the
+case of the fugitive and the officials of the Inquisition had
+come to the same conclusion as their Protestant colleagues.
+They too had condemned Servetus to death and had dispatched
+their sheriff to Geneva with the request that the
+culprit be surrendered to him and be brought back to France.</p>
+
+<p>This request was refused.</p>
+
+<p>Calvin was able to do his own burning.</p>
+
+<p>As for that terrible walk to the place of execution, with
+a delegation of arguing ministers surrounding the heretic
+upon his last journey, the agony which lasted for more than
+half an hour and did not really come to an end until the
+crowd, in their pity for the poor martyr, had thrown a fresh
+supply of fagots upon the flames, all this makes interesting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_243"></a>[243]</span>
+reading for those who care for that sort of thing, but it had
+better be omitted. One execution more or less, what difference
+did it make during a period of unbridled religious
+fanaticism?</p>
+
+<p>But the case of Servetus really stands by itself. Its consequences
+were terrible. For now it was shown, and shown
+with brutal clearness, that those Protestants who had
+clamored so loudly and persistently for “the right to their
+own opinions” were merely Catholics in disguise, that they
+were just as narrow-minded and cruel to those who did not
+share their own views as their enemies and that they were
+only waiting for the opportunity to establish a reign of
+terror of their own.</p>
+
+<p>This accusation is a very serious one. It cannot be dismissed
+by a mere shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, what
+would you expect?”</p>
+
+<p>We possess a great deal of information upon the trial
+and know in detail what the rest of the world thought of
+this execution. It makes ghastly reading. It is true that
+Calvin, in an outburst of generosity, suggested that Servetus
+be decapitated instead of burned. Servetus thanked him
+for his kindness, but offered still another solution. He
+wanted to be set free. Yea, he insisted (and the logic was
+all on his side) that the court had no jurisdiction over him,
+that he was merely an honest man in search for the truth
+and that therefore he had the right to be heard in open
+debate with his opponent, Dr. Calvin.</p>
+
+<p>But of this Calvin would not hear.</p>
+
+<p>He had sworn that this heretic, once he fell into his
+hands, should never be allowed to escape with his life, and
+he was going to be as good as his word. That he could not
+get a conviction without the coöperation of his arch-enemy,
+the Inquisition, made no difference to him. He would have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_244"></a>[244]</span>
+made common cause with the pope if His Holiness had been
+in the possession of some documents that would further incriminate
+the unfortunate Spaniard.</p>
+
+<p>But worse was to follow.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of his death, Servetus asked to see Calvin
+and the latter came to the dark and filthy dungeon that
+had served his enemy as a prison.</p>
+
+<p>Upon this occasion at least he might have been generous;
+more, he might have been human.</p>
+
+<p>He was neither.</p>
+
+<p>He stood in the presence of a man who within another
+hour would be able to plead his case before the throne of
+God and he argued. He debated and sputtered, grew green
+and lost his temper. But not a word of pity, of charity, or
+kindliness. Not a word. Only bitterness and hatred, the
+feeling of “Serve you right, you obstinate scoundrel. Burn
+and be damned!”</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>All this happened many, many years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Servetus is dead.</p>
+
+<p>All our statues and memorial tablets will not bring him
+back to life again.</p>
+
+<p>Calvin is dead.</p>
+
+<p>A thousand volumes of abuse will not disturb the ashes
+of his unknown grave.</p>
+
+<p>They are all of them dead, those ardent reformers who
+during the trial had shuddered with fear lest the blasphemous
+scoundrel be allowed to escape, those staunch pillars
+of the Church who after the execution broke forth into
+paeans of praise and wrote each other, “All hail to Geneva!
+The deed is done.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_245"></a>[245]</span></p>
+
+<p>They are all of them dead, and perhaps it were best they
+were forgotten too.</p>
+
+<p>Only let us have a care.</p>
+
+<p>Tolerance is like liberty.</p>
+
+<p>No one ever gets it merely by asking for it. No one
+keeps it except by the exercise of eternal care and vigilance.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of some future Servetus among our own
+children, we shall do well to remember this.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_246"></a>[246]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVI">CHAPTER XVI<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE ANABAPTISTS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Every generation has a bogey-man all its own.</p>
+
+<p>We have our “Reds.”</p>
+
+<p>Our fathers had their Socialists.</p>
+
+<p>Our grandfathers had their Molly Maguires.</p>
+
+<p>Our great-great-grandfathers had their Jacobins.</p>
+
+<p>And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not
+a bit better off.</p>
+
+<p>They had their Anabaptists.</p>
+
+<p>The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth
+century was a certain “World Book” or chronicle, which
+Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler, prohibitionist and author, living
+in the good city of Ulm, published in the year 1534.</p>
+
+<p>Sebastian knew the Anabaptists. He had married into
+an Anabaptist family. He did not share their views, for
+he was a confirmed free-thinker. But this is what he wrote
+about them: “that they taught nothing but love and faith
+and the crucifixion of the flesh, that they manifested patience
+and humility under all suffering, assisted one another with
+true helpfulness, called each other brother and believed in
+having all things in common.”</p>
+
+<p>It is surely a curious thing that people of whom all those
+nice things could be truthfully said should for almost a
+hundred years have been hunted down like wild animals,
+and should have been exposed to all the most cruel punishments
+of the most bloodthirsty of centuries.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_247"></a>[247]</span></p>
+
+<p>But there was a reason and in order to appreciate it you
+must remember certain facts about the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>The Reformation really settled nothing.</p>
+
+<p>It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book
+infallible in the place of a man and established (or rather,
+tried to establish) a rule by black garbed ministers instead
+of white garbed priests.</p>
+
+<p>Such meager results after half a century of struggle and
+sacrifice had filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate
+disappointment. They had expected a millennium
+of social and religious righteousness and they were not at
+all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and economic
+slavery.</p>
+
+<p>They had been ready for a great adventure. Then something
+had happened. They had slipped between the wall
+and the ship. And they had been obliged to strike out for
+themselves and keep above water as best they could.</p>
+
+<p>They were in a terrible position. They had left the old
+church. Their conscience did not allow them to join the
+new faith. Officially they had, therefore, ceased to exist.
+And yet they lived. They breathed. They were sure that
+they were God’s beloved children. As such it was their
+duty to keep on living and breathing, that they might save
+a wicked world from its own folly.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually they survived, but do not ask how!</p>
+
+<p>Deprived of their old associations, they were forced to
+form groups of their own, to look for a new leadership.</p>
+
+<p>But what man in his senses would take up with these
+poor fanatics?</p>
+
+<p>As a result, shoemakers with second sight and hysterical
+midwives with visions and hallucinations assumed the rôle
+of prophets and prophetesses and they prayed and preached
+and raved until the rafters of their dingy meeting places<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_248"></a>[248]</span>
+shook with the hosannas of the faithful and the tip-staffs of
+the village were forced to take notice of the unseemly disturbance.</p>
+
+<p>Then half a dozen men and women were sent to jail
+and their High and Mightinesses, the town councilors, began
+what was good-naturedly called “an investigation.”</p>
+
+<p>These people did not go to the Catholic Church. They
+did not worship in the Protestant kirk. Then would they
+please explain who they were and what they believed?</p>
+
+<p>To give the poor councilors their due, they were in a
+difficult predicament. For their prisoners were the most
+uncomfortable of all heretics, people who took their religious
+convictions absolutely seriously. Many of the most respectable
+reformers were of this earth earthy and willingly
+made such small compromises as were absolutely necessary,
+if one hoped to lead an agreeable and respectable existence.</p>
+
+<p>Your true Anabaptist was of a different caliber. He
+frowned upon all half-way measures. Jesus had told his
+followers to turn the other cheek when smitten by an enemy,
+and had taught that all those who take the sword shall
+perish by the sword. To the Anabaptists this meant a positive
+ordinance to use no violence. They did not care to
+dilly-dally with words and murmur that circumstances alter
+cases, that, of course, they were against war, but that this
+was a different kind of a war and that therefore they felt
+that for this once God would not mind if they threw a few
+bombs or fired an occasional torpedo.</p>
+
+<p>A divine ordinance was a divine ordinance, and that was
+all there was to it.</p>
+
+<p>And so they refused to enlist and refused to carry arms
+and in case they were arrested for their pacifism (for that
+is what their enemies called this sort of applied Christianity)
+they went willingly forth to meet their fate and recited<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_249"></a>[249]</span>
+Matthew xxvi: 52 until death made an end to their suffering.</p>
+
+<p>But anti-militarism was only a small detail in their program
+of queerness. Jesus had preached that the Kingdom
+of God and the Kingdom of Caesar were two entirely different
+entities and could not and should not be reconciled.
+Very well. These words were clear. Henceforth all good
+Anabaptists carefully abstained from taking part in their
+country’s government, refused to hold public office and
+spent the time which other people wasted upon politics,
+reading and studying the holy scriptures.</p>
+
+<p>Jesus had cautioned his disciples against unseemly quarrels
+and the Anabaptists would rather lose their rightful
+possessions than submit a difference of opinion to a law
+court.</p>
+
+<p>There were several other points which set these peculiar
+people apart from the rest of the world, but these few examples
+of their odd behavior will explain the suspicion and
+detestation in which they were held by their fat and happy
+neighbors who invariably mixed their piety with a dose of
+that comfortable doctrine which bids us live and let live.</p>
+
+<p>Even so, the Anabaptists, like the Baptists and many
+other dissenters, might in the end have discovered a way
+to placate the authorities, if only they had been able to
+protect themselves from their own friends.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly there are many honest Bolshevists who
+dearly love their fellow proletarians and who spend their
+waking hours trying to make this world a better and happier
+place. But when the average person hears the word
+“Bolshevik,” he thinks of Moscow and of a reign of terror
+established by a handful of scholarly cut-throats, of jails
+full of innocent people and firing squads jeering at the victims
+they are about to shoot. This picture may be slightly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_250"></a>[250]</span>
+unfair, but it is no more than natural that it should be
+part of the popular myth after the unspeakable things which
+have happened in Russia during the last seven years.</p>
+
+<p>The really good and peaceful Anabaptists of the sixteenth
+century suffered from a similar disadvantage. As
+a sect they were suspected of many strange crimes, and
+with good reason. In the first place, they were inveterate
+Bible readers. This, of course, is not a crime at all, but let
+me finish my sentence. The Anabaptists studied the scriptures
+without any discrimination and that is a very dangerous
+thing when one has a strong predilection for the Book
+of Revelation.</p>
+
+<p>This strange work which even as late as the fifth century
+was rejected as a bit of “spurious writing” was just the
+sort of thing to appeal to people who lived during a period
+of intense emotional passions. The exile of Patmos spoke
+a language which these poor, hunted creatures understood.
+When his impotent rage drove him into hysterical prophecies
+anent the modern Babylon, all the Anabaptists shouted amen
+and prayed for the speedy coming of the New Heaven
+and the New Earth.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the first time that weak minds gave way under
+the stress of a great excitement. And almost every persecution
+of the Anabaptists was followed by violent outbursts
+of religious insanity. Men and women would rush naked
+through the streets, announcing the end of the world, trying
+to indulge in weird sacrifices that the fury of God
+might be appeased. Old hags would enter the divine services
+of some other sect and break up the meeting, stridently
+shrieking nonsense about the coming of the Dragon.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, this sort of affliction (in a mild degree) is
+always with us. Read the daily papers and you will see
+how in some remote hamlet of Ohio or Iowa or Florida a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_251"></a>[251]</span>
+woman has butchered her husband with a meat cleaver because
+“she was told to do so” by the voice of an angel; or
+how an otherwise reasonable father has just killed his wife
+and eight children in anticipation of the sounding of the
+Seven Trumpets. Such cases, however, are rare exceptions.
+They can be easily handled by the local police and they
+really do not have great influence upon the life or the
+safety of the Republic.</p>
+
+<p>But what had happened in the year 1534 in the good
+town of Münster was something very different. There the
+New Zion, upon strictly Anabaptist principles, had actually
+been proclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>And people all over northern Europe shuddered when
+they thought of that terrible winter and spring.</p>
+
+<p>The villain in the case was a good-looking young tailor
+by the name of Jan Beukelszoon. History knows him as
+John of Leiden, for Jan was a native of that industrious
+little city and had spent his childhood along the banks
+of the sluggish old Rhine. Like all other apprentices of
+that day, he had traveled extensively and had wandered far
+and wide to learn the secrets of his trade.</p>
+
+<p>He could read and write just enough to produce an occasional
+play, but he had no real education. Neither was
+he possessed of that humility of spirit which we so often
+find in people who are conscious of their social disadvantages
+and their lack of knowledge. But he was a very good-looking
+young man, endowed with unlimited cheek and as
+vain as a peacock.</p>
+
+<p>After a long absence in England and Germany, he went
+back to his native land and set up in the cloak and suit
+business. At the same time he went in for religion and
+that was the beginning of his extraordinary career. For
+he became a disciple of Thomas Münzer.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_252"></a>[252]</span></p>
+
+<p>This man Münzer, a baker by profession, was a famous
+character. He was one of the three Anabaptist prophets
+who, in the year 1521, had suddenly made their appearance
+in Wittenberg that they might show Luther how to find
+the true road to salvation. Although they had acted with
+the best of intentions, their efforts had not been appreciated
+and they had been chased out of the Protestant stronghold
+with the request that never again they show their unwelcome
+selves within the jurisdiction of the Dukes of Saxony.</p>
+
+<p>Came the year 1534 and the Anabaptists had suffered so
+many defeats that they decided to risk everything on one
+big, bold stroke.</p>
+
+<p>That they selected the town of Münster in Westphalia as
+the spot for their final experiment surprised no one. Franz
+von Waldeck, the prince-bishop of that city, was a drunken
+bounder who for years had lived openly with a score of
+women and who ever since his sixteenth year had offended
+all decent people by the outrageous bad taste of his private
+conduct. When the town went Protestant, he compromised.
+But being known far and wide for a liar and a cheat, his
+treaty of peace did not give his Protestant subjects that
+feeling of personal security without which life is indeed a
+very uncomfortable experience. In consequence whereof
+the inhabitants of Münster remained in a state of high agitation
+until the next elections. These brought a surprise.
+The city government fell into the hands of the Anabaptists.
+The chairman became one Bernard Knipperdollinck, a cloth
+merchant by day and a prophet after dark.</p>
+
+<p>The bishop took one look at his new councilors and fled.</p>
+
+<p>It was then that John of Leiden appeared upon the scene.
+He had come to Münster as the apostle of a certain Jan
+Matthysz, a Haarlem baker who had started a new sect of
+his own and was regarded as a very holy man. And when<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_253"></a>[253]</span>
+he heard of the great blow that had been struck for the
+good cause, he remained to help celebrate the victory and
+purge the bishopric of all popish contamination. The
+Anabaptists were nothing if not thorough. They turned
+the churches into stone quarries. They confiscated the convents
+for the benefit of the homeless. All books except the
+Bible were publicly burned. And as a fitting climax, those
+who refused to be re-baptized after the Anabaptist fashion
+were driven into the camp of the Bishop, who decapitated
+them or drowned them on the general principle that they
+were heretics and small loss to the community.</p>
+
+<p>That was the prologue.</p>
+
+<p>The play itself was no less terrible.</p>
+
+<p>From far and wide the high priests of half a hundred
+new creeds hastened to the New Jerusalem. There they
+were joined by all those who believed themselves possessed
+of a call for the great uplift, honest and sincere citizens,
+but as innocent as babes when it came to politics or statecraft.</p>
+
+<p>The siege of Münster lasted five months and during that
+time, every scheme, system and program of social and spiritual
+regeneration was tried out; every new-fangled prophet
+had his day in court.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, a little town chuck full of fugitives, pestilence
+and hunger, was not a fit place for a sociological
+laboratory and the dissensions and quarrels between the
+different factions lamed all the efforts of the military
+leaders. During that crisis John the tailor stepped forward.</p>
+
+<p>The short hour of his glory had come.</p>
+
+<p>In that community of starving men and suffering children,
+all things were possible. John began his régime by
+introducing an exact replica of that old theocratic form of
+government of which he had read in his Old Testament.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_254"></a>[254]</span>
+The burghers of Münster were divided into the twelve tribes
+of Israel and John himself was chosen to be their king.
+He had already married the daughter of one prophet, Knipperdollinck.
+Now he married the widow of another, the
+wife of his former master, John Matthysz. Next he remembered
+Solomon and added a couple of concubines. And
+then the ghastly farce began.</p>
+
+<p>All day long John sat on the throne of David in the
+market place and all day long the people stood by while
+the royal court chaplain read the latest batch of ordinances.
+These came fast and furiously, for the fate of the city
+was daily growing more desperate and the people were
+in dire need.</p>
+
+<p>John, however, was an optimist and thoroughly believed
+in the omnipotence of paper decrees.</p>
+
+<p>The people complained that they were hungry. John
+promised that he would tend to it. And forthwith a royal
+ukase, duly signed by His Majesty, ordained that all wealth
+in the city be divided equally among the rich and the poor,
+that the streets be broken up and used as vegetable gardens,
+that all meals be eaten in common.</p>
+
+<p>So far so good. But there were those who said that some
+of the rich people had hidden part of their treasures. John
+bade his subjects not to worry. A second decree proclaimed
+that all those who broke a single law of the community
+would be immediately decapitated. And, mind you, such a
+warning was no idle threat. For this royal tailor was as
+handy with his sword as with his scissors and frequently
+undertook to be his own executioner.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the period of hallucinations when the populace
+suffered from a diversity of religious manias; when
+the market place was crowded day and night with thousands<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_255"></a>[255]</span>
+of men and women, awaiting the trumpet blasts of the angel
+Gabriel.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the period of terror, when the prophet kept
+up the courage of his flock by a constant orgy of blood
+and cut the throat of one of his own queens.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the terrible day of retribution when two
+citizens in their despair opened the gates to the soldiers
+of the bishop and when the prophet, locked in an iron cage,
+was shown at all the Westphalian country fairs and was
+finally tortured to death.</p>
+
+<p>A weird episode, but of terrible consequence to many a
+God-fearing and simple soul.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment on, all Anabaptists were outlawed.
+Such leaders as had escaped the carnage of Münster were
+hunted down like rabbits and were killed wherever found.
+From every pulpit, ministers and priests fulminated against
+the Anabaptists and with many curses and anathemas they
+denounced them as communists and traitors and rebels,
+who wanted to upset the existing order of things and deserved
+less mercy than wolves or mad dogs.</p>
+
+<p>Rarely has a heresy hunt been so successful. As a sect,
+the Anabaptists ceased to exist. But a strange thing happened.
+Many of their ideas continued to live, were picked
+up by other denominations, were incorporated into all sorts
+of religious and philosophic systems, became respectable,
+and are today part and parcel of everybody’s spiritual
+and intellectual inheritance.</p>
+
+<p>It is a simple thing to state such a fact. To explain
+how it actually came about, that is quite a different story.</p>
+
+<p>Almost without exception the Anabaptists belonged to
+that class of society which regards an inkstand as an unnecessary
+luxury.</p>
+
+<p>Anabaptist history, therefore, was writ by those who regarded<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_256"></a>[256]</span>
+the sect as a particularly venomous land of denominational
+radicalism. Only now, after a century of
+study, are we beginning to understand the great rôle the
+ideas of these humble peasants and artisans have played
+in the further development of a more rational and more
+tolerant form of Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>But ideas are like lightning. One never knows where
+they will strike next. And what is the use of lightning rods
+in Münster, when the storm breaks loose over Sienna?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_257"></a>[257]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVII">CHAPTER XVII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE SOZZINI FAMILY</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In Italy the Reformation had never been successful.
+It could not be. In the first place, the people of the
+south did not take their religion seriously enough to
+fight about it and in the second place, the close proximity
+of Rome, the center of a particularly well equipped office
+of the Inquisition, made indulgence in private opinions a
+dangerous and costly pastime.</p>
+
+<p>But, of course, among all the thousands of humanists
+who populated the peninsula, there were bound to be a few
+black sheep who cared a great deal more for the good opinion
+of Aristotle than for that of Saint Chrysostom. Those
+good people, however, were given many opportunities to get
+rid of their surplus spiritual energy. There were clubs
+and coffee-houses and discreet salons where men and women
+could give vent to their intellectual enthusiasm without upsetting
+empires. All of which was very pleasant and restful.
+And besides, wasn’t all life a compromise? Hadn’t it always
+been a compromise? Would it not in all likelihood be a
+compromise until the end of time?</p>
+
+<p>Why get excited about such a small detail as one’s faith?</p>
+
+<p>After these few introductory remarks, the reader will
+surely not expect to hear a loud fanfaronade or the firing
+of guns when our next two heroes make their appearance.
+For they are soft-spoken gentlemen, and go about their
+business in a dignified and pleasant way.</p>
+
+<p>In the end, they are to do more to upset the dogmatic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_258"></a>[258]</span>
+tyranny under which the world had suffered for such a
+long time than a whole army of noisy reformers. But that
+is one of those curious things which no one can foresee.
+They happen. We are grateful. But how it comes about,
+that, alas, is something which we do not fully understand.</p>
+
+<p>The name of these two quiet workmen in the vineyard
+of reason was Sozzini.</p>
+
+<p>They were uncle and nephew.</p>
+
+<p>For some unknown reason, the older man, Lelio Francesco,
+spelled his name with one “z” and the younger,
+Fausto Paolo, spelled his with two “zs.” But as they are
+both of them much better known by the Latinized form of
+their name, Socinius, than by the Italian Sozzini, we can
+leave that detail to the grammarians and etymologists.</p>
+
+<p>As far as their influence was concerned, the uncle was
+much less important than the nephew. We shall, therefore,
+deal with him first and speak of the nephew afterwards.</p>
+
+<p>Lelio Sozini was a Siennese, the descendant of a race of
+bankers and judges and himself destined for a career at
+the bar, via the University of Bologna. But like so many
+of his contemporaries, he allowed himself to slip into theology,
+stopped reading law, played with Greek and Hebrew
+and Arabic and ended (as so often happens with
+people of his type) as a rationalistic mystic—a man who
+was at once very much of this world and yet never quite of
+it. This sounds complicated. But those who understand
+what I mean will understand without any further explanation,
+and the others would not understand, no matter what
+I said.</p>
+
+<p>His father, however, seems to have had a suspicion that
+the son might amount to something in the world of letters.
+He gave his boy a check and bade him go forth and see
+whatever there was to be seen. And so Lelio left Sienna<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_259"></a>[259]</span>
+and during the next ten years, he traveled from Venice
+to Geneva and from Geneva to Zürich and from Zürich to
+Wittenberg and then to London and then to Prague and then
+to Vienna and then to Cracow, spending a few months or
+years in every town and hamlet where he hoped to find interesting
+company and might be able to learn something new
+and interesting. It was an age when people talked religion
+just as incessantly as today they talk business. Lelio must
+have collected a strange assortment of ideas and by keeping
+his ears open he was soon familiar with every heresy between
+the Mediterranean and the Baltic.</p>
+
+<p>When, however, he carried himself and his intellectual
+luggage to Geneva, he was received politely but none too
+cordially. The pale eyes of Calvin looked upon this Italian
+visitor with grave suspicion. He was a distinguished young
+man of excellent family and not a poor, friendless wanderer
+like Servetus. It was said, however, that he had Servetian
+inclinations. And that was most disturbing. The case for
+or against the Trinity, so Calvin thought, had been definitely
+settled when the Spanish heretic was burned. On
+the contrary! The fate of Servetus had become a subject
+of conversation from Madrid to Stockholm, and serious-minded
+people all over the world were beginning to take
+the side of the anti-trinitarian. But that was not all. They
+were using Gutenberg’s devilish invention to spread their
+views broadcast and being at a safe distance from Geneva
+they were often far from complimentary in their remarks.</p>
+
+<p>Only a short while before a very learned tract had appeared
+which contained everything the fathers of the Church
+had ever said or written upon the subject of persecuting
+and punishing heretics. It had an instantaneous and enormous
+sale among those who “hated God,” as Calvin said,
+or who “hated Calvin,” as they themselves protested. Calvin<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_260"></a>[260]</span>
+had let it be known that he would like to have a personal
+interview with the author of this precious booklet. But
+the author, anticipating such a request, had wisely omitted
+his name from the title-page.</p>
+
+<p>It was said that he was called Sebastian Castellio, that
+he had been a teacher in one of the Geneva high schools
+and that his moderate views upon diverse theological enormities
+had gained him the hatred of Calvin and the approbation
+of Montaigne. No one, however, could prove this.
+It was mere hearsay. But where one had gone before, others
+might follow.</p>
+
+<p>Calvin, therefore, was distantly polite to Sozzini, but
+suggested that the mild air of Basel would suit his Siennese
+friend much better than the damp climate of Savoy and
+heartily bade him Godspeed when he started on his way
+to the famous old Erasmian stronghold.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for Calvin, the Sozzini family soon afterwards
+fell under the suspicion of the Inquisition, Lelio was
+deprived of his funds and falling ill of a fever, he died in
+Zürich at the age of only thirty-seven.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever joy his untimely demise may have caused in
+Geneva, it was short-lived.</p>
+
+<p>For Lelio, besides a widow and several trunks of notes,
+left a nephew, who not only fell heir to his uncle’s unpublished
+manuscripts but soon gained for himself the reputation
+of being even more of a Servetus enthusiast than his
+uncle had been.</p>
+
+<p>During his younger years, Faustus Socinius had traveled
+almost as extensively as the older Lelio. His grandfather
+had left him a small estate and as he did not marry
+until he was nearly fifty, he was able to devote all his time
+to his favorite subject, theology.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_261"></a>[261]</span></p>
+
+<p>For a short while he seems to have been in business in
+Lyons.</p>
+
+<p>What sort of a salesman he made, I do not know, but his
+experience in buying and selling and dealing in concrete
+commodities rather than spiritual values seems to have
+strengthened him in his conviction that very little is ever
+gained by killing a competitor or losing one’s temper if the
+other man has the better of a deal. And as long as he lived,
+he showed himself possessed of that sober common sense
+which is often found in a counting-house but is very rarely
+part of the curriculum of a religious seminary.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1563 Faustus returned to Italy. On his way
+home he visited Geneva. It does not appear that he ever
+paid his respects to the local patriarch. Besides, Calvin
+was a very sick man at that time. The visit from a member
+of the Sozzini family would only have disturbed him.</p>
+
+<p>The next dozen years, young Socinius spent in the service
+of Isabella de’ Medici. But in the year 1576 this lady, after
+a few days of matrimonial bliss, was murdered by her husband,
+Paolo Orsini. Thereupon Socinius resigned, left Italy
+for good and went to Basel to translate the Psalms into colloquial
+Italian and write a book on Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>Faustus, so it appeared from his writings, was a careful
+man. In the first place, he was very deaf and such people
+are by nature cautious.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, he derived his income from certain
+estates situated on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan
+authorities had given him a hint that it might be just as well
+for one suspected of “Lutheran leanings” not to be too bold
+while dealing with subjects which were held in disfavor by
+the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms
+and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by
+a number of friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_262"></a>[262]</span></p>
+
+<p>Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the
+Index. It also happened that a copy of his life of Jesus
+was carried all the way to Transylvania and there fell into
+the hands of another liberal-minded Italian, the private
+physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine ladies who
+had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.</p>
+
+<p>Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe.
+A wilderness until the early part of the twelfth century,
+it had been used as a convenient home for the surplus population
+of Germany. The hard working Saxon peasants had
+turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well regulated
+little country with cities and schools and an occasional university.
+But it remained a country far removed from the
+main roads of travel and trade. Hence it had always been
+a favorite place of residence for those who for one reason
+or another preferred to keep a few miles of marsh and mountain
+between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many
+centuries been associated with the general idea of reaction
+and jingoism that it will come as an agreeable surprise to
+many of my readers when I tell them that during the first
+half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum for
+all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account
+of their religious convictions.</p>
+
+<p>This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about
+in a typically Polish fashion.</p>
+
+<p>That the Republic for quite a long time had been the
+most scandalously mismanaged country of the entire continent
+was even then a generally known fact. The extent,
+however, to which the higher clergy had neglected their duties
+was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when
+dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common
+affliction of all western nations.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_263"></a>[263]</span></p>
+
+<p>But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was
+noticed that the number of Polish students in the different
+German universities was beginning to increase at a rate of
+speed which caused great concern among the authorities of
+Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask questions.
+And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of
+Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed
+to fall into such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders
+were forced to go abroad for their education or do
+without. A little later, when the Teuton universities fell
+under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young men
+from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally
+followed suit.</p>
+
+<p>And when they returned to their home towns, they did so
+as full-fledged Lutherans.</p>
+
+<p>At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been
+quite easy for the king and the nobility and the clergy to
+stamp out this epidemic of erroneous opinions. But such
+a step would have obliged the rulers of the republic to unite
+upon a definite and common policy and that of course was
+directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of
+this strange country where a single dissenting vote could
+upset a law which had the support of all the other members
+of the diet.</p>
+
+<p>And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared
+that the religion of the famous Wittenberg professor carried
+with it a by-product of an economic nature, consisting of
+the confiscation of all Church property, the Boleslauses and
+the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts, barons,
+princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between
+the Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning
+towards a faith which meant money in their pockets.</p>
+
+<p>The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_264"></a>[264]</span>
+upon the discovery caused one of those famous “interims”
+with which the Poles, since time immemorial, have
+tried to stave off the day of reckoning. During such periods
+all authority came to a standstill and the Protestants made
+such a good use of their opportunity that in less than a year
+they had established churches of their own in every part
+of the kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling
+of the new ministers drove the peasants back into the arms
+of the Church and Poland once more became one of the
+strongholds of a most uncompromising form of Catholicism.
+But during the latter half of the sixteenth century, the country
+enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics
+and Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination
+upon the Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion
+that the survivors should flee eastward and should
+eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula and
+it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’
+book on Jesus and expressed a wish to make the author’s
+acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man
+of parts. He had graduated at the University of Montpellier
+and had been remarkably successful as a woman’s
+specialist. First and last he was a good deal of a scoundrel,
+but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think
+of Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as
+a neurologist and frequently played one rôle out against the
+other. For example, he cured the Queen Dowager of Poland,
+Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund), so successfully of
+the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were wrong,
+that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed
+those who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.</p>
+
+<p>The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_265"></a>[265]</span>
+lovers) but two of her daughters had married local noblemen
+and as their medical adviser, Blandrata exercised a great
+deal of influence upon the politics of his adopted land. He
+knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that it would
+happen very soon unless something be done to make an end
+to the everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to
+work to bring about a truce between the different opposing
+sects. But for this purpose he needed some one more skilled
+in the intricacies of a religious debate than he was himself.
+Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life of Jesus
+was his man.</p>
+
+<p>He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the
+private life of Blandrata had just led to so grave a public
+scandal that the Italian had been forced to resign and leave
+for parts unknown. Socinius, however, remained in this far
+away land, married a Polish girl and died in his adopted
+country in the year 1604.</p>
+
+<p>These last two decades of his life proved to be the most
+interesting period of his career. For it was then that he
+gave a concrete expression to his ideas upon the subject
+of tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of
+Rakow,” a document which Socinius composed as a sort of
+common constitution for all those who meant well by this
+world and wished to make an end to future sectarian strife.</p>
+
+<p>The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of
+catechism, confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People
+were writing them in Germany and in Switzerland and in
+France and in Holland and in Denmark. But everywhere
+these carelessly printed little booklets gave expression to the
+ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained the real<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_266"></a>[266]</span>
+Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty
+of all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to
+uphold this one particular form of Truth with a great big
+capital T to punish with the sword and the gallows and the
+stake those who willfully remained faithful to a different
+sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and
+therefore was of an inferior quality).</p>
+
+<p>The Socinian confession of faith breathed an entirely different
+spirit. It began by the flat statement that it was not
+the intention of those who had signed this document to quarrel
+with anybody else.</p>
+
+<p>“With good reason,” it continued, “many pious people
+complain that the various confessions and catechisms which
+have hitherto been published and which the different churches
+are now publishing are apples of discord among the Christians
+because they all try to impose certain principles upon
+people’s conscience and to consider those who disagree with
+them as heretics.”</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was
+the intention of the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any
+one else on account of his religious convictions and turning
+to humanity in general, it made the following appeal:</p>
+
+<p>“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for
+this is the rule set forth by the New Testament and by the
+example of the earliest church. Who are we, miserable people,
+that we would smother and extinguish in others the fire
+of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have any
+of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures?
+Why do we not remember that our only master is Jesus
+Christ and that we are all brothers and that to no one has
+been given power over the souls of others? It may be that
+one of our brothers is more learned than the others, yet in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_267"></a>[267]</span>
+regard to liberty and the relationship with Christ we are all
+equal.”</p>
+
+<p>All this was very fine and very wonderful, but it was said
+three hundred years ahead of the times. Neither the Socinians
+nor any of the other Protestant sects could in the long
+run hope to hold their own in this turbulent part of the world.
+The counter-reformation had begun in all seriousness.
+Veritable hordes of Jesuit fathers were beginning to be
+turned loose upon the lost provinces. While they worked,
+the Protestants quarreled. Soon the people of the eastern
+frontier were back within the fold of Rome. Today the
+traveler who visits these distant parts of civilized Europe
+would hardly guess that, once upon a time, they were a
+stronghold of the most advanced and liberal thought of the
+age. Nor would he suspect that somewhere among those
+dreary Lithuanian hills there lies a village where the world
+was for the first time presented with a definite program
+for a practical system of tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>Driven by idle curiosity, I took a morning off recently
+and went to the library and read through the index of all
+our most popular text-books out of which the youth of our
+country learns the story of the past. Not a single one mentioned
+Socinianism or the Sozzinis. They all jumped from
+Social Democrats to Sophia of Hanover and from Sobieski
+to Saracens. The usual leaders of the great religious revolution
+were there, including Oecolampadius and the lesser
+lights.</p>
+
+<p>One volume only contained a reference to the two great
+Siennese humanists but they appeared as a vague appendix
+to something Luther or Calvin had said or done.</p>
+
+<p>It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion
+that in the popular histories of three hundred years
+hence, all this will have been changed and that the Sozzinis<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_268"></a>[268]</span>
+shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter of their own and
+that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be relegated
+to the bottom of the page.</p>
+
+<p>They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing
+in footnotes.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_269"></a>[269]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XVIII">CHAPTER XVIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">MONTAIGNE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the Middle Ages it used to be said that city air made
+for freedom.</p>
+
+<p>That was true.</p>
+
+<p>A man behind a high stone wall could thumb his nose safely
+at baron and priest.</p>
+
+<p>A little later, when conditions upon the European continent
+had improved so much that international commerce
+was once more becoming a possibility, another historical phenomenon
+began to make itself manifest.</p>
+
+<p>Done into words of three syllables it read: “Business makes
+for tolerance.”</p>
+
+<p>You can verify this statement any day of the week and
+most of all on Sunday in any part of our country.</p>
+
+<p>Winesberg, Ohio, can afford to support the Ku Klux
+Klan, but New York cannot. If the people of New York
+should ever start a movement for the exclusion of all Jews
+and all Catholics and all foreigners in general, there would
+be such a panic in Wall Street and such an upheaval in the
+labor movement that the town would be ruined beyond the
+hope of repair.</p>
+
+<p>The same held true during the latter half of the Middle
+Ages. Moscow, the seat of a small grand ducal count, might
+rage against the pagans, but Novgorod, the international
+trading post, must be careful lest she offend the Swedes and
+Norwegians and the Germans and the Flemish merchants
+who visited her market place and drive them to Wisby.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_270"></a>[270]</span></p>
+
+<p>A purely agricultural state could with impunity regale its
+peasantry with a series of festive autos da fé. But if the
+Venetians or the Genoese or the people of Bruges had started
+a pogrom among the heathen within their walls, there would
+have been an immediate exodus of all those who represented
+foreign business houses and the subsequent withdrawal of
+capital would have driven the city into bankruptcy.</p>
+
+<p>A few countries which were constitutionally unable to
+learn from experience (like Spain and the papal dominions
+and certain possessions of the Habsburgs), actuated by a
+sentiment which they proudly called “loyalty to their convictions,”
+ruthlessly expelled the enemies of the true faith.
+As a result they either ceased to exist altogether or dwindled
+down to the rank of seventh rate Ritter states.</p>
+
+<p>Commercial nations and cities, however, are as a rule governed
+by men who have a profound respect for established
+facts, who know on which side their bread is buttered, and
+who therefore maintain such a state of spiritual neutrality
+that their Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Chinese
+customers can do business as usual and yet remain faithful
+to their own particular religion.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake of outward respectability Venice might pass
+a law against the Calvinists, but the Council of Ten was
+careful to explain to their gendarmes that this decree must
+not be taken too seriously and that unless the heretics actually
+tried to get hold of San Marco and convert it into a
+meeting-house of their own, they must be left alone and must
+be allowed to worship as they saw fit.</p>
+
+<p>Their good friends in Amsterdam did likewise. Every
+Sunday their ministers fulminated against the sins of the
+“Scarlet Woman.” But in the next block the terrible Papists
+were quietly saying mass in some inconspicuous looking
+house, and outside the Protestant chief-of-police stood watch<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_271"></a>[271]</span>
+lest an over-zealous admirer of the Geneva catechism try to
+break up this forbidden meeting and frighten the profitable
+French and Italian visitors away.</p>
+
+<p>This did not in the least mean that the mass of the people
+in Venice or Amsterdam ceased to be faithful sons of their
+respective churches. They were as good Catholics or Protestants
+as they had ever been. But they remembered that the
+good will of a dozen profitable heretics from Hamburg or
+Lübeck or Lisbon was worth more than the approbation of
+a dozen shabby clerics from Geneva or Rome and they acted
+accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem a little far-fetched to connect the enlightened
+and liberal opinions (they are not always the same) of Montaigne
+with the fact that his father and grandfather had
+been in the herring business and that his mother was of
+Spanish-Jewish descent. But it seems to me that these commercial
+antecedents had a great deal to do with the man’s
+general point of view and that the intense dislike of fanaticism
+and bigotry which characterized his entire career as a
+soldier and statesman had originated in a little fish-shop
+somewhere off the main quai of Bordeaux.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne himself would not have thanked me if I had
+been able to make this statement to his face. For when he
+was born, all vestiges of mere “trade” had been carefully
+wiped off the resplendent family escutcheon.</p>
+
+<p>His father had acquired a bit of property called Montaigne
+and had spent money lavishly that his son might be
+brought up as a gentleman. Before he was fairly able to
+walk private tutors had stuffed his poor little head full of
+Latin and Greek. At the age of six he had been sent to
+high-school. At thirteen he had begun to study law. And
+before he was twenty he was a full-fledged member of the
+Bordeaux town council.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_272"></a>[272]</span></p>
+
+<p>Then followed a career in the army and a period at court,
+until at the age of thirty-eight, after the death of his father,
+he retired from all active business and spent the last twenty-one
+years of his life, (with the exception of a few unwilling
+excursions into politics), among his horses and his dogs and
+his books and learned as much from the one as he did from
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne was very much a man of his time and suffered
+from several weaknesses. He was never quite free from certain
+affections and mannerisms which he, the fish-monger’s
+grandson, believed to be a part of true gentility. Until the
+end of his days he protested that he was not really a writer
+at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled
+away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random
+ideas upon subjects of a slightly philosophic nature.
+All this was pure buncombe. If ever a man put his heart
+and his soul and his virtues and his vices and everything
+he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the
+immortal d’Artagnan.</p>
+
+<p>And as this heart and this soul and these virtues and these
+vices were the heart and the soul and the virtues and the vices
+of an essentially generous, well-bred and agreeable person,
+the sum total of Montaigne’s works has become something
+more than literature. It has developed into a definite philosophy
+of life, based upon common sense and an ordinary practical
+variety of decency.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne was born a Catholic. He died a Catholic,
+and in his younger years he was an active member of that
+League of Catholic Noblemen which was formed among the
+French nobility to drive Calvinism out of France.</p>
+
+<p>But after that fateful day in August of the year 1572
+when news reached him of the joy with which Pope Gregory
+XIII had celebrated the murder of thirty thousand French<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_273"></a>[273]</span>
+Protestants, he turned away from the Church for good. He
+never went so far as to join the other side. He continued
+to go through certain formalities that he might keep his
+neighbors’ tongues from wagging, but those of his chapters
+written after the night of Saint Bartholomew might just as
+well have been the work of Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus
+or any of a dozen other Greek or Roman philosophers. And
+in one memorable essay, entitled “On the Freedom of Conscience,”
+he spoke as if he had been a contemporary of
+Pericles rather than a servant of Her Majesty Catherine
+de’ Medici and he used the career of Julian the Apostate
+as an example of what a truly tolerant statesman might
+hope to accomplish.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very short chapter. It is only five pages long and
+you will find it in part nineteen of the second book.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne had seen too much of the incorrigible obstinacy
+of both Protestants and Catholics to advocate a system of
+absolute freedom, which (under the existing circumstances)
+could only provoke a new outbreak of civil war. But when
+circumstances allowed it, when Protestants and Catholics no
+longer slept with a couple of daggers and pistols underneath
+their pillows, then an intelligent government should keep
+away as much as possible from interfering with other people’s
+consciences and should permit all of its subjects to love
+God as best suited the happiness of their own particular
+souls.</p>
+
+<p>Montaigne was neither the only, nor the first Frenchman
+who had hit upon this idea or had dared to express it in public.
+As early as the year 1560, Michel de l’Hôpital, a former
+chancellor of Catherine de’ Medici and a graduate of half
+a dozen Italian universities (and incidentally suspected of
+being tarred with the Anabaptist brush) had suggested that
+heretics be attacked exclusively with verbal arguments. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_274"></a>[274]</span>
+had based his somewhat startling opinion upon the ground
+that conscience being what it was, it could not possibly be
+changed by force, and two years later he had been instrumental
+in bringing about that royal Edict of Toleration which
+had given the Huguenots the right to hold meetings of their
+own, to call synods to discuss the affairs of their church and
+in general to behave as if they were a free and independent
+denomination and not merely a tolerated little sect.</p>
+
+<p>Jean Bodin, a Parisian lawyer, a most respectable citizen
+(the man who had defended the rights of private property
+against the communistic tendencies expressed in Thomas
+More’s “Utopia”), had spoken in a similar vein when he
+denied the right of sovereigns to use violence in driving
+their subjects to this or that church.</p>
+
+<p>But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises
+of political philosophers very rarely make best sellers.
+Whereas Montaigne was read and translated and discussed
+wherever civilized people came together in the name of intelligent
+company and good conversation and continued to
+be read and translated and discussed for more than three
+hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote
+for the fun of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular
+with large numbers of people who otherwise would never
+dream of buying (or borrowing) a book that was officially
+classified under “philosophy.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_275"></a>[275]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XIX">CHAPTER XIX<br>
+<span class="smaller">ARMINIUS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict
+between “organized society” which places the
+continued safety of the “group” ahead of all other
+considerations and those private citizens of unusual intelligence
+or energy who hold that such improvement as the world
+has thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts
+of the individual and not due to the efforts of the mass
+(which by its very nature is distrustful of all innovations)
+and that therefore the rights of the individual are far more
+important than those of the mass.</p>
+
+<p>If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows
+that the amount of tolerance in any given country must be
+in direct proportion to the degree of individual liberty enjoyed
+by the majority of its inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally
+enlightened ruler spake unto his children and
+said, “I firmly believe in the principle of live and let live.
+I expect all my beloved subjects to practice tolerance towards
+their neighbors or bear the consequences.”</p>
+
+<p>In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in
+a supply of the official buttons bearing the proud inscription,
+“Tolerance first.”</p>
+
+<p>But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His
+Majesty’s hangman, were rarely of a lasting nature and only
+bore fruit if the sovereign accompanied his threat by an intelligent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_276"></a>[276]</span>
+system of gradual education along the lines of practical
+every day politics.</p>
+
+<p>Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred
+in the Dutch Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place the country consisted of several thousand
+semi-independent towns and villages and these for the greater
+part were inhabited by fishermen, sailors and traders, three
+classes of people who are accustomed to a certain amount
+of independence of action and who are forced by the nature
+of their trade to make quick decisions and to judge the casual
+occurrences of the day’s work upon their own merits.</p>
+
+<p>I would not for a moment claim that, man for man, they
+were a whit more intelligent or broadminded than their
+neighbors in other parts of the world. But hard work and
+tenacity of purpose had made them the grain and fish carriers
+of all northern and western Europe. They knew that
+the money of a Catholic was just as good as that of a Protestant
+and they preferred a Turk who paid cash to a Presbyterian
+who asked for six months’ credit. An ideal country
+therefore to start a little experiment in tolerance and furthermore
+the right man was in the right place and what is
+infinitely more important the right man was in the right
+place at the right moment.</p>
+
+<p>William the Silent was a shining example of the old maxim
+that “those who wish to rule the world must know the world.”
+He began life as a very fashionable and rich young man, enjoying
+a most enviable social position as the confidential
+secretary of the greatest monarch of his time. He wasted
+scandalous sums of money upon dinners and dances, married
+several of the better known heiresses of his day and lived
+gayly without a care for the day of tomorrow. He was not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_277"></a>[277]</span>
+a particularly studious person and racing charts interested
+him infinitely more than religious tracts.</p>
+
+<p>The social unrest which followed in the wake of the Reformation
+did not at first impress him as anything more
+serious than still another quarrel between capital and labor,
+the sort of thing that could be settled by the use of a little
+tact and the display of a few brawny police constables.</p>
+
+<p>But once he had grasped the true nature of the issue that
+had arisen between the sovereign and his subjects, this amiable
+grand seigneur was suddenly transformed into the exceedingly
+able leader of what, to all intents and purposes,
+was the prime lost cause of the age. The palaces and horses,
+the gold plate and the country estates were sold at short
+notice (or confiscated at no notice at all) and the sporting
+young man from Brussels became the most tenacious and
+successful enemy of the house of Habsburg.</p>
+
+<p>This change of fortune, however, did not affect his private
+character. William had been a philosopher in the days
+of plenty. He remained a philosopher when he lived in a
+couple of furnished rooms and did not know how to pay for
+Saturday’s clean wash. And just as in the olden days he
+had worked hard to frustrate the plans of a cardinal who
+had expressed the intention of building a sufficient number
+of gallows to accommodate all Protestants, he now made it
+a point to bridle the energy of those ardent Calvinists who
+wished to hang all Catholics.</p>
+
+<p>His task was wellnigh hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>Between twenty and thirty thousand people had already
+been killed, the prisons of the Inquisition were full of new
+candidates for martyrdom and in far off Spain new armies
+were being recruited to smash the rebellion before it should
+spread to other parts of the Empire.</p>
+
+<p>To tell people who were fighting for their lives that they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_278"></a>[278]</span>
+must love those who had just hanged their sons and brothers
+and uncles and grandfathers was out of the question. But
+by his personal example, by his conciliatory attitude towards
+those who opposed him, William was able to show his followers
+how a man of character can invariably rise superior
+to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for
+a tooth.</p>
+
+<p>In this campaign for public decency he enjoyed the support
+of a very remarkable man. In the church of Gouda
+you may this very day read a curious monosyllabic epitaph
+which enumerates the virtues of one Dirck Coornhert, who
+lies buried there. This Coornhert was an interesting fellow.
+He was the son of well-to-do people and had spent many
+years of his youth traveling in foreign lands and getting
+some first hand information about Germany, Spain and
+France. As soon as he had returned home from this trip
+he fell in love with a girl who did not have a cent. His careful
+Dutch father had forbidden the marriage. When his
+son married the girl just the same, he did what those ancestral
+patriarchs were supposed to do under the circumstances;
+he talked about filial ingratitude and disinherited the boy.</p>
+
+<p>This was inconvenient, in so far as young Coornhert was
+now obliged to go to work for a living. But he was a young
+man of parts, learned a trade and set up as a copper-engraver.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! once a Dutchman, always a dominie. When evening
+came, he hastily dropped the burin, picked up the goose-quill
+and wrote articles upon the events of the day. His style
+was not exactly what one would nowadays call “amusing.”
+But his books contained a great deal of that amiable common
+sense which had distinguished the work of Erasmus and they
+made him many friends and brought him into contact with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_279"></a>[279]</span>
+William the Silent who thought so highly of his abilities
+that he employed him as one of his confidential advisers.</p>
+
+<p>Now William was engaged in a strange sort of debate.
+King Philip, aided and abetted by the Pope, was trying to
+rid the world of the enemy of the human race (to wit, his
+own enemy, William) by a standing offer of twenty-five
+thousand golden ducats and a patent of nobility and forgiveness
+of all sins to whomsoever would go to Holland and murder
+the arch-heretic. William, who had already lived
+through five attempts upon his life, felt it his duty to refute
+the arguments of good King Philip in a series of pamphlets
+and Coornhert assisted him.</p>
+
+<p>That the house of Habsburg, for whom these arguments
+were intended, should thereby be converted to tolerance was
+of course an idle hope. But as all the world was watching
+the duel between William and Philip, those little pamphlets
+were translated and read everywhere and they caused a
+healthy discussion of many subjects that people had never
+before dared to mention above a whisper.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately the debates did not last very long. On the
+ninth of July of the year 1584 a young French Catholic
+gained that reward of twenty-five thousand ducats and six
+years later Coornhert died before he had been able to finish
+the translation of the works of Erasmus into the Dutch
+vernacular.</p>
+
+<p>As for the next twenty years, they were so full of the
+noise of battle that even the fulminations of the different
+theologians went unheard. And when finally the enemy had
+been driven from the territory of the new republic, there
+was no William to take hold of internal affairs and three
+score sects and denominations, who had been forced into temporary
+but unnatural friendship by the presence of a large
+number of Spanish mercenaries, flew at each other’s throats.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_280"></a>[280]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of course, they had to have a pretext for their quarrel
+but who ever heard of a theologian without a grievance?</p>
+
+<p>In the University of Leiden there were two professors
+who disagreed. That was nothing either new or unusual.
+But these two professors disagreed upon the question of the
+freedom of the will and that was a very serious matter. At
+once the delighted populace took a hand in the discussion
+and within less than a month the entire country was divided
+into two hostile camps.</p>
+
+<p>On the one side, the friends of Arminius.</p>
+
+<p>On the other, the followers of Gomarus.</p>
+
+<p>The latter, although born of Dutch parents, had lived all
+his life in Germany and was a brilliant product of the Teuton
+system of pedagogy. He possessed immense learning
+combined with a total absence of ordinary horse-sense. His
+mind was versed in the mysteries of Hebrew prosody but his
+heart beat according to the rules of the Aramaic syntax.</p>
+
+<p>His opponent, Arminius, was a very different sort of man.
+He was born in Oudewater, a little city not far away from
+that cloister Steyn where Erasmus had spent the unhappy
+years of his early manhood. As a child he had won the
+friendship of a neighbor, a famous mathematician and professor
+of astronomy in the University of Marburg. This
+man, Rudolf Snellius, had taken Arminius back with him
+to Germany that he might be properly educated. But when
+the boy went home for his first vacation he found that his
+native town had been sacked by the Spaniards and that all
+his relatives had been murdered.</p>
+
+<p>That seemed to end his career but fortunately some rich
+people with kind hearts heard of the sad plight of the young
+orphan and they put up a purse and sent him to Leiden to
+study theology. He worked hard and after half a dozen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_281"></a>[281]</span>
+years he had learned all there was to be learned and looked
+for fresh intellectual grazing grounds.</p>
+
+<p>In those days, brilliant students could always find a patron
+willing to invest a few dollars in their future. Soon
+Arminius, provided with a letter of credit issued by certain
+guilds of Amsterdam, was merrily trotting southward in
+search of future educational opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>As behooved a respectable candidate of theology, he went
+first of all to Geneva. Calvin was dead, but his man Friday,
+the learned Theodore Beza, had succeeded him as shepherd
+of the seraphic flock. The fine nose of this old heresy
+hunter at once detected a slight odor of Ramism in the
+doctrines of the young Dutchman and the visit of Arminius
+was cut short.</p>
+
+<p>The word Ramism means nothing to modern readers. But
+three hundred years ago it was considered a most dangerous
+religious novelty, as those who are familiar with the assembled
+works of Milton will know. It had been invented
+or originated (or what you please) by a Frenchman, a certain
+Pierre de la Ramée. As a student, de la Ramée had
+been so utterly exasperated by the antiquated methods of his
+professors that he had chosen as subject for his doctor’s
+dissertation the somewhat startling text, “Everything ever
+taught by Aristotle is absolutely wrong.”</p>
+
+<p>Needless to say this subject did not gain him the good will
+of his teachers. When a few years afterwards he elaborated
+his idea in a number of learned volumes, his death was a
+foregone conclusion. He fell as one of the first victims of
+the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.</p>
+
+<p>But his books, those pesky books which refuse to be assassinated
+together with their authors, had survived and
+Ramée’s curious system of logic had gained great popularity
+throughout northern and western Europe. Truly pious people<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_282"></a>[282]</span>
+however believed that Ramism was the password to
+Hades and Arminius was advised to go to Basel where “libertines”
+(a sixteenth century colloquialism meaning
+“liberals”) had been considered good form ever since that
+unfortunate city had fallen under the spell of the quizzical
+Erasmus.</p>
+
+<p>Arminius, thus forewarned, traveled northward and then
+decided upon something quite unusual. He boldly invaded
+the enemy’s territory, studied for a few semesters in the
+University of Padua and paid a visit to Rome. This made
+him a dangerous person in the eyes of his fellow countrymen
+when he returned to his native country in the year 1587.
+But as he seemed to develop neither horns nor a tail, he
+was gradually taken back into their good favor and was
+allowed to accept a call as minister to Amsterdam.</p>
+
+<p>There he made himself not only useful but he gained quite
+a reputation as a hero during one of the many outbreaks of
+the plague. Soon he was held in such genuine esteem that
+he was entrusted with the task of reorganizing the public
+school system of that big city and when in the year 1603
+he was called to Leiden as a full-fledged professor of theology,
+he left the capital amidst the sincere regrets of the
+entire population.</p>
+
+<p>If he had known beforehand what was awaiting him in
+Leiden, I am sure he would never have gone. He arrived
+just when the battle between the Infralapsarians and the
+Supralapsarians was at its height.</p>
+
+<p>Arminius was both by nature and education an Infralapsarian.
+He tried to be fair to his colleague, the Supralapsarian
+Gomarus. But alas, the differences between the
+Supralapsarians and the Infralapsarians were such as allowed
+of no compromise. And Arminius was forced to declare
+himself an out and out Infralapsarian.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_283"></a>[283]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of course, you will ask me what Supra- and Infralapsarians
+were. I don’t know, and I seem unable to learn such
+things. But as far as I can make out, it was the age-old
+quarrel between those who believed (as did Arminius) that
+man is to a certain extent possessed of a free will and able
+to shape his own destinies and those who like Sophocles and
+Calvin and Gomarus taught that everything in our lives has
+been pre-ordained ages before we were born and that our
+fate therefore depends upon a throw of the divine dice at
+the hour of creation.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1600 by far the greater number of the people
+of northern Europe were Supralapsarians. They loved to
+listen to sermons which doomed the majority of their neighbors
+to eternal perdition and those few ministers who dared
+to preach a gospel of good will and charity were at once
+suspected of criminal weakness, fit rivals of those tender
+hearted doctors who fail to prescribe malodorous medicines
+and kill their patients by their kindness.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the gossiping old women of Leiden had discovered
+that Arminius was an Infralapsarian, his usefulness
+had come to an end. The poor man died under the torrent
+of abuse that was let loose upon him by his former friends
+and supporters. And then, as seemed unavoidable during
+the seventeenth century, Infralapsarianism and Supralapsarianism
+made their entrance into the field of politics and
+the Supralapsarians won at the polls and the Infralapsarians
+were declared enemies of the public order and traitors to
+their country.</p>
+
+<p>Before this absurd quarrel had come to an end, Oldenbarnevelt,
+the man who next to William the Silent had been
+responsible for the foundation of the Republic, lay dead
+with his head between his feet; Grotius, whose moderation
+had made him the first great advocate of an equitable system<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_284"></a>[284]</span>
+of international law, was eating the bread of charity at the
+court of the Queen of Sweden; and the work of William the
+Silent seemed entirely undone.</p>
+
+<p>But Calvinism did not gain the triumph it had hoped.</p>
+
+<p>The Dutch Republic was a republic only in name. It was
+really a sort of merchants’ and bankers’ club, ruled by a
+few hundred influential families. These gentlemen were not
+at all interested in equality and fraternity, but they did believe
+in law and order. They recognized and supported the
+established church. On Sundays with a great display of
+unction they proceeded to the large white-washed sepulchers
+which in former days had been Catholic Cathedrals and
+which now were Protestant lecture halls. But on Monday,
+when the clergy paid its respects to the Honorable Burgomaster
+and Town Councilor, with a long list of grievances
+against this and that and the other person, their lordships
+were “in conference” and unable to receive the reverend gentlemen.
+If the reverend gentlemen insisted, and induced (as
+frequently happened) a few thousand of their loyal parishioners
+to “demonstrate” in front of the town hall, then their
+lordships would graciously deign to accept a neatly written
+copy of the reverend gentlemen’s complaints and suggestions.
+But as soon as the door had been closed upon the last
+of the darkly garbed petitioners, their lordships would use
+the document to light their pipes.</p>
+
+<p>For they had adopted the useful and practical maxim of
+“once is enough and too many” and they were so horrified
+by what had happened during the terrible years of the great
+Supralapsarian civil war that they uncompromisingly suppressed
+all further forms of religious frenzy.</p>
+
+<p>Posterity has not always been kind to those aristocrats of
+the ledger. Undoubtedly they regarded the country as their
+private property and did not always differentiate with sufficient<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_285"></a>[285]</span>
+nicety between the interests of their fatherland and
+those of their own firm. They lacked that broad vision which
+goes with empire and almost invariably they were penny-wise
+and pound-foolish. But they did something which deserves
+our hearty commendation. They turned their country
+into an international clearing-house where all sorts of people
+with all sorts of ideas were given the widest degree of liberty
+to say, think, write and print whatever pleased them.</p>
+
+<p>I do not want to paint too rosy a picture. Here and there,
+under a threat of ministerial disapprobation, the Town
+Councilors were sometimes obliged to suppress a secret society
+of Catholics or to confiscate the pamphlets printed by
+a particularly noisy heretic. But generally speaking, as
+long as one did not climb on a soap-box in the middle of the
+market place to denounce the doctrine of predestination or
+carry a big rosary into a public dining-hall or deny the
+existence of God in the South Side Methodist Church of
+Haarlem, one enjoyed a degree of personal immunity which
+for almost two centuries made the Dutch Republic a veritable
+haven of rest for all those who in other parts of the
+world were persecuted for the sake of their opinions.</p>
+
+<p>Soon the rumor of this Paradise Regained spread abroad.
+And during the next two hundred years, the print shops
+and the coffee-houses of Holland were filled with a motley
+crew of enthusiasts, the advance guard of a strange new army
+of spiritual liberation.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_286"></a>[286]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XX">CHAPTER XX<br>
+<span class="smaller">BRUNO</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It has been said (and with a good deal of reason) that
+the Great War was a war of non-commissioned officers.</p>
+
+<p>While the generals and the colonels and the three-star
+strategists sat in solitary splendor in the halls of some
+deserted château and contemplated miles of maps until they
+could evolve a new bit of tactics that was to give them half
+a square mile of territory (and lose some thirty thousand
+men), the junior officers, the sergeants and the corporals,
+aided and abetted by a number of intelligent privates, did
+the so-called “dirty work” and eventually brought about
+the collapse of the German line of defense.</p>
+
+<p>The great crusade for spiritual independence was fought
+along similar lines.</p>
+
+<p>There were no frontal attacks which drew into action half
+a million soldiers.</p>
+
+<p>There were no desperate charges to provide the enemy’s
+gunners with an easy and agreeable target.</p>
+
+<p>I might go even further and say that the vast majority
+of the people never knew that there was any fighting at all.
+Now and then, curiosity may have compelled them to ask
+who was being burned that morning or who was going to be
+hanged the next afternoon. Then perhaps they discovered
+that a few desperate individuals continued to fight for certain
+principles of freedom of which both Catholics and Protestants
+disapproved most heartily. But I doubt whether
+such information affected them beyond the point of mild<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_287"></a>[287]</span>
+regret and the comment that it must be very sad for their
+poor relatives to bear, that uncle had come to such a terrible
+end.</p>
+
+<p>It could hardly have been otherwise. What martyrs actually
+accomplish for the cause for which they give their
+lives cannot possibly be reduced to mathematical formulae
+or be expressed in terms of amperes or horsepower.</p>
+
+<p>Any industrious young man in search of a Ph.D. may
+read carefully through the assembled works of Giordano
+Bruno and by the patient collection of all sentences containing
+such sentiments as “the state has no right to tell people
+what to think” or “society may not punish with the sword
+those who dissent from the generally approved dogmas,” he
+may be able to write an acceptable dissertation upon “Giordano
+Bruno (1549-1600) and the principles of religious
+freedom.”</p>
+
+<p>But those of us no longer in search of those fatal letters
+must approach the subject from a different angle.</p>
+
+<p>There were, so we say in our final analysis, a number
+of devout men who were so profoundly shocked by the fanaticism
+of their day, by the yoke under which the people of
+all countries were forced to exist, that they rose in revolt.
+They were poor devils. They rarely owned more than the
+cloak upon their back and they were not always certain of a
+place to sleep. But they burned with a divine fire. Up
+and down the land they traveled, talking and writing, drawing
+the learned professors of learned academies into learned
+disputes, arguing humbly with the humble country folk in
+humble rustic inns, eternally preaching a gospel of good
+will, of understanding, of charity towards others. Up and
+down the land they traveled in their shabby clothes with
+their little bundles of books and pamphlets until they died
+of pneumonia in some miserable village in the hinterland<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_288"></a>[288]</span>
+of Pomerania or were lynched by drunken peasants in a
+Scotch hamlet or were broken on the wheel in a provincial
+borough of France.</p>
+
+<p>And if I mention the name of Giordano Bruno, I do not
+mean to imply that he was the only one of his kind. But
+his life, his ideas, his restless zeal for what he held to be
+true and desirable, were so typical of that entire group of
+pioneers that he will serve very well as an example.</p>
+
+<p>The parents of Bruno were poor people. Their son, an
+average Italian boy of no particular promise, followed the
+usual course and went into a monastery. Later he became
+a Dominican monk. He had no business in that order for
+the Dominicans were the most ardent supporters of all forms
+of persecution, the “police-dogs of the true faith,” as their
+contemporaries called them. And they were clever. It was
+not necessary for a heretic to have his ideas put into print
+to be nosed out by one of those eager detectives. A single
+glance, a gesture of the hand, a shrug of the shoulders were
+often sufficient to give a man away and bring him into contact
+with the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>How Bruno, brought up in an atmosphere of unquestioning
+obedience, turned rebel and deserted the Holy Scriptures
+for the works of Zeno and Anaxagoras, I do not know. But
+before this strange novice had finished his course of prescribed
+studies, he was expelled from the Dominican order
+and henceforth he was a wanderer upon the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>He crossed the Alps. How many other young men before
+him had braved the dangers of those ancient mountain passes
+that they might find freedom in the mighty fortress which
+the new faith had erected at the junction of the Rhone
+and the Arve!</p>
+
+<p>And how many of them had turned away, broken hearted
+when they discovered that here as there it was the inner<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_289"></a>[289]</span>
+spirit which guided the hearts of men and that a change of
+creed did not necessarily mean a change of heart and mind.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno’s residence in Geneva lasted less than three months.
+The town was full of Italian refugees. These brought their
+fellow-countryman a new suit of clothes and found him a
+job as proof-reader. In the evenings he read and wrote.
+He got hold of a copy of de la Ramée’s works. There at
+last was a man after his own heart. De la Ramée believed
+too that the world could not progress until the tyranny
+of the medieval text-books was broken. Bruno did not go
+as far as his famous French teacher and did not believe that
+everything the Greeks had ever taught was wrong. But
+why should the people of the sixteenth century be bound by
+words and sentences that were written in the fourth century
+before the birth of Christ? Why indeed?</p>
+
+<p>“Because it has always been that way,” the upholders of
+the orthodox faith answered him.</p>
+
+<p>“What have we to do with our grandfathers and what
+have they to do with us? Let the dead bury the dead,” the
+young iconoclast answered.</p>
+
+<p>And very soon afterwards the police paid him a visit and
+suggested that he had better pack his satchels and try his
+luck elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno’s life thereafter was one endless peregrination in
+search of a place where he might live and work in some
+degree of liberty and security. He never found it. From
+Geneva he went to Lyons and then to Toulouse. By that
+time he had taken up the study of astronomy and had become
+an ardent supporter of the ideas of Copernicus, a
+dangerous step in an age when all the contemporary Bryans
+brayed, “The world turning around the sun! The world
+a commonplace little planet turning around the sun! Ho-ho
+and hee-hee! Who ever heard such nonsense?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_290"></a>[290]</span></p>
+
+<p>Toulouse became uncomfortable. He crossed France,
+walking to Paris. And next to England as private secretary
+to a French ambassador. But there another disappointment
+awaited him. The English theologians were no better
+than the continental ones. A little more practical, perhaps.
+In Oxford, for example, they did not punish a student when
+he committed an error against the teachings of Aristotle.
+They fined him ten shillings.</p>
+
+<p>Bruno became sarcastic. He began to write brilliantly
+dangerous bits of prose, dialogues of a religious-philosophic-political
+nature in which the entire existing order of things
+was turned topsy turvy and submitted to a minute but none
+too flattering examination.</p>
+
+<p>And he did some lecturing upon his favorite subject,
+astronomy.</p>
+
+<p>But college authorities rarely smile upon professors who
+please the hearts of their students. Bruno once more found
+himself invited to leave. And so back again to France and
+then to Marburg, where not so long before Luther and
+Zwingli had debated upon the true nature of the transubstantiation
+in the castle of pious Elisabeth of Hungary.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! his reputation as a “Libertine” had preceded him.
+He was not even allowed to lecture. Wittenberg proved
+more hospitable. That old stronghold of the Lutheran
+faith, however, was beginning to be overrun by the disciples
+of Dr. Calvin. After that there was no further room for
+a man of Bruno’s liberal tendencies.</p>
+
+<p>Southward he wended his way to try his luck in the land
+of John Huss. Further disappointment awaited him.
+Prague had become a Habsburg capital and where the Habsburg
+entered, freedom went out by the city gates. Back to
+the road and a long, long walk to Zürich.</p>
+
+<p>There he received a letter from an Italian youth, Giovanni<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_291"></a>[291]</span>
+Mocenigo, who asked him to come to Venice. What made
+Bruno accept, I do not know. Perhaps the Italian peasant
+in him was impressed by the luster of an old patrician name
+and felt flattered by the invitation.</p>
+
+<p>Giovanni Mocenigo, however, was not made of the stuff
+which had enabled his ancestors to defy both Sultan and
+Pope. He was a weakling and a coward and did not move
+a finger when officers of the Inquisition appeared at his
+house and took his guest to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, the government of Venice was terribly jealous
+of its rights. If Bruno had been a German merchant or a
+Dutch skipper, they would have protested violently and
+they might even have gone to war when a foreign power
+dared to arrest some one within their own jurisdiction. But
+why incur the hostility of the pope on account of a vagabond
+who had brought nothing to their city but his ideas?</p>
+
+<p>It was true he called himself a scholar. The Republic
+was highly flattered, but she had scholars enough of her own.</p>
+
+<p>And so farewell to Bruno and may San Marco have mercy
+upon his soul.</p>
+
+<p>Seven long years Bruno was kept in the prison of the Inquisition.</p>
+
+<p>On the seventeenth of February of the year 1600 he was
+burned at the stake and his ashes were blown to the winds.</p>
+
+<p>He was executed on the Campo dei Fiori. Those who
+know Italian may therein find inspiration for a pretty little
+allegory.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_292"></a>[292]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXI">CHAPTER XXI<br>
+<span class="smaller">SPINOZA</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>There are certain things in history which I have
+never been able to understand and one of these is
+the amount of work done by some of the artists and
+literary men of bygone ages.</p>
+
+<p>The modern members of our writing guild, with typewriters
+and dictaphones and secretaries and fountain pens,
+can turn out between three and four thousand words a day.
+How did Shakespeare, with half a dozen other jobs to distract
+his mind, with a scolding wife and a clumsy goose-quill,
+manage to write thirty-seven plays?</p>
+
+<p>Where did Lope de Vega, veteran of the Invincible
+Armada and a busy man all his life, find the necessary ink
+and paper for eighteen hundred comedies and five hundred
+essays?</p>
+
+<p>What manner of man was this strange Hofkonzertmeister,
+Johann Sebastian Bach, who in a little house filled with the
+noise of twenty children found time to compose five oratorios,
+one hundred and ninety church cantatas, three wedding
+cantatas, and a dozen motets, six solemn masses, three
+fiddle concertos, a concerto for two violins which alone would
+have made his name immortal, seven concertos for piano
+and orchestra, three concertos for two pianos, two concertos
+for three pianos, thirty orchestral scores and enough
+pieces for the flute, the harpsichord, the organ, the bull-fiddle
+and the French horn to keep the average student of
+music busy for the rest of his days.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_293"></a>[293]</span></p>
+
+<p>Or again, by what process of industry and application
+could painters like Rembrandt and Rubens produce a picture
+or an etching at the rate of almost four a month during
+more than thirty years? How could an humble citizen
+like Antonio Stradivarius turn out five hundred and forty
+fiddles, fifty violoncellos and twelve violas in a single lifetime?</p>
+
+<p>I am not now discussing the brains capable of devising
+all these plots, hearing all these melodies, seeing all those
+diversified combinations of color and line, choosing all this
+wood. I am just wondering at the physical part of it.
+How did they do it? Didn’t they ever go to bed? Didn’t
+they sometimes take a few hours off for a game of billiards?
+Were they never tired? Had they ever heard of nerves?</p>
+
+<p>Both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were full
+of that sort of people. They defied all the laws of hygiene,
+ate and drank everything that was bad for them, were totally
+unconscious of their high destinies as members of the glorious
+human race, but they had an awfully good time and
+their artistic and intellectual output was something terrific.</p>
+
+<p>And what was true of the arts and the sciences held equally
+true of such finicky subjects as theology.</p>
+
+<p>Go to any of the libraries that date back two hundred
+years and you will find their cellars and attics filled with
+tracts and homilies and discussions and refutations and digests
+and commentaries in duodecimo and octodecimo and
+octavo, bound in leather and in parchment and in paper, all
+of them covered with dust and oblivion, but without exception
+containing an enormous if useless amount of learning.</p>
+
+<p>The subjects of which they treated and many of the words
+they used have lost all meaning to our modern ears. But
+somehow or other these moldy compilations served a very
+useful purpose. If they accomplished nothing else, they at<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_294"></a>[294]</span>
+least cleared the air. For they either settled the questions
+they discussed to the general satisfaction of all concerned,
+or they convinced their readers that those particular problems
+could not possibly be decided with an appeal to logic
+and argument and might therefore just as well be dropped
+right then and there.</p>
+
+<p>This may sound like a back-handed compliment. But I
+hope that critics of the thirtieth century shall be just as
+charitable when they wade through the remains of our own
+literary and scientific achievements.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Baruch de Spinoza, the hero of this chapter, did not follow
+the fashion of his time in the matter of quantity. His
+assembled works consist of three or four small volumes and
+a few bundles of letters.</p>
+
+<p>But the amount of study necessary for the correct mathematical
+solution of his abstract problems in ethics and philosophy
+would have staggered any normally healthy man.
+It killed the poor consumptive who had undertaken to reach
+God by way of the table of multiplication.</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza was a Jew. His people, however, had never suffered
+the indignities of the Ghetto. Their ancestors had
+settled down in the Spanish peninsula when that part of
+the world was a Moorish province. After the reconquest
+and the introduction of that policy of “Spain for the Spaniard”
+which eventually forced that country into bankruptcy,
+the Spinozas had been forced to leave their old home. They
+had sailed for the Netherlands, had bought a small house
+in Amsterdam, had worked hard, had saved their money
+and soon were known as one of the most respectable families
+of the “Portuguese colony.”</p>
+
+<p>If nevertheless their son Baruch was conscious of his Jewish<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_295"></a>[295]</span>
+origin, this was due more to the training he received in
+his Talmud school than to the gibes of his little neighbors.
+For the Dutch Republic was so chock full of class prejudice
+that there was little room left for mere race prejudice and
+therefore lived in perfect peace and harmony with all the
+alien races that had found a refuge along the banks of the
+North and Zuider Seas. And this was one of the most characteristic
+bits of Dutch life which contemporary travelers
+never failed to omit from their “Souvenirs de Voyage” and
+with good reason.</p>
+
+<p>In most other parts of Europe, even at that late age, the
+relation between the Jew and the non-Jew was far from
+satisfactory. What made the quarrel between the two races
+so hopeless was the fact that both sides were equally right
+and equally wrong and that both sides could justly claim
+to be the victim of their opponent’s intolerance and prejudice.
+In the light of the theory put forward in this book
+that intolerance is merely a form of self-protection of the
+mob, it becomes clear that as long as they were faithful to
+their own respective religions, the Christian and the Jew
+must have conceded each other as enemies. In the first place,
+they both of them maintained that their God was the only
+true God and that all the other Gods of all the other nations
+were false. In the second place, they were each other’s most
+dangerous commercial rival. The Jews had come to western
+Europe as they had originally come to Palestine, as immigrants
+in search of a new home. The labor unions of that
+day, the Guilds, had made it impossible for them to take
+up a trade. They had therefore been obliged to content
+themselves with such economic makeshifts as pawnbroking
+and banking. In the Middle Ages these two professions,
+which closely resembled each other, were not thought fit
+occupations for decent citizens. Why the Church, until the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_296"></a>[296]</span>
+days of Calvin, should have felt such a repugnance towards
+money (except in the form of taxes) and should have regarded
+the taking of interest as a crime, is hard to understand.
+Usury, of course, was something no government
+could tolerate and already the Babylonians, some forty centuries
+before, had passed drastic laws against the money
+changers who tried to make a profit out of other people’s
+money. In several chapters of the Old Testament, written
+two thousand years later, we read how Moses too had expressly
+forbidden his followers to lend money at exorbitant
+rates of interest to any one except foreigners. Still later,
+the great Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato,
+had given expression to their great disapproval of money
+that was born of other money. The Church fathers had
+been even more explicit upon this subject. All during the
+Middle Ages the money lenders were held in profound contempt.
+Dante even provided a special little alcove in his
+Hell for the exclusive benefit of his banker friends.</p>
+
+<p>Theoretically perhaps it could be proved that the pawnbroker
+and his colleague, the man behind the “banco,” were
+undesirable citizens and that the world would be better off
+without them. At the same time, as soon as the world had
+ceased to be entirely agricultural, it was found to be quite
+impossible to transact even the simplest business operations
+without the use of credit. The money lender therefore had
+become a necessary evil and the Jew, who (according to the
+views of the Christians) was doomed to eternal damnation
+any way, was urged to occupy himself with a trade which
+was necessary but which no respectable man would touch.</p>
+
+<p>In this way these unfortunate exiles were forced into
+certain unpleasant trades which made them the natural
+enemy of both the rich and the poor, and then, as soon as
+they had established themselves, these same enemies turned<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_297"></a>[297]</span>
+against them, called them names, locked them up in the dirtiest
+part of the city and in moments of great emotional
+stress, hanged them as wicked unbelievers or burned them
+as renegade Christians.</p>
+
+<p>It was all so terribly silly. And besides it was so stupid.
+These endless annoyances and persecutions did not make
+the Jews any fonder of their Christian neighbors. And
+as a direct result, a large volume of first-rate intelligence
+was withdrawn from public circulation, thousands of bright
+young fellows, who might have advanced the cause of commerce
+and science and the arts, wasted their brains and
+energy upon the useless study of certain old books filled with
+abstruse conundrums and hair-splitting syllogisms and millions
+of helpless boys and girls were doomed to lead stunted
+lives in stinking tenements, listening on the one hand to
+their elders who told them that they were God’s chosen
+people who would surely inherit the earth and all the wealth
+thereof, and on the other hand being frightened to death
+by the curses of their neighbors who never ceased to inform
+them that they were pigs and only fit for the gallows or
+the wheel.</p>
+
+<p>To ask that people (any people) doomed to live under
+such adverse circumstances shall retain a normal outlook
+upon life is to demand the impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Again and again the Jews were goaded into some desperate
+act by their Christian compatriots and then, when white
+with rage, they turned upon their oppressors, they were
+called “traitors” and “ungrateful villains” and were subjected
+to further humiliations and restrictions. But these
+restrictions had only one result. They increased the number
+of Jews who had a grievance, turned the others into
+nervous wrecks and generally made the Ghetto a ghastly
+abode of frustrated ambitions and pent-up hatreds.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_298"></a>[298]</span></p>
+
+<p>Spinoza, because he was born in Amsterdam, escaped the
+misery which was the birthright of most of his relatives.
+He went first of all to the school maintained by his synagogue
+(appropriately called “the Tree of Life”) and as
+soon as he could conjugate his Hebrew verbs was sent to
+the learned Dr. Franciscus Appinius van den Ende, who
+was to drill him in Latin and in the sciences.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Franciscus, as his name indicates, was of Catholic
+origin. Rumor had it that he was a graduate of the University
+of Louvain and if one were to believe the best informed
+deacons of the town, he was really a Jesuit in disguise
+and a very dangerous person. This however was
+nonsense. Van den Ende in his youth had actually spent
+a few years at a Catholic seminary. But his heart was
+not in his work and he had left his native city of Antwerp,
+had gone to Amsterdam and there had opened a private
+school of his own.</p>
+
+<p>He had such a tremendous flair for choosing the methods
+that would make his pupils like their classical lessons, that
+heedless of the man’s popish past, the Calvinistic burghers
+of Amsterdam willingly entrusted their children to his care
+and were very proud of the fact that the pupils of his school
+invariably out-hexametered and out-declined the little boys
+of all other local academies.</p>
+
+<p>Van den Ende taught little Baruch his Latin, but being
+an enthusiastic follower of all the latest discoveries in the
+field of science and a great admirer of Giordano Bruno,
+he undoubtedly taught the boy several things which as a
+rule were not mentioned in an orthodox Jewish household.</p>
+
+<p>For young Spinoza, contrary to the customs of the times,
+did not board with the other boys, but lived at home. And
+he so impressed his family by his profound learning that all
+the relations proudly pointed to him as the little professor<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_299"></a>[299]</span>
+and liberally supplied him with pocket money. He did not
+waste it upon tobacco. He used it to buy books on
+philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>One author especially fascinated him.</p>
+
+<p>That was Descartes.</p>
+
+<p>René Descartes was a French nobleman born in that region
+between Tours and Poitiers where a thousand years before
+the grandfather of Charlemagne had stopped the Mohammedan
+conquest of Europe. Before he was ten years old he
+had been sent to the Jesuits to be educated and he spent
+the next decade making a nuisance of himself. For this
+boy had a mind of his own and accepted nothing without
+“being shown.” The Jesuits are probably the only people
+in the world who know how to handle such difficult children
+and who can train them successfully without breaking their
+spirit. The proof of the educational pudding is in the eating.
+If our modern pedagogues would study the methods
+of Brother Loyola, we might have a few Descartes of our
+own.</p>
+
+<p>When he was twenty years old, René entered military
+service and went to the Netherlands where Maurice of Nassau
+had so thoroughly perfected his military system that
+his armies were the post-graduate school for all ambitious
+young men who hoped to become generals. Descartes’ visit
+to the headquarters of the Nassau prince was perhaps a
+little irregular. A faithful Catholic taking service with a
+Protestant chieftain! It sounds like high treason. But
+Descartes was interested in problems of mathematics and
+artillery but not of religion or politics. Therefore as soon
+as Holland had concluded a truce with Spain, he resigned
+his commission, went to Munich and fought for a while
+under the banner of the Catholic Duke of Bavaria.</p>
+
+<p>But that campaign did not last very long. The only fighting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_300"></a>[300]</span>
+of any consequence then still going on was near La
+Rochelle, the city which the Huguenots were defending
+against Richelieu. And so Descartes went back to France
+that he might learn the noble art of siege-craft. But camp
+life was beginning to pall upon him. He decided to give
+up a military career and devote himself to philosophy and
+science.</p>
+
+<p>He had a small income of his own. He had no desire to
+marry. His wishes were few. He anticipated a quiet and
+happy life and he had it.</p>
+
+<p>Why he chose Holland as a place of residence, I do not
+know. But it was a country full of printers and publishers
+and bookshops and as long as one did not openly attack
+the established form of government or religion, the existing
+law on censorship remained a dead letter. Furthermore,
+as he never learned a single word of the language of his
+adopted country (a trick not difficult to a true Frenchman),
+Descartes was able to avoid undesirable company and
+futile conversations and could give all of his time (some
+twenty hours per day) to his own work.</p>
+
+<p>This may seem a dull existence for a man who had been
+a soldier. But Descartes had a purpose in life and it seems
+that he was perfectly contented with his self-inflicted exile.
+He had during the course of years become convinced that
+the world was still plunged in a profound gloom of abysmal
+ignorance; that what was then being called science had not
+even the remotest resemblance to true science, and that no
+general progress would be possible until the whole ancient
+fabric of error and falsehood had first of all been razed
+to the ground. No small order, this. Descartes however
+was possessed of endless patience and at the age of thirty
+he set to work to give us an entirely new system of philosophy.
+Warming up to his task he added geometry and astronomy<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_301"></a>[301]</span>
+and physics to his original program and he performed
+his task with such noble impartiality of mind that
+the Catholics denounced him as a Calvinist and the Calvinists
+cursed him for an atheist.</p>
+
+<p>This clamor, if ever it reached him, did not disturb him
+in the least. He quietly continued his researches and died
+peacefully in the city of Stockholm, whither he had gone
+to talk philosophy with the Queen of Sweden.</p>
+
+<p>Among the people of the seventeenth century, Cartesianism
+(the name under which his philosophies became known)
+made quite as much of a stir as Darwinism was to make
+among the contemporaries of Queen Victoria. To be a Cartesian
+in the year 1680 meant something terrible, something
+almost indecent. It proclaimed one an enemy of the
+established order of society, a Socinian, a low fellow who
+by his own confession had set himself apart from the companionship
+of his respectable neighbors. This did not prevent
+the majority of the intelligent classes from accepting
+Cartesianism as readily and as eagerly as our grandfathers
+accepted Darwinism. But among the orthodox Jews of Amsterdam,
+such subjects were never even mentioned. Cartesianism
+was not mentioned in either Talmud or Torah.
+Hence it did not exist. And when it became apparent that
+it existed just the same in the mind of one Baruch de Spinoza,
+it was a foregone conclusion that said Baruch de Spinoza
+would himself cease to exist as soon as the authorities of
+the synagogue had been able to investigate the case and
+take official action.</p>
+
+<p>The Amsterdam synagogue had at that moment passed
+through a severe crisis. When little Baruch was fifteen years
+old, another Portuguese exile by the name of Uriel Acosta
+had arrived in Amsterdam, had forsworn Catholicism,
+which he had accepted under a threat of death, and had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_302"></a>[302]</span>
+returned to the faith of his fathers. But this fellow Acosta
+had not been an ordinary Jew. He was a gentleman accustomed
+to carry a feather in his hat and a sword at his side.
+To him the arrogance of the Dutch rabbis, trained in the
+German and Polish schools of learning, had come as a most
+unpleasant surprise, and he had been too proud and too indifferent
+to hide his opinions.</p>
+
+<p>In a small community like that, such open defiance could
+not possibly be tolerated. A bitter struggle had followed.
+On the one side a solitary dreamer, half prophet, half hidalgo.
+On the other side the merciless guardians of the law.</p>
+
+<p>It had ended in tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>First of all Acosta had been denounced to the local police
+as the author of certain blasphemous pamphlets which denied
+the immortality of the soul. This had got him into
+trouble with the Calvinist ministers. But the matter had
+been straightened out and the charge had been dropped.
+Thereupon the synagogue had excommunicated the stiff-necked
+rebel and had deprived him of his livelihood.</p>
+
+<p>For months thereafter the poor man had wandered
+through the streets of Amsterdam until destitution and loneliness
+had driven him back to his own flock. But he was
+not re-admitted until he had first of all publicly apologized
+for his evil conduct and had then suffered himself to be
+whipped and kicked by all the members of the congregation.
+These indignities had unbalanced his mind. He had
+bought a pistol and had blown his brains out.</p>
+
+<p>This suicide had caused a tremendous lot of talk among
+the principal citizens of Amsterdam. The Jewish community
+felt that it could not risk the chance of another public
+scandal. When it became evident that the most promising
+pupil of the “Tree of Life” had been contaminated by the
+new heresies of Descartes, a direct attempt was made to hush<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_303"></a>[303]</span>
+things up. Baruch was approached and was offered a fixed
+annual sum if he would give his word that he would be good,
+would continue to show himself in the synagogue and would
+not publish or say anything against the law.</p>
+
+<p>Now Spinoza was the last man to consider such a compromise.
+He curtly refused to do anything of the sort.
+In consequence whereof he was duly read out of his own
+church according to that famous ancient Formula of Damnation
+which leaves very little to the imagination and goes
+back all the way to the days of Jericho to find the appropriate
+number of curses and execrations.</p>
+
+<p>As for the victim of these manifold maledictions, he remained
+quietly in his room and read about the occurrence in
+next day’s paper. Even when an attempt was made upon
+his life by an over zealous follower of the law, he refused
+to leave town.</p>
+
+<p>This came as a great blow to the prestige of the Rabbis
+who apparently had invoked the names of Joshua and Elisha
+in vain and who saw themselves publicly defied for the second
+time in less than half a dozen years. In their anxiety
+they went so far as to make an appeal to the town hall.
+They asked for an interview with the Burgomasters and
+explained that this Baruch de Spinoza whom they had just
+expelled from their own church was really a most dangerous
+person, an agnostic who refused to believe in God and
+who therefore ought not to be tolerated in a respectable
+Christian community like the city of Amsterdam.</p>
+
+<p>Their lordships, after their pleasant habit, washed their
+hands of the whole affair and referred the matter to a sub-committee
+of clergymen. The sub-committee studied the
+question, discovered that Baruch de Spinoza had done nothing
+that could be construed as an offense against the ordinances
+of the town, and so reported to their lordships. At<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_304"></a>[304]</span>
+the same time they considered it to be good policy for members
+of the cloth to stand together and therefore they suggested
+that the Burgomasters ask this young man, who
+seemed to be so very independent, to leave Amsterdam for a
+couple of months and not to return until the thing had
+blown over.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment on the life of Spinoza was as quiet
+and uneventful as the landscape upon which he looked from
+his bedroom windows. He left Amsterdam and hired a small
+house in the village of Rijnsberg near Leiden. He spent his
+days polishing lenses for optical instruments and at night
+he smoked his pipe and read or wrote as the spirit moved
+him. He never married. There was rumor of a love affair
+between him and a daughter of his former Latin teacher,
+van den Ende. But as the child was ten years old when
+Spinoza left Amsterdam, this does not seem very likely.</p>
+
+<p>He had several very loyal friends and at least twice a
+year they offered to give him a pension that he might devote
+all his time to his studies. He answered that he appreciated
+their good intentions but that he preferred to
+remain independent and with the exception of an allowance
+of eighty dollars a year from a rich young Cartesian, he
+never touched a penny and spent his days in the respectable
+poverty of the true philosopher.</p>
+
+<p>He had a chance to become a professor in Germany, but
+he declined. He received word that the illustrious King of
+Prussia would be happy to become his patron and protector,
+but he answered nay and remained faithful to the quiet routine
+of his pleasant exile.</p>
+
+<p>After a number of years in Rijnsberg he moved to the
+Hague. He had never been very strong and the particles
+of glass from his half-finished lenses had affected his lungs.</p>
+
+<p>He died quite suddenly and alone in the year 1677.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_305"></a>[305]</span></p>
+
+<p>To the intense disgust of the local clergy, not less than
+six private carriages belonging to prominent members of
+the court followed the “atheist” to his grave. And when
+two hundred years later a statue was unveiled to his memory,
+the police reserves had to be called out to protect the
+participants in this solemn celebration against the fury of
+a rowdy crowd of ardent Calvinists.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the man. What about his influence? Was
+he merely another of those industrious philosophers who fill
+endless books with endless theories and speak a language
+which drove even Omar Khayyam to an expression of exasperated
+annoyance?</p>
+
+<p>No, he was not.</p>
+
+<p>Neither did he accomplish his results by the brilliancy of
+his wit or the plausible truth of his theories. Spinoza was
+great mainly by force of his courage. He belonged to a race
+that knew only one law, a set of hard and fast rules laid
+down for all times in the dim ages of a long forgotten past,
+a system of spiritual tyranny created for the benefit of a
+class of professional priests who had taken it upon themselves
+to interpret this sacred code.</p>
+
+<p>He lived in a world in which the idea of intellectual freedom
+was almost synonymous with political anarchy.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that his system of logic must offend both Jews
+and Gentiles.</p>
+
+<p>But he never wavered.</p>
+
+<p>He approached all problems as universal problems. He
+regarded them without exception as the manifestation of
+an omnipresent will and believed them to be the expression
+of an ultimate reality which would hold good on Doomsday
+as it had held good at the hour of creation.</p>
+
+<p>And in this way he greatly contributed to the cause of
+human tolerance.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_306"></a>[306]</span></p>
+
+<p>Like Descartes before him, Spinoza discarded the narrow
+boundaries laid down by the older forms of religion and
+boldly built himself a new system of thought based upon
+the rocks of a million stars.</p>
+
+<p>By so doing he made man what man had not been since
+the days of the ancient Greeks and Romans, a true citizen
+of the universe.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_307"></a>[307]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXII">CHAPTER XXII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE NEW ZION</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>There was little reason to fear that the works of
+Spinoza would ever be popular. They were as amusing
+as a text-book on trigonometry and few people
+ever get beyond the first two or three sentences of any given
+chapter.</p>
+
+<p>It took a different sort of man to spread the new ideas
+among the mass of the people.</p>
+
+<p>In France the enthusiasm for private speculation and investigation
+had come to an end as soon as the country had
+been turned into an absolute monarchy.</p>
+
+<p>In Germany the poverty and the horror which had followed
+in the wake of the Thirty Years War had killed all
+personal initiative for at least two hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>During the second half of the seventeenth century, therefore,
+England was the only one among the larger countries
+of Europe where further progress along the lines of independent
+thought was still possible and the prolonged quarrel
+between the Crown and Parliament was adding an element
+of instability which proved to be of great help to the
+cause of personal freedom.</p>
+
+<p>First of all we must consider the English sovereigns. For
+years these unfortunate monarchs had been between the devil
+of Catholicism and the deep sea of Puritanism.</p>
+
+<p>Their Catholic subjects (which included a great many
+faithful Episcopalians with a secret leaning towards Rome)<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_308"></a>[308]</span>
+were forever clamoring for a return to that happy era when
+the British kings had been vassals of the pope.</p>
+
+<p>Their Puritan subjects on the other hand, with one eye
+firmly glued upon the example of Geneva, dreamed of the
+day when there should be no king at all and England
+should be a replica of the happy commonwealth tucked away
+in a little corner of the Swiss mountains.</p>
+
+<p>But that was not all.</p>
+
+<p>The men who ruled England were also kings of Scotland
+and their Scottish subjects, when it came to religion, knew
+exactly what they wanted. And so thoroughly were they
+convinced that they themselves were right that they were
+firmly opposed to the idea of liberty of conscience. They
+thought it wicked that other denominations should be suffered
+to exist and to worship freely within the confines of
+their own Protestant land. And they insisted not only that
+all Catholics and Anabaptists be exiled from the British
+Isles but furthermore that Socinians, Arminians, Cartesians,
+in short all those who did not share their own views upon
+the existence of a living God, be hanged.</p>
+
+<p>This triangle of conflicts, however, produced an unexpected
+result. It forced the men who were obliged to keep
+peace between those mutually hostile parties to be much more
+tolerant than they would have been otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>If both the Stuarts and Cromwell at different times of
+their careers insisted upon equal rights for all denominations,
+and history tells us they did, they were most certainly not
+animated by a love for Presbyterians or High Churchmen,
+or vice versa. They were merely making the best of a very
+difficult bargain. The terrible things which happened in
+the colonies along the Bay of Massachusetts, where one sect
+finally became all powerful, show us what would have been
+the fate of England if any one of the many contending<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_309"></a>[309]</span>
+factions had been able to establish an absolute dictatorship
+over the entire country.</p>
+
+<p>Cromwell of course reached the point where he was able
+to do as he liked. But the Lord Protector was a very wise
+man. He knew that he ruled by the grace of his iron
+brigade and carefully avoided such extremes of conduct or
+of legislation as would have forced his opponents to make
+common cause. Beyond that, however, his ideas concerning
+tolerance did not go.</p>
+
+<p>As for the abominable “atheists”—the aforementioned
+Socinians and Arminians and Cartesians and other apostles
+of the divine right of the individual human being, their lives
+were just as difficult as before.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous
+advantage. They lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six
+hours of sickness separated them from the safe asylum of
+the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these cities were
+turning out most of the contraband literature of southern
+and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really
+meant a voyage to one’s publisher and gave the enterprising
+traveler a chance to gather in his royalties and see what
+were the latest additions to the literature of intellectual
+protest.</p>
+
+<p>Among those who at one time or another availed themselves
+of this convenient opportunity for quiet study and
+peaceful reflection, no one has gained a more deserving fame
+than John Locke.</p>
+
+<p>He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like
+Spinoza (indeed like most independent thinkers) he was the
+product of an essentially pious household. The parents of
+Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John were
+orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well
+by their children when they trained them in the strict doctrines<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_310"></a>[310]</span>
+of their own respective creeds. But such an education
+either breaks a boy’s spirit or it turns him into a rebel.
+Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever surrenders,
+gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there
+for the first time heard of Descartes. But among the dusty
+book-stalls of St. Catherine Street he found certain other
+volumes that were much to his taste. For example, there
+were the works of Thomas Hobbes.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen
+College, a restless person who had visited Italy and had
+held converse with Galileo, who had exchanged letters with
+the great Descartes himself and who had spent the greater
+part of his life on the continent, an exile from the fury of
+the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous
+book which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable
+subject and which bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or
+the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical
+and Civil.”</p>
+
+<p>This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was
+in his Sophomore year. It was so outspoken upon the nature
+of princes, their rights and most especially their duties,
+that even the most thorough going Cromwellian must approve
+of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans felt inclined
+to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged
+royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume
+that weighed not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes
+was the sort of person whom it has never been easy to classify.
+His contemporaries called him a Latitudinarian. That
+meant that he was more interested in the ethics of the Christian
+religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the
+Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_311"></a>[311]</span>
+of “latitude” in their attitude upon those questions
+which they regarded as non-essential.</p>
+
+<p>Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too
+remained within the Church until the end of his life but he
+was heartily in favor of a most generous interpretation both
+of life and of faith. What was the use, Locke and his friends
+argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who wore a
+golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power
+by another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why
+renounce allegiance to one set of priests and then the next
+day accept the rule of another set of priests who were
+fully as overbearing and arrogant as their predecessors?
+Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of view
+could not possibly be popular among those who would have
+lost their livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful
+and had changed a rigid social system into an ethical
+debating society?</p>
+
+<p>And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of
+great personal charm, had influential friends who could protect
+him against the curiosity of the sheriffs, the day was
+soon to come when he would no longer be able to escape the
+suspicion of being an atheist.</p>
+
+<p>That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke
+thereupon went to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for
+half a dozen years, but the intellectual atmosphere of the
+Dutch capital continued to be decidedly liberal and Locke
+was given a chance to study and write without the slightest
+interference on the part of the authorities. He was an industrious
+fellow and during the four years of his exile he
+composed that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes
+him one of the heroes of our little history. In this letter
+(which under the criticism of his opponents grew into three
+letters) he flatly denied that the state had the right to interfere<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_312"></a>[312]</span>
+with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and in this
+he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name
+of Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time
+composing his incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia),
+the state was merely a sort of protective organization which a
+certain number of people had created and continued to maintain
+for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such an organization
+should presume to dictate what the individual
+citizens should believe and what not—that was something
+which Locke and his disciples failed to understand. The
+state did not undertake to tell them what to eat or drink.
+Why should it force them to visit one church and keep away
+from another?</p>
+
+<p>The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted
+victory of Protestantism, was an era of strange religious
+compromises.</p>
+
+<p>The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make
+an end to all religious warfare had laid down the principle
+that “all subjects shall follow the religion of their ruler.”
+Hence in one six-by-nine principality all citizens were Lutherans
+(because the local grand duke was a Lutheran) and
+in the next they were all Catholics (because the local baron
+happened to be a Catholic).</p>
+
+<p>“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate
+to the people concerning the future weal of their souls,
+then one-half of the people are foreordained to perdition,
+for since both religions cannot possibly be true (according
+to article I of their own catechisms) it follows that those
+who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound for
+Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound
+for Hell and in this way the geographical accident of birth
+decides one’s future salvation.”</p>
+
+<p>That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_313"></a>[313]</span>
+tolerance is regrettable, but understandable. To the average
+Britisher of the seventeenth century Catholicism was not
+a form of religious conviction but a political party which
+had never ceased to plot against the safety of the English
+state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of
+gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly
+friendly nation.</p>
+
+<p>Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights
+which he was willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies
+and asked that they continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s
+domains, but solely on the ground of their dangerous
+political activities and not because they professed a different
+faith.</p>
+
+<p>One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such
+sentiments. Then a Roman emperor had laid down the
+famous principle that religion was an affair between the
+individual man and his God and that God was quite capable
+of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity
+had been injured.</p>
+
+<p>The English people who had lived and prospered through
+four changes of government within less than sixty years
+were inclined to see the fundamental truth of such an ideal
+of tolerance based upon common sense.</p>
+
+<p>When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the
+year 1688, Locke followed him on the next ship, which carried
+the new Queen of England. Henceforth he lived a
+quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at the ripe
+old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author
+and no longer feared as a heretic.</p>
+
+<p>Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage.
+It clears the atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>The political dissensions of the seventeenth century had
+completely consumed the superfluous energy of the English<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_314"></a>[314]</span>
+nation and while the citizens of other countries continued
+to kill each other for the sake of the Trinity and prenatal
+damnation, religious persecution in Great Britain came
+to an end. Now and then a too presumptuous critic of the
+established church, like Daniel Defoe, might come into unpleasant
+contact with the law, but the author of “Robinson
+Crusoe” was pilloried because he was a humorist rather
+than an amateur theologian and because the Anglo-Saxon
+race, since time immemorial, has felt an inborn suspicion of
+irony. Had Defoe written a serious defense of tolerance,
+he would have escaped with a reprimand. When he turned
+his attack upon the tyranny of the church into a semi-humorous
+pamphlet entitled “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,”
+he showed that he was a vulgar person without a
+decent sense of the proprieties and one who deserved no
+better than the companionship of the pickpockets of Newgate
+Prison.</p>
+
+<p>Even then Defoe was fortunate that he had never extended
+his travels beyond the confines of the British Isles.
+For intolerance having been driven from the mother country
+had found a most welcome refuge in certain of the colonies
+on the other side of the ocean. And this was due not so
+much to the character of the people who had moved into
+these recently discovered regions as to the fact that the new
+world offered infinitely greater economic advantages than
+the old one.</p>
+
+<p>In England itself, a small island so densely populated
+that it offered standing room only to the majority of her
+people, all business would soon have come to an end if the
+people had not been willing to practice the ancient and
+honorable rule of “give and take.” But in America, a
+country of unknown extent and unbelievable riches, a continent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_315"></a>[315]</span>
+inhabited by a mere handful of farmers and workmen,
+no such compromise was necessary.</p>
+
+<p>And so it happened that a small communist settlement
+on the shores of Massachusetts Bay could develop into such
+a stronghold of self-righteous orthodoxy that the like of it
+had not been seen since the happy days when Calvin exercised
+the functions of Chief of Police and Lord High Executioner
+in western Switzerland.</p>
+
+<p>The credit for the first permanent settlement in the chilly
+regions of the Charles River usually goes to a small group
+of people who are referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers. A
+Pilgrim, in the usual sense of the word, is one who “journeys
+to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion.” The
+passengers of the <i>Mayflower</i> were not pilgrims in that
+sense of the word. They were English bricklayers and
+tailors and cord-wainers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights
+who had left their country to escape certain of those hated
+“poperies” which continued to cling to the worship in most
+of the churches around them.</p>
+
+<p>First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to
+Holland where they arrived at a moment of great economic
+depression. Our school-books continue to ascribe their
+desire for further travel to their unwillingness to let their
+children learn the Dutch language and otherwise to see
+them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It seems
+very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of
+such shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most
+reprehensible course of hyphenation. The truth is that
+most of the time they were forced to live in the slums,
+that they found it very difficult to make a living in an
+already over-populated country, and that they expected a
+better revenue from tobacco planting in America than
+from wool-carding in Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_316"></a>[316]</span>
+but having been thrown by adverse currents and bad seamanship
+upon the shores of Massachusetts, they decided
+to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of
+another voyage in their leaky tub.</p>
+
+<p>But although they had now escaped the dangers of
+drowning and seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous
+position. Most of them came from small cities in the heart
+of England and had little aptitude for a life of pioneering.
+Their communistic ideas were shattered by the cold, their
+civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and their
+wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food.
+And, finally, the few who survived the first three winters,
+good-natured people accustomed to the rough and ready
+tolerance of the home country, were entirely swamped by
+the arrival of thousands of new colonists who without exception
+belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety
+of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was
+to remain for several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles
+River.</p>
+
+<p>Hanging on for dear life to their small stretch of land,
+forever on the verge of disaster, they felt more than ever
+inclined to find an excuse for everything they thought and
+did within the pages of the Old Testament. Cut off from
+polite human society and books, they began to develop
+a strange religious psyche of their own. In their own eyes
+they had fallen heir to the traditions of Moses and Gideon
+and soon became veritable Maccabees to their Indian neighbors
+of the west. They had nothing to reconcile them to
+their lives of hardship and drudgery except the conviction
+that they were suffering for the sake of the only true faith.
+Hence their conclusion (easily arrived at) that all other
+people must be wrong. Hence the brutal treatment of
+those who failed to share their own views, who suggested<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_317"></a>[317]</span>
+by implication that the Puritan way of doing and thinking
+was not the only right way. Hence the exclusion from
+their country of all harmless dissenters who were either unmercifully
+flogged and then driven into the wilderness or
+suffered the loss of their ears and tongues unless they were
+fortunate enough to find a refuge in one of the neighboring
+colonies which belonged to the Swedes and the Dutch.</p>
+
+<p>No, for the cause of religious freedom or tolerance, this
+colony achieved nothing except in that roundabout and
+involuntary fashion which is so common in the history of
+human progress. The very violence of their religious despotism
+brought about a reaction in favor of a more liberal
+policy. After almost two centuries of ministerial tyranny,
+there arose a new generation which was the open and
+avowed enemy of all forms of priest-rule, which believed
+profoundly in the desirability of the separation of state
+and church and which looked askance upon the ancestral
+admixture of religion and politics.</p>
+
+<p>By a stroke of good luck this development came about
+very slowly and the crisis did not occur until the period
+immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between Great
+Britain and her American colonies. As a result, the Constitution
+of the United States was written by men who
+were either freethinkers or secret enemies of the old-fashioned
+Calvinism and who incorporated into this document
+certain highly modern principles which have proved
+of the greatest value in maintaining the peaceful balance
+of our republic.</p>
+
+<p>But ere this happened, the new world had experienced
+a most unexpected development in the field of tolerance
+and curiously enough it took place in a Catholic community,
+in that part of America now covered by the free
+state of Maryland.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_318"></a>[318]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Calverts, who were responsible for this interesting
+experiment, were of Flemish origin, but the father had
+moved to England and had rendered very distinguished services
+to the house of Stuart. Originally they had been
+Protestants, but George Calvert, private secretary and
+general utility man to King James I, had become so utterly
+disgusted with the futile theological haggling of his contemporaries
+that he returned to the old faith. Good, bad
+or indifferent, it called black, black and white, white and
+did not leave the final settlement of every point of doctrine
+to the discretion of a board of semi-literate deacons.</p>
+
+<p>This George Calvert, so it seems, was a man of parts.
+His back-sliding (a very serious offense in those days!)
+did not lose him the favor of his royal master. On the
+contrary, he was made Baron Baltimore of Baltimore and
+was promised every sort of assistance when he planned to
+establish a little colony of his own for the benefit of persecuted
+Catholics. First, he tried his luck in Newfoundland.
+But his settlers were frozen out of house and home and
+his Lordship then asked for a few thousand square miles
+in Virginia. The Virginians, however, staunchly Episcopalian,
+would have naught of such dangerous neighbors and
+Baltimore then asked for a slice of that wilderness which
+lay between Virginia and the Dutch and Swedish possessions
+of the north. Ere he received his charter he died.
+His son Cecil, however, continued the good work, and in the
+winter of 1633-1634 two little ships, the <i>Ark</i> and the <i>Dove</i>,
+under command of Leonard Calvert, brother to George,
+crossed the ocean, and in March of 1634 they safely landed
+their passengers on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. The
+new country was called Maryland. This was done in honor
+of Mary, daughter of that French king, Henri IV, whose
+plans for a European League of Nations had been cut<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_319"></a>[319]</span>
+short by the dagger of a crazy monk, and wife to that
+English monarch who soon afterwards was to lose his head
+at the hands of his Puritan subjects.</p>
+
+<p>This extraordinary colony which did not exterminate its
+Indian neighbors and offered equal opportunities to both
+Catholics and Protestants passed through many difficult
+years. First of all it was overrun by Episcopalians who
+tried to escape the fierce intolerance of the Puritans in
+Massachusetts. Next it was invaded by Puritans who tried
+to escape the fierce intolerance of the Episcopalians in Virginia.
+And the two groups of fugitives, with the usual
+arrogance of that sort of people, tried hard to introduce
+their own “correct form of worship” into the commonwealth
+that had just offered them refuge. As “all disputes which
+might give rise to religious passions” were expressly forbidden
+on Maryland territory, the older colonists were entirely
+within their right when they bade both Episcopalians
+and Puritans to keep the peace. But soon afterwards
+war broke out in the home country between the
+Cavaliers and the Roundheads and the Marylanders feared
+that, no matter who should win, they would lose their old
+freedom. Hence, in April of the year 1649 and shortly
+after news of the execution of Charles I had reached them,
+and at the direct suggestion of Cecil Calvert, they passed
+their famous Act of Tolerance which, among other things,
+contained this excellent passage:</p>
+
+<p>“That since the coercion of conscience in the matter of
+religion has often produced very harmful results in those
+communities in which it was exercised, for the more tranquil
+and pacific government in this province and for the
+better preservation of mutual love and unity among its inhabitants,
+it is hereby decided that nobody in this province
+who professes faith in Jesus Christ shall be disturbed, molested<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_320"></a>[320]</span>
+or persecuted in any way for reasons respecting his
+religion or the free exercise thereof.”</p>
+
+<p>That such an act could be passed in a country in which
+the Jesuits occupied a favorite position shows that the
+Baltimore family was possessed of remarkable political
+ability and of more than ordinary courage. How profoundly
+this generous spirit was appreciated by some of
+their guests was shown in the same year when a number of
+Puritan exiles overthrew the government of Maryland, abolished
+the Act of Tolerance and replaced it by an “Act Concerning
+Religion” of their own which granted full religious
+liberty to all those who declared themselves Christians “with
+the exception of Catholics and Episcopalians.”</p>
+
+<p>This period of reaction fortunately did not last long.
+In the year 1660 the Stuarts returned to power and once
+more the Baltimores reigned in Maryland.</p>
+
+<p>The next attack upon their policy came from the other
+side. The Episcopalians gained a complete victory in the
+mother country and they insisted that henceforth their
+church should be the official church of all the colonies. The
+Calverts continued to fight but they found it impossible
+to attract new colonists. And so, after a struggle which
+lasted another generation, the experiment came to an end.</p>
+
+<p>Protestantism triumphed.</p>
+
+<p>So did intolerance.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_321"></a>[321]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXIII">CHAPTER XXIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE SUN KING</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The eighteenth century is usually referred to as an
+era of despotism. And in an age which believes
+in the dogma of democracy, despotism, however enlightened,
+is not apt to be regarded as a desirable form of
+government.</p>
+
+<p>Historians who mean well by the human race are very
+apt to point the finger of scorn at that great monarch Louis
+XIV and ask us to draw our own conclusions. When this
+brilliant sovereign came to the throne, he inherited a country
+in which the forces of Catholicism and Protestantism
+were so evenly balanced that the two parties, after a century
+of mutual assassination (with the odds heavily in favor
+of the Catholics), had at last concluded a definite peace
+and had promised to accept each other as unwelcome but
+unavoidable neighbors and fellow citizens. The “perpetual
+and irrevocable” Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 which
+contained the terms of agreement, stated that the Catholic
+religion was the official religion of the state but that the
+Protestants should enjoy complete liberty of conscience and
+should not suffer any persecution on account of their belief.
+They were furthermore allowed to build churches of their
+own and to hold public office. And as a token of good faith,
+the Protestants were allowed to hold two hundred fortified
+cities and villages within the realm of France.</p>
+
+<p>This, of course, was an impossible arrangement. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_322"></a>[322]</span>
+Huguenots were no angels. To leave two hundred of the
+most prosperous cities and villages of France in the hands
+of a political party which was the sworn enemy of the government
+was quite as absurd as if we should surrender
+Chicago and San Francisco and Philadelphia to the Democrats
+to make them accept a Republican administration, or
+vice versa.</p>
+
+<p>Richelieu, as intelligent a man as ever ruled a country,
+recognized this. After a long struggle he deprived the
+Protestants of their political power, but although a cardinal
+by profession, he scrupulously refrained from any interference
+with their religious freedom. The Huguenots could
+no longer conduct independent diplomatic negotiations with
+the enemies of their own country, but otherwise they enjoyed
+the same privileges as before and could sing psalms
+and listen to sermons or not as pleased them.</p>
+
+<p>Mazarin, the next man to rule France in the real sense
+of the word, had followed a similar policy. But he died in
+the year 1661. Then young Louis XIV personally undertook
+to rule his domains, and there was an end to the era
+of good will.</p>
+
+<p>It seems most unfortunate that when this brilliant if
+disreputable Majesty was forced for once in his life into
+the companionship of decent people he should have fallen
+into the clutches of a good woman who was also a religious
+fanatic. Françoise d’Aubigné, the widow of a literary
+hack by the name of Scarron, had begun her career at the
+French court as governess to the seven illegitimate children
+of Louis XIV and the Marquise de Montespan. When
+that lady’s love philtres ceased to have the desired effect
+and the King began to show occasional signs of boredom,
+it was the governess who stepped into her shoes. Only she
+was different from all her predecessors. Before she agreed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_323"></a>[323]</span>
+to move into His Majesty’s apartments, the Archbishop of
+Paris had duly solemnized her marriage to the descendant
+of Saint Louis.</p>
+
+<p>During the next twenty years the power behind the throne
+was therefore in the hands of a woman who was completely
+dominated by her confessor. The clergy of France had
+never forgiven either Richelieu or Mazarin for their conciliatory
+attitude towards the Protestants. Now at last
+they had a chance to undo the work of these shrewd statesmen
+and they went to it with a will. For not only were
+they the official advisers of the Queen, but they also became
+the bankers of the King.</p>
+
+<p>That again is a curious story.</p>
+
+<p>During the last eight centuries the monasteries had accumulated
+the greater part of the wealth of France and
+as they paid no taxes in a country which suffered perpetually
+from a depleted treasury, their surplus wealth was of
+great importance. And His Majesty, whose glory was
+greater than his credit, made a grateful use of this opportunity
+to replenish his own coffers and in exchange for certain
+favors extended to his clerical supporters he was allowed
+to borrow as much money as he wanted.</p>
+
+<p>In this way the different stipulations of the “irrevocable”
+Edict of Nantes were one by one revoked. At first the
+Protestant religion was not actually forbidden, but life for
+those who remained faithful to the Huguenot cause was
+made exasperatingly uncomfortable. Whole regiments of
+dragoons were turned loose upon those provinces where the
+false doctrines were supposed to be most strongly entrenched.
+The soldiers were billeted among the inhabitants
+with instructions to make themselves thoroughly detestable.
+They ate the food and drank the wine and stole the forks
+and spoons and broke the furniture and insulted the wives<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_324"></a>[324]</span>
+and daughters of perfectly harmless citizens and generally
+behaved as if they were in a conquered territory. When
+their poor hosts, in their despair, rushed to the courts for
+some form of redress and protection, they were laughed at
+for their trouble and were told that they had brought their
+misfortunes upon their own heads and knew perfectly well
+how they could get rid of their unwelcome guests and at the
+same time regain the good will of the government.</p>
+
+<p>A few, a very few, followed this suggestion and allowed
+themselves to be baptized by the nearest village priest. But
+the vast majority of these simple people remained faithful
+to the ideals of their childhood. At last, however, when
+one after another their churches were closed and their clergy
+were sent to the galleys, they began to understand that they
+were doomed. Rather than surrender, they decided to go
+into exile. But when they reached the frontier, they were
+told that no one was allowed to leave the country, that
+those who were caught in the act were to be hanged, and
+that those who aided and abetted such fugitives were liable
+to be sent to the galleys for life.</p>
+
+<p>There are apparently certain things which this world will
+never learn.</p>
+
+<p>From the days of the Pharaohs to those of Lenin, all
+governments at one time or another have tried the policy
+of “closing the frontier” and none of them has ever been
+able to score a success.</p>
+
+<p>People who want to get out so badly that they are willing
+to take all sorts of risks can invariably find a way. Hundreds
+of thousands of French Protestants took to the “underground
+route” and soon afterwards appeared in London
+or Amsterdam or Berlin or Basel. Of course, such fugitives
+were not able to carry much ready cash. But they
+were known everywhere as honest and hard working merchants<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_325"></a>[325]</span>
+and artisans. Their credit was good and their
+energy undiminished. After a few years they usually regained
+that prosperity which had been their share in the
+old country and the home government was deprived of a
+living economic asset of incalculable value.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the revocation
+of the Edict of Nantes was the prelude to the French Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>France had been and still was a very rich country. But
+commerce and clericalism have never been able to coöperate.</p>
+
+<p>From the moment that the French government surrendered
+to petticoats and cassocks, her fate was sealed. The
+same pen that decreed the expulsion of the Huguenots
+signed the death-warrant of Louis XVI.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_326"></a>[326]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXIV">CHAPTER XXIV<br>
+<span class="smaller">FREDERICK THE GREAT</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The house of Hohenzollern has never been famous
+for its love of popular forms of government. But
+ere the crazy strain of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs
+had tainted this sober-minded family of bookkeepers and
+overseers, they rendered some very useful service to the
+cause of tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>In part this was the result of a practical necessity. The
+Hohenzollerns had fallen heir to the poorest part of Europe,
+a half-populated wilderness of sand and forests. The
+Thirty Years War had left them bankrupt. They needed
+both men and money to start in business once more and
+they set out to get them, regardless of race, creed or previous
+condition of servitude.</p>
+
+<p>The father of Frederick the Great, a vulgarian with the
+manners of a coal-heaver and the personal tastes of a bartender,
+could grow quite tender when he was called upon to
+meet a delegation of foreign fugitives. “The more the merrier,”
+was his motto in all matters pertaining to the vital
+statistics of his kingdom and he collected the disinherited
+of all nations as carefully as he collected the six-foot-three
+grenadiers of his lifeguard.</p>
+
+<p>His son was of a very different caliber, a highly civilized
+human being who, having been forbidden by his father to
+study Latin and French, had made a speciality of both languages
+and greatly preferred the prose of Montaigne to the
+poetry of Luther and the wisdom of Epictetus of that of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_327"></a>[327]</span>
+the Minor Prophets. The Old Testament severity of his
+father (who ordered the boy’s best friend to be decapitated
+in front of his window so as to teach him a lesson in
+obedience) had not inclined his heart toward those Judaean
+ideals of rectitude of which the Lutheran and Calvinist
+ministers of his day were apt to speak with such great
+praise. He came to regard all religion as a survival of
+prehistoric fear and ignorance, a mood of subservience carefully
+encouraged by a small class of clever and unscrupulous
+fellows who knew how to make good use of their own pre-eminent
+position by living pleasantly at the expense of their
+neighbors. He was interested in Christianity and even more
+so in the person of Christ himself, but he approached the
+subject by way of Locke and Socinius and as a result he
+was, in religious matters at least, a very broad minded
+person, and could truly boast that in his country “every one
+could find salvation after his own fashion.”</p>
+
+<p>This clever saying he made the basis for all his further
+experiments along the line of Tolerance. For example,
+he decreed that all religions were good as long as those who
+professed them were upright people who led decent, law-abiding
+lives; that therefore all creeds must enjoy equal
+rights and the state must never interfere in religious questions,
+but must content herself with playing policeman and
+keeping the peace between the different denominations. And
+because he truly believed this, he asked nothing of his subjects
+except that they be obedient and faithful and leave
+the final judgment of their thoughts and deeds “to Him
+alone who knew the conscience of men” and of whom he
+(the King) did not venture to form so small an opinion as
+to believe him to be in need of that human assistance which
+imagines that it can further the divine purpose by the exercise
+of violence and cruelty.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_328"></a>[328]</span></p>
+
+<p>In all these ideas, Frederick was a couple of centuries
+ahead of his day. His contemporaries shook their heads
+when the king gave his Catholic subjects a piece of land
+that they might build themselves a church right in the heart
+of his capital. They began to murmur ominous words of
+warning when he made himself the protector of the Jesuit
+order, which had just been driven out of most Catholic
+countries, and they definitely ceased to regard him as a
+Christian when he claimed that ethics and religion had
+nothing to do with each other and that each man could
+believe whatever he pleased as long as he paid his taxes
+and served his time in the army.</p>
+
+<p>Because at that time they happened to live within the
+boundaries of Prussia, these critics held their peace, for
+His Majesty was a master of epigram and a witty remark
+on the margin of a royal rescript could do strange things
+to the career of those who in some way or another had
+failed to please him.</p>
+
+<p>The fact however remains that it was the head of an unlimited
+monarchy, an autocrat of thirty years’ standing,
+who gave Europe a first taste of almost complete religious
+liberty.</p>
+
+<p>In this distant corner of Europe, Protestant and Catholic
+and Jew and Turk and Agnostic enjoyed for the first time
+in their lives equal rights and equal prerogatives. Those
+who preferred to wear red coats could not lord it over their
+neighbors who preferred to wear green coats, and vice versa.
+And the people who went back for their spiritual consolation
+to Nicaea were forced to live in peace and amity with
+others who would as soon have supped with the Devil as
+with the Bishop of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>That Frederick was entirely pleased with the outcome
+of his labors, that I rather doubt. When he felt his last<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_329"></a>[329]</span>
+hour approaching, he sent for his faithful dogs. They
+seemed better company in this supreme hour than the members
+of “the so-called human race.” (His Majesty was a
+columnist of no mean ability.)</p>
+
+<p>And so he died, another Marcus Aurelius who had strayed
+into the wrong century and who, like his great predecessor,
+left a heritage which was entirely too good for his successors.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_330"></a>[330]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXV">CHAPTER XXV<br>
+<span class="smaller">VOLTAIRE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In this day and age we hear a great deal of talk about
+the nefarious labors of the press agent and many good
+people denounce “publicity” as an invention of the
+modern devil of success, a new-fangled and disreputable
+method of attracting attention to a person or to a cause.
+But this complaint is as old as the hills. Events of the
+past, when examined without prejudice, completely contradict
+the popular notion that publicity is something of recent
+origin.</p>
+
+<p>The prophets of the Old Testament, both major and
+minor, were past-masters in the art of attracting a crowd.
+Greek history and Roman history are one long succession
+of what we people of the journalistic profession call “publicity
+stunts.” Some of that publicity was dignified. A
+great deal of it was of so patent and blatant a nature that
+today even Broadway would refuse to fall for it.</p>
+
+<p>Reformers like Luther and Calvin fully understood the
+tremendous value of carefully pre-arranged publicity. And
+we cannot blame them. They were not the sort of men
+who could be happy growing humbly by the side of the
+road like the blushing daisies. They were very much in
+earnest. They wanted their ideas to live. How could
+they hope to succeed without attracting a crowd of followers?</p>
+
+<p>A Thomas à Kempis can become a great moral influence<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_331"></a>[331]</span>
+by spending eighty years in a quiet corner of a monastery,
+for such long voluntary exile, if duly advertised (as it was),
+becomes an excellent selling point and makes people curious
+to see the little book which was born of a lifetime of
+prayer and meditation. But a Francis of Assisi or a Loyola,
+who hope to see some tangible results of their work while
+they are still on this planet, must willy-nilly resort to
+methods now usually associated with a circus or a new movie
+star.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity lays great stress upon modesty and praises
+those who are humble of spirit. But the sermon which extols
+these virtues was delivered under circumstances which
+have made it a subject of conversation to this very day.</p>
+
+<p>No wonder that those men and women who were denounced
+as the arch enemies of the Church took a leaf out
+of the Holy Book and resorted to certain rather obvious
+methods of publicity when they began their great fight upon
+the spiritual tyranny which held the western world in
+bondage.</p>
+
+<p>I offer this slight explanation because Voltaire, the greatest
+of all virtuosos in the field of free advertisement, has
+very often been blamed for the way in which he sometimes
+played upon the tom-tom of public consciousness. Perhaps
+he did not always show the best of good taste. But those
+whose lives he saved may have felt differently about it.</p>
+
+<p>And furthermore, just as the proof of the pudding is in
+the eating, the success or failure of a man like Voltaire
+should be measured by the services he actually rendered to
+his fellow-men and not by his predilection for certain sorts
+of dressing-gowns, jokes and wall-paper.</p>
+
+<p>In an outburst of justifiable pride this strange creature
+once said, “What of it if I have no scepter? I have got
+a pen.” And right he was. He had a pen. Any number<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_332"></a>[332]</span>
+of pens. He was the born enemy of the goose and used
+more quills than two dozen ordinary writers. He belonged
+to that class of literary giants who all alone and under the
+most adverse circumstances can turn out as much copy
+as an entire syndicate of modern sport writers. He scribbled
+on the tables of dirty country inns. He composed
+endless hexameters in the chilly guest-rooms of lonely country
+houses. His scrawls littered the floors of dingy boarding-houses
+in Greenwich. He spattered ink upon the carpets
+of the royal Prussian residence and used reams of the
+private stationery which bore the monogram of the governor
+of the Bastille. Before he had ceased to play with a hoop
+and marbles, Ninon de Lenclos had presented him with a
+considerable sum of pocket-money that he might “buy some
+books,” and eighty years later, in the self-same town of
+Paris, we hear him ask for a pad of foolscap and unlimited
+coffee that he may finish yet one more volume before the
+inevitable hour of darkness and rest.</p>
+
+<p>His tragedies, however, and his stories, his poetry and
+his treatises upon philosophy and physics, do not entitle
+him to an entire chapter of this book. He wrote no better
+verses than half a hundred other sonneteers of that era.
+As a historian he was both unreliable and dull, while his
+ventures in the realm of science were no better than the sort
+of stuff we find in the Sunday papers.</p>
+
+<p>But as the brave and unyielding enemy of all that was
+stupid and narrow and bigoted and cruel, he wielded an influence
+which has endured until the beginning of the Great
+Civil War of the year 1914.</p>
+
+<p>The age in which he lived was a period of extremes.
+On the one hand, the utter selfishness and corruption of a
+religious, social and economic system which had long since
+outlived its usefulness. On the other side, a large number<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_333"></a>[333]</span>
+of eager but overzealous young men and young women
+ready to bring about a millennium which was based upon
+nothing more substantial than their good intentions. A
+humorous fate dropped this pale and sickly son of an inconspicuous
+notary public into this maelstrom of sharks
+and pollywogs, and bade him sink or swim. He preferred
+to swim and struck out for shore. The methods he employed
+during his long struggle with adverse circumstances
+were often of a questionable nature. He begged and flattered
+and played the clown. But this was in the days before
+royalties and literary agents. And let the author who
+never wrote a potboiler throw the first stone!</p>
+
+<p>Not that Voltaire would have been greatly worried by a
+few additional bricks. During a long and busy life devoted
+to warfare upon stupidity, he had experienced too
+many defeats to worry about such trifles as a public beating
+or a couple of well aimed banana peels. But he was a
+man of indomitable good cheer. If today he must spend
+his leisure hours in His Majesty’s prison, tomorrow he may
+find himself honored with a high titulary position at the
+same court from which he has just been banished. And if
+all his life he is obliged to listen to angry village priests
+denouncing him as the enemy of the Christian religion,
+isn’t there somewhere in a cupboard filled with old love
+letters that beautiful medal presented to him by the Pope
+to prove that he can gain the approbation of Holy Church
+as well as her disapproval?</p>
+
+<p>It was all in the day’s work.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he fully intended to enjoy himself hugely and
+crowd his days and weeks and months and years with a
+strange and colorful assortment of the most variegated experiences.</p>
+
+<p>By birth Voltaire belonged to the better middle class.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_334"></a>[334]</span>
+His father was what for the lack of a better term we might
+call a sort of private trust company. He was the confidential
+handy-man of a number of rich nobles and looked
+after their legal and financial interests. Young Arouet
+(for that was the family name) was therefore accustomed
+to a society a little better than that of his own people,
+something which later in life gave him a great advantage
+over most of his literary rivals. His mother was a certain
+Mademoiselle d’Aumard. She had been a poor girl who
+did not bring her husband a cent of dowry. But she was
+possessed of that small “d’” which all Frenchmen of the
+middle classes (and all Europeans in general and a few
+Americans in particular) regard with humble awe, and her
+husband thought himself pretty lucky to win such a prize.
+As for the son, he also basked in the reflected glory of his
+ennobled grandparents and as soon as he began to write, he
+exchanged the plebeian François Marie Arouet for the more
+aristocratic François Marie de Voltaire, but how and where
+he hit upon this surname is still a good deal of a mystery.
+He had a brother and a sister. The sister, who took care
+of him after his mother’s death, he loved very sincerely.
+The brother, on the other hand, a faithful priest of the
+Jansenist denomination, full of zeal and rectitude, bored
+him to distraction and was one of the reasons why he spent
+as little time as possible underneath the paternal shingles.</p>
+
+<p>Father Arouet was no fool and soon discovered that his
+little “Zozo” promised to be a handful. Wherefore he sent
+him to the Jesuits that he might become versed in Latin
+hexameters and Spartan discipline. The good fathers did
+their best by him. They gave their spindly-legged pupil
+a sound training in the rudiments of both the dead and
+living tongues. But they found it impossible to eradicate<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_335"></a>[335]</span>
+a certain bump of “queerness” which from the very beginning
+had set this child apart from the other scholars.</p>
+
+<p>At the age of seventeen they willingly let him go, and
+to please his father, young François then took up the study
+of the law. Unfortunately one could not read all day long.
+There were the long hours of the lazy evenings. These
+hours François whiled away either writing funny little pieces
+for the local newspapers or reading his latest literary compositions
+to his cronies in the nearest coffee-house. Two
+centuries ago such a life was generally believed to lead
+straight to perdition. Father Arouet fully appreciated the
+danger his son was running. He went to one of his many
+influential friends and obtained for M. François a position
+as secretary to the French Legation at the Hague. The
+Dutch capital, then as now, was exasperatingly dull. Out
+of sheer boredom Voltaire began a love affair with the not
+particularly attractive daughter of a terrible old woman
+who was a society reporter. The lady, who hoped to marry
+her darling to a more promising party, rushed to the French
+minister and asked him to please remove this dangerous
+Romeo before the whole city knew about the scandal. His
+Excellency had troubles enough of his own and was not
+eager for more. He bundled his secretary into the next
+stage-coach for Paris and François, without a job, once
+more found himself at the mercy of his father.</p>
+
+<p>In this emergency Maître Arouet bethought himself of
+an expedient which was often used by such Frenchmen as
+had a friend at court. He asked and obtained a “lettre de
+cachet” and placed his son before the choice of enforced
+leisure in a jail or industrious application in a law-school.
+The son said that he would prefer the latter and promised
+that he would be a model of industry and application. He
+was as good as his word and applied himself to the happy<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_336"></a>[336]</span>
+life of a free lance pamphleteer with such industry that
+the whole town talked about it. This was not according
+to the agreement with his papa and the latter was entirely
+within his rights when he decided to send his son away
+from the flesh-pots of the Seine and packed him off to a
+friend in the country, where the young man was to remain
+for a whole year.</p>
+
+<p>There, with twenty-four hours leisure each day of the
+week (Sundays included) Voltaire began the study of letters
+in all seriousness and composed the first of his plays.
+After twelve months of fresh air and a very healthy monotony,
+he was allowed to return to the scented atmosphere
+of the capital and at once made up for lost time by a series
+of lampoons upon the Regent, a nasty old man who deserved
+all that was said about him but did not like this
+publicity the least little bit. Hence, a second period of
+exile in the country, followed by more scribbling and at
+last a short visit to the Bastille. But prison in those days,
+that is to say, prison for young gentlemen of Voltaire’s
+social prominence, was not a bad place. One was not allowed
+to leave the premises but otherwise did pretty much
+as one pleased. And it was just what Voltaire needed. A
+lonely cell in the heart of Paris gave him a chance to do
+some serious work. When he was released, he had finished
+several plays and these were performed with such tremendous
+success that one of them broke all records of the eighteenth
+century and ran for forty-five nights in succession.</p>
+
+<p>This brought him some money (which he needed badly)
+but it also established his reputation as a wit, a most unfortunate
+thing for a young man who still has to make
+his career. For hereafter he was held responsible for every
+joke that enjoyed a few hours’ popularity on the boulevards
+and in the coffee-houses. And incidentally it was the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_337"></a>[337]</span>
+reason why he went to England and took a post-graduate
+course in liberal statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>It happened in the year 1725. Voltaire had (or had not)
+been funny about the old but otherwise useless family of de
+Rohan. The Chevalier de Rohan felt that his honor had
+been assailed and that something must be done about it.
+Of course, it was impossible for a descendant of the ancient
+rulers of Brittany to fight a duel with the son of a notary
+public and the Chevalier delegated the work of revenge to
+his flunkeys.</p>
+
+<p>One night Voltaire was dining with the Duc de Sully,
+one of his father’s customers, when he was told that some
+one wished to speak to him outside. He went to the door,
+was fallen upon by the lackeys of my Lord de Rohan and
+was given a sound beating. The next day the story was
+all over the town. Voltaire, even on his best days, looked
+like the caricature of a very ugly little monkey. What
+with his eyes blackened and his head bandaged, he was a fit
+subject for half a dozen popular reviews. Only something
+very drastic could save his reputation from an untimely
+death at the hands of the comic papers. And as soon as
+raw beefsteak had done its work, M. de Voltaire sent his
+witnesses to M. le Chevalier de Rohan and began his preparation
+for mortal combat by an intensive course in fencing.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! when the morning came for the great fight, Voltaire
+once more found himself behind the bars. De Rohan,
+a cad unto the last, had given the duel away to the police,
+and the battling scribe remained in custody until, provided
+with a ticket for England, he was sent traveling in a northwestern
+direction and was told not to return to France until
+requested to do so by His Majesty’s gendarmes.</p>
+
+<p>Four whole years Voltaire spent in and near London.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_338"></a>[338]</span>
+The British kingdom was not exactly a Paradise, but compared
+to France, it was a little bit of Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>A royal scaffold threw its shadow over the land. The
+thirtieth of January of the year 1649 was a date remembered
+by all those in high places. What had happened to
+sainted King Charles might (under slightly modified circumstances)
+happen to any one else who dared to set himself
+above the law. And as for the religion of the country,
+of course the official church of the state was supposed to
+enjoy certain lucrative and agreeable advantages, but those
+who preferred to worship elsewhere were left in peace and
+the direct influence of the clerical officials upon the affairs
+of state was, compared to France, almost negligible. Confessed
+Atheists and certain bothersome non-conformists
+might occasionally succeed in getting themselves into jail,
+but to a subject of King Louis XV the general condition
+of life in England must have seemed wellnigh perfect.</p>
+
+<p>In 1729, Voltaire returned to France, but although he
+was permitted to live in Paris, he rarely availed himself of
+that privilege. He was like a scared animal, willing to accept
+bits of sugar from the hands of his friends, but forever
+on the alert and ready to escape at the slightest sign
+of danger. He worked very hard. He wrote prodigiously
+and with a sublime disregard for dates and facts, and choosing
+for himself subjects which ran all the way from Lima,
+Peru, to Moscow, Russia, he composed a series of such
+learned and popular histories, tragedies and comedies that
+at the age of forty he was by far the most successful man
+of letters of his time.</p>
+
+<p>Followed another episode which was to bring him into
+contact with a different kind of civilization.</p>
+
+<p>In distant Prussia, good King Frederick, yawning audibly
+among the yokels of his rustic court, sadly pined for the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_339"></a>[339]</span>
+companionship of a few amusing people. He felt a tremendous
+admiration for Voltaire and for years he had tried
+to induce him to come to Berlin. But to a Frenchman of
+the year 1750 such a migration seemed like moving into the
+wilds of Virginia and it was not until Frederick had repeatedly
+raised the ante that Voltaire at last condescended
+to accept.</p>
+
+<p>He traveled to Berlin and the fight was on. Two such
+hopeless egotists as the Prussian king and the French playwright
+could not possibly hope to live under one and the
+same roof without coming to hate each other. After two
+years of sublime disagreement, a violent quarrel about nothing
+in particular drove Voltaire back to what he felt inclined
+to call “civilization.”</p>
+
+<p>But he had learned another useful lesson. Perhaps he
+was right, and the French poetry of the Prussian king was
+atrocious. But His Majesty’s attitude upon the subject of
+religious liberty left nothing to be desired and that was
+more than could be said of any other European monarch.</p>
+
+<p>And when at the age of almost sixty Voltaire returned
+to his native land, he was in no mood to accept the brutal
+sentences by which the French courts tried to maintain
+order without some very scathing words of protest. All his
+life he had been greatly angered by man’s unwillingness
+to use that divine spark of intelligence which the Lord on
+the sixth day of creation had bestowed upon the most
+sublime product of His handiwork. He (Voltaire) hated
+and loathed stupidity in every shape, form and manner.
+The “infamous enemy” against whom he directed most of
+his anger and whom, Cato-like, he was forever threatening
+to demolish, this “infamous enemy” was nothing more or
+less than the lazy stupidity of the mass of the people who<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_340"></a>[340]</span>
+refused to think for themselves as long as they had enough
+to eat and to drink and a place to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>From the days of his earliest childhood he had felt himself
+pursued by a gigantic machine which seemed to move
+through sheer force of lethargy and combined the cruelty
+of Huitzilopochtli with the relentless persistency of Juggernaut.
+To destroy or at least upset this contraption
+become the obsession of his old years, and the French government,
+to give this particular devil his due, ably assisted
+him in his efforts by providing the world with a choice
+collection of legal scandals.</p>
+
+<p>The first one occurred in the year 1761.</p>
+
+<p>In the town of Toulouse in the southern part of France
+there lived a certain Jean Calas, a shop-keeper and a Protestant.
+Toulouse had always been a pious city. No Protestant
+was there allowed to hold office or to be a doctor or
+a lawyer, a bookseller or a midwife. No Catholic was permitted
+to keep a Protestant servant. And on August
+23rd and 24th of each year the entire community celebrated
+the glorious anniversary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew
+with a solemn feast of praise and thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding these many disadvantages, Calas had
+lived all his life in complete harmony with his neighbors.
+One of his sons had turned Catholic, but the father had
+continued to be on friendly terms with the boy and had
+let it be known that as far as he was concerned, his children
+were entirely free to choose whatever religion pleased them
+best.</p>
+
+<p>But there was a skeleton in the Calas closet. That was
+Marc Antony, the oldest son. Marc was an unfortunate
+fellow. He wanted to be a lawyer but that career was
+closed to Protestants. He was a devout Calvinist and refused
+to change his creed. The mental conflict had caused<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_341"></a>[341]</span>
+an attack of melancholia and this in time seemed to prey
+upon the young man’s mind. He began to entertain his
+father and mother with long recitations of Hamlet’s well
+known soliloquy. He took long solitary walks. To his
+friends he often spoke of the superior advantages of suicide.</p>
+
+<p>This went on for some time and then one night, while
+the family was entertaining a friend, the poor boy slipped
+into his father’s storeroom, took a piece of packing rope
+and hanged himself from the doorpost.</p>
+
+<p>There his father found him a few hours later, his coat
+and vest neatly folded upon the counter.</p>
+
+<p>The family was in despair. In those days the body of a
+person who had committed suicide was dragged nude and
+face downward through the streets of the town and was
+hanged on a gibbet outside the gate to be eaten by the
+birds.</p>
+
+<p>The Calas were respectable folks and hated to think of
+such a disgrace. They stood around and talked of what
+they ought to do and what they were going to do until one
+of the neighbors, hearing the commotion, sent for the police,
+and the scandal spreading rapidly, their street was immediately
+filled with an angry crowd which loudly clamored for
+the death of old Calas “because he had murdered his son to
+prevent him from becoming a Catholic.”</p>
+
+<p>In a little town all things are possible and in a provincial
+nest of eighteenth century France, with boredom like a
+black funeral pall hanging heavily upon the entire community,
+the most idiotic and fantastic yarns were given
+credence with a sigh of profound and eager relief.</p>
+
+<p>The high magistrates, fully aware of their duty under
+such suspicious circumstances, at once arrested the entire
+family, their guests and their servants and every one who
+had recently been seen in or near the Calas home. They<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_342"></a>[342]</span>
+dragged their prisoners to the town hall, put them in irons
+and threw them into the dungeons provided for the most
+desperate criminals. The next day they were examined.
+All of them told the same story. How Marc Antony had
+come into the house in his usual spirits, how he had left
+the room, how they thought that he had gone for one of his
+solitary walks, etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>By this time, however, the clergy of the town of Toulouse
+had taken a hand in the matter and with their help the
+dreadful news of this bloodthirsty Huguenot, who had killed
+one of his own children because he was about to return to
+the true faith, had spread far and wide throughout the land
+of Languedoc.</p>
+
+<p>Those familiar with modern methods of detecting crime
+might think that the authorities would have spent that day
+inspecting the scene of the murder. Marc Antony enjoyed
+quite a reputation as an athlete. He was twenty-eight
+and his father was sixty-three. The chances of the father
+having hanged his son from his own doorpost without a
+struggle were small indeed. But none of the town councilors
+bothered about such little details. They were too busy with
+the body of the victim. For Marc Antony, the suicide,
+had by now assumed the dignity of a martyr and for three
+weeks his corpse was kept at the town hall and thereupon
+it was most solemnly buried by the White Penitents who
+for some mysterious reason had made the defunct Calvinist
+an ex-officio member of their own order and who conducted
+his embalmed remains to the Cathedral with the circumstance
+and the pomp usually reserved for an archbishop
+or an exceedingly rich patron of the local Basilica.</p>
+
+<p>During these three weeks, from every pulpit in town,
+the good people of Toulouse had been urged to bring whatever
+testimony they could against the person of Jean Calas<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_343"></a>[343]</span>
+and his family and finally, after the case had been thoroughly
+thrashed out in the public press, and five months
+after the suicide, the trial began.</p>
+
+<p>One of the judges in a moment of great lucidity suggested
+that the shop of the old man be visited to see
+whether such a suicide as he described would have been possible,
+but he was overridden and with twelve votes against
+one, Calas was sentenced to be tortured and to be broken
+on the wheel.</p>
+
+<p>He was taken to the torture room and was hanged by his
+wrists until his feet were a meter from the ground. Then
+his body was stretched until the limbs were “drawn from
+their sockets.” (I am copying from the official report.) As
+he refused to confess to a crime which he had not committed,
+he was then taken down and was forced to swallow such vast
+quantities of water that his body had soon “swollen to twice
+its natural size.” As he persisted in his diabolical refusal
+to confess his guilt, he was placed on a tumbril and was
+dragged to the place of execution where his arms and legs
+were broken in two places by the executioner. During the
+next two hours, while he lay helpless on the block, magistrates
+and priests continued to bother him with their questions.
+With incredible courage the old man continued to
+proclaim his innocence. Until the chief justice, exasperated
+by such obstinate lying, gave him up as a hopeless case and
+ordered him to be strangled to death.</p>
+
+<p>The fury of the populace had by this time spent itself
+and none of the other members of the family were killed.
+The widow, deprived of all her goods, was allowed to go
+into retirement and starve as best she could in the company
+of her faithful maid. As for the children, they were sent
+to different convents with the exception of the youngest
+who had been away at school at Nîmes at the time of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_344"></a>[344]</span>
+brother’s suicide and who had wisely fled to the territory
+of the sovereign city of Geneva.</p>
+
+<p>The case had attracted a great deal of attention. Voltaire
+in his castle of Ferney (conveniently built near the
+frontier of Switzerland so that a few minutes’ walk could
+carry him to foreign ground) heard of it but at first refused
+to be interested. He was forever at loggerheads with
+the Calvinist ministers of Geneva who regarded his private
+little theater which stood within sight of their own city as
+a direct provocation and the work of Satan. Hence Voltaire,
+in one of his supercilious moods, wrote that he could
+not work up any enthusiasm for this so-called Protestant
+martyr, for if the Catholics were bad, how much worse those
+terribly bigoted Huguenots, who boycotted his plays! Besides,
+it seemed impossible to him (as to a great many other
+people) that twelve supposedly respectable judges would
+have condemned an innocent man to such a terrible death
+without very good reason.</p>
+
+<p>But a few days later the sage of Ferney, who kept open
+house to all comers and no questions asked, had a visit from
+an honest merchant from Marseilles who had happened to be
+in Toulouse at the time of the trial and who was able to
+give him some first-hand information. Then at last he began
+to understand the horror of the crime that had been
+committed and from that moment on he could think of nothing
+else.</p>
+
+<p>There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of
+merit is reserved for those rare souls who, practically alone,
+dare to face the entire established order of society and who
+loudly cry for justice when the high courts of the land have
+pronounced sentence and when the community at large has
+accepted their verdict as equitable and just.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire well knew the storm that would break if he should<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_345"></a>[345]</span>
+dare to accuse the court of Toulouse of a judicial murder,
+and he prepared his case as carefully as if he had been a
+professional attorney. He interviewed the Calas boy who
+had escaped to Geneva. He wrote to every one who could
+possibly know something of the inside of the case. He hired
+counsel to examine and if possible to correct his own conclusions,
+lest his anger and his indignation carry him away.
+And when he felt sure of his ground, he opened his campaign.</p>
+
+<p>First of all he induced every man of some influence whom
+he knew within the realm of France (and he knew most of
+them) to write to the Chancellor of the Kingdom and ask
+for a revision of the Calas case. Then he set about to find
+the widow and as soon as she had been located, he ordered
+her to be brought to Paris at his own expense and engaged
+one of the best known lawyers to look after her. The spirit
+of the woman had been completely broken. She vaguely
+prayed that she might get her daughters out of the convent
+before she died. Beyond that, her hopes did not extend.</p>
+
+<p>Then he got into communication with the other son who
+was a Catholic, made it possible for him to escape from his
+school and to join him in Geneva. And finally he published
+all the facts in a short pamphlet entitled “Original Documents
+Concerning the Calas Family,” which consisted of letters
+written by the survivors of the tragedy and contained
+no reference whatsoever to Voltaire himself.</p>
+
+<p>Afterwards, too, during the revision of the case, he remained
+carefully behind the scenes, but so well did he handle
+his publicity campaign that soon the cause of the Calas family
+was the cause of all families in all countries of Europe
+and that thousands of people everywhere (including the
+King of England and the Empress of Russia) contributed
+to the funds that were being raised to help the defense.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_346"></a>[346]</span></p>
+
+<p>Eventually Voltaire gained his victory, but not until he
+had fought one of the most desperate battle of his entire
+career.</p>
+
+<p>The throne of France just then was occupied by Louis XV
+of unsavory memory. Fortunately his mistress hated the
+Jesuits and all their works (including the Church) with a
+most cordial hatred and was therefore on the side of Voltaire.
+But the King loved his ease above all other things
+and was greatly annoyed at all the fuss made about an
+obscure and dead Protestant. And of course as long as His
+Majesty refused to sign a warrant for a new trial, the
+Chancellor would not take action, and as long as the Chancellor
+would not take action, the tribunal of Toulouse was
+perfectly safe and so strong did they feel themselves that
+they defied public opinion in a most high-handed fashion
+and refused to let Voltaire or his lawyers have access to the
+original documents upon which they had based their conviction.</p>
+
+<p>During nine terrible months, Voltaire kept up his agitation
+until finally in March of the year 1765 the Chancellor
+ordered the Tribunal of Toulouse to surrender all the records
+in the Calas case and moved that there be a new trial. The
+widow of Jean Calas and her two daughters, who had at
+last been returned to their mother, were present in Versailles
+when this decision was made public. A year later
+the special court which had been ordered to investigate the
+appeal reported that Jean Calas had been done to death for
+a crime which he had not committed. By herculean efforts
+the King was induced to bestow a small gift of money upon
+the widow and her children. Furthermore the magistrates
+who had handled the Calas case were deprived of their office
+and it was politely suggested to the people of Toulouse that
+such a thing must not happen again.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_347"></a>[347]</span></p>
+
+<p>But although the French government might take a lukewarm
+view of the incident, the people of France had been
+stirred to the very depths of their outraged souls. And
+suddenly Voltaire became aware that this was not the only
+miscarriage of justice on record, that there were many others
+who had suffered as innocently as Calas.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1760 a Protestant country squire of the
+neighborhood of Toulouse had offered the hospitality of
+his house to a visiting Calvinist minister. For this hideous
+crime he had been deprived of his estate and had been sent
+to the galleys for life. He must have been a terribly strong
+man for thirteen years later he was still alive. Then Voltaire
+was told of his plight. He set to work, got the unfortunate
+man away from the galleys, brought him to Switzerland
+where his wife and children were being supported by
+public charity and looked after the family until the crown
+was induced to surrender a part of the confiscated property
+and the family were given permission to return to their
+deserted homestead.</p>
+
+<p>Next came the case of Chaumont, a poor devil who had
+been caught at an open-air meeting of Protestants and who
+for that crime had been dispatched to the galleys for an indeterminate
+period, but who now, at the intercession of
+Voltaire, was set free.</p>
+
+<p>These cases, however, were merely a sort of grewsome
+hors d’œuvre to what was to follow.</p>
+
+<p>Once more the scene was laid in Languedoc, that long
+suffering part of France which after the extermination of
+the Albigensian and Waldensian heretics had been left a
+wilderness of ignorance and bigotry.</p>
+
+<p>In a village near Toulouse there lived an old Protestant
+by the name of Sirven, a most respectable citizen who made
+a living as an expert in medieval law, a lucrative position<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_348"></a>[348]</span>
+at a time when the feudal judicial system had grown so
+complicated that ordinary rent-sheets looked like an income
+tax blank.</p>
+
+<p>Sirven had three daughters. The youngest was a harmless
+idiot, much given to brooding. In March of the year
+1764 she left her home. The parents searched far and wide
+but found no trace of the child until a few days later when
+the bishop of the district informed the father that the
+girl had visited him, had expressed a desire to become a
+nun and was now in a convent.</p>
+
+<p>Centuries of persecution had successfully broken the
+spirit of the Protestants in that part of France. Sirven
+humbly answered that everything undoubtedly would be for
+the best in this worst of all possible worlds and meekly accepted
+the inevitable. But in the unaccustomed atmosphere
+of the cloister, the poor child had soon lost the last vestiges
+of reason and when she began to make a nuisance of herself,
+she was returned to her own people. She was then
+in a state of terrible mental depression and in such continual
+horror of voices and spooks that her parents feared for her
+life. A short time afterwards she once more disappeared.
+Two weeks later her body was fished out of an old well.</p>
+
+<p>At that time Jean Calas was up for trial and the people
+were in a mood to believe anything that was said against a
+Protestant. The Sirvens, remembering what had just happened
+to innocent Jean Calas, decided not to court a similar
+fate. They fled and after a terrible trip through the
+Alps, during which one of their grandchildren froze to
+death, they at last reached Switzerland. They had not left
+a moment too soon. A few months later, both the father and
+the mother were found guilty (in their absence) of the
+crime of having murdered their child and were ordered to
+be hanged. The daughters were condemned to witness the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_349"></a>[349]</span>
+execution of their parents and thereafter to be banished for
+life.</p>
+
+<p>A friend of Rousseau brought the case to the notice of
+Voltaire and as soon as the Calas affair came to an end, he
+turned his attention to the Sirvens. The wife meanwhile had
+died. Remained the duty of vindicating the husband. It
+took exactly seven years to do this. Once again the tribunal
+of Toulouse refused to give any information or to surrender
+any documents. Once more Voltaire had to beat the tom-tom
+of publicity and beg money from Frederick of Prussia
+and Catherine of Russia and Poniatowski of Poland before
+he could force the crown to take an interest. But finally,
+in the seventy-eighth year of his own life and in the eighth
+year of this interminable lawsuit, the Sirvens were exonerated
+and the survivors were allowed to go back to their homes.</p>
+
+<p>So ended the second case.</p>
+
+<p>The third one followed immediately.</p>
+
+<p>In the month of August of the year 1765 in the town of
+Abbeville, not far from Amiens, two crucifixes that stood by
+the side of the road were found broken to pieces by an unknown
+hand. Three young boys were suspected of this
+sacrilege and orders were given for their arrest. One of
+them escaped and went to Prussia. The others were caught.
+Of these, the older one, a certain Chevalier de la Barre,
+was suspected of being an atheist. A copy of the Philosophical
+Dictionary, that famous work to which all the great
+leaders of liberal thought had contributed, was found among
+his books. This looked very suspicious and the judges decided
+to look into the young man’s past. It was true they
+could not connect him with the Abbeville case but had he
+not upon a previous occasion refused to kneel down and uncover
+while a religious procession went by?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_350"></a>[350]</span></p>
+
+<p>De la Barre said yes, but he had been in a hurry to catch
+a stage-coach and had meant no offense.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon he was tortured, and being young and bearing
+the pain less easily than old Calas, he readily confessed that
+he had mutilated one of the two crucifixes and was condemned
+to death for “impiously and deliberately walking
+before the Host without kneeling or uncovering, singing
+blasphemous songs, tendering marks of adoration to profane
+books,” and other crimes of a similar nature which
+were supposed to have indicated a lack of respect for the
+Church.</p>
+
+<p>The sentence was so barbarous (his tongue was to be
+torn out with hot irons, his right hand was to be cut off,
+and he was to be slowly burned to death, and all that only
+a century and a half ago!) that the public was stirred into
+several expressions of disapproval. Even if he were guilty
+of all the things enumerated in the bill of particulars, one
+could not butcher a boy for a drunken prank! Petitions
+were sent to the King, ministers were besieged with requests
+for a respite. But the country was full of unrest and there
+must be an example, and de la Barre, having undergone
+the same tortures as Calas, was taken to the scaffold, was
+decapitated (as a sign of great and particular favor) and
+his corpse, together with his Philosophical Dictionary and
+some volumes by our old friend Bayle, were publicly burned
+by the hangman.</p>
+
+<p>It was a day of rejoicing for those who dreaded the ever-growing
+influence of the Sozzinis and the Spinozas and
+the Descartes. It showed what invariably happened to those
+ill-guided young men who left the narrow path between
+the right and the wrong and followed the leadership of a
+group of radical philosophers.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire heard this and accepted the challenge. He was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_351"></a>[351]</span>
+fast approaching his eightieth birthday, but he plunged
+into the case with all his old zeal and with a brain that
+burned with a clear white flame of outraged decency.</p>
+
+<p>De la Barre had been executed for “blasphemy.” First
+of all, Voltaire tried to discover whether there existed a law
+by which people guilty of that supposed crime could be condemned
+to death. He could not find one. Then he asked
+his lawyer friends. They could not find one. And it gradually
+dawned upon the community that the judges in their
+unholy eagerness had “invented” this bit of legal fiction
+to get rid of their prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>There had been ugly rumors at the time of de la Barre’s
+execution. The storm that now arose forced the judges to
+be very circumspect and the trial of the third of the youthful
+prisoners was never finished. As for de la Barre, he was
+never vindicated. The review of the case dragged on for
+years and when Voltaire died, no decision had as yet been
+reached. But the blows which he had struck, if not for
+tolerance at least against intolerance, were beginning to
+tell.</p>
+
+<p>The official acts of terror instigated by gossiping old
+women and senile courts came to an end.</p>
+
+<p>Tribunals that have religious axes to grind are only
+successful when they can do their work in the dark and are
+able to surround themselves with secrecy. The method of
+attack followed by Voltaire was one against which such
+courts had no means of defense.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire turned on all the lights, hired a voluminous
+orchestra, invited the public to attend, and then bade his
+enemies do their worst.</p>
+
+<p>As a result, they did nothing at all.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_352"></a>[352]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXVI">CHAPTER XXVI<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE ENCYCLOPEDIA</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>There are three different schools of statesmanship.
+The first one teaches a doctrine which reads somewhat
+as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by poor
+benighted creatures who are unable to think for themselves,
+who suffer mental agonies whenever they are obliged
+to make an independent decision and who therefore can be
+led astray by the first ward-heeler that comes along. Not
+only is it better for the world at large that these ‘herd
+people’ be ruled by some one who knows his own mind, but
+they themselves, too, are infinitely happier when they do not
+have to bother about parliaments and ballot-boxes and can
+devote all their time to their work-shops, their children, their
+flivvers and their vegetable gardens.”</p>
+
+<p>The disciples of this school become emperors, sultans,
+sachems, sheiks and archbishops and they rarely regard
+labor unions as an essential part of civilization. They work
+hard and build roads, barracks, cathedrals and jails.</p>
+
+<p>The adherents of the second school of political thought
+argue as follows: “The average man is God’s noblest invention.
+He is a sovereign in his own right, unsurpassed in
+wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives. He is
+perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but
+those committees through which he tries to rule the universe
+are proverbially slow when it comes to handling delicate
+affairs of state. Therefore, the masses ought to leave all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_353"></a>[353]</span>
+executive business to a few trusted friends who are not hampered
+by the immediate necessity of making a living and
+who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”</p>
+
+<p>Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the
+logical candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first
+consul and Lord protector.</p>
+
+<p>They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the
+cathedrals they turn into jails.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a third group of people. They contemplate
+man with the sober eye of science and accept him as he is.
+They appreciate his good qualities, they understand his
+limitations. They are convinced from a long observation
+of past events that the average citizen, when not under the
+influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard
+to do what is right. But they make themselves no false
+illusions. They know that the natural process of growth
+is exceedingly slow, that it would be as futile to try and
+hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of human
+intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government
+of a state, but whenever they have a chance to put
+their ideas into action, they build roads, improve the jails
+and spend the rest of the available funds upon schools and
+universities. For they are such incorrigible optimists that
+they believe that education of the right sort will gradually
+rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore
+a thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.</p>
+
+<p>And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal,
+they usually write an encyclopedia.</p>
+
+<p>Like so many other things that give evidence of great
+wisdom and profound patience, the encyclopedia-habit took
+its origin in China. The Chinese Emperor K’ang-hi tried
+to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in five
+thousand and twenty volumes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_354"></a>[354]</span></p>
+
+<p>Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was
+contented with thirty-seven books.</p>
+
+<p>The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced
+nothing of the slightest value along this line of enlightenment.
+A fellow-countryman of Saint Augustine, the
+African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years of his
+life composing something which he held to be a veritable
+treasure house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that
+people might the more easily retain the many interesting
+facts which he presented to them, he used poetry. This
+terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by heart
+by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and
+was held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature,
+music and science.</p>
+
+<p>Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name
+of Isidore wrote an entirely new encyclopedia and after
+that, the output increased at the regular rate of two for
+every hundred years. What has become of them all, I do
+not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals)
+has possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these
+volumes had been allowed to survive, there would not be
+room for anything else on this earth.</p>
+
+<p>When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century,
+Europe experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual
+curiosity, the purveyors of encyclopedias entered
+into a veritable Paradise. Such books, then as now, were
+usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live on
+eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted
+for less than the money spent upon paper and ink. England
+especially was a great country for this sort of literature
+and so it was quite natural that John Mills, a Britisher who
+lived in Paris, should think of translating the successful
+“Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_355"></a>[355]</span>
+French language that he might peddle his product among
+the subjects of good King Louis and grow rich. For this
+purpose he associated himself with a German professor and
+then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do the
+actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton,
+who saw a chance to make a small fortune, deliberately
+swindled his partner and as soon as he had frozen Mills and
+the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise, continued to publish
+the pirated edition on his own account. He called the
+forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel
+des Arts et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful
+prospectuses with such a tremendous selling appeal that
+the list of subscribers was soon filled.</p>
+
+<p>Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the
+Collège de France to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot
+of paper and awaited results.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did
+not prove as simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor
+produced notes but no articles, the subscribers loudly
+clamored for Volume I and everything was in great disorder.</p>
+
+<p>In this emergency Lebreton remembered that a “Universal
+Dictionary of Medicine” which had appeared only a few
+months before had been very favorably received. He sent
+for the editor of this medical handbook and hired him on
+the spot. And so it happened that a mere encyclopedia became
+the “Encyclopédie.” For the new editor was no one
+less than Denis Diderot and the work which was to have
+been a hack job became one of the most important contributions
+of the eighteenth century towards the sum total
+of human enlightenment.</p>
+
+<p>Diderot at that time was thirty-seven years old and his
+life had been neither easy nor happy. He had refused
+to do what all respectable young Frenchmen were supposed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_356"></a>[356]</span>
+to do and go to a university. Instead, as soon as he could
+get away from his Jesuit teachers, he had proceeded to
+Paris to become a man of letters. After a short period of
+starvation (acting upon the principle that two can go
+hungry just as cheaply as one) he had married a lady who
+proved to be a terribly pious woman and an uncompromising
+shrew, a combination which is by no means as rare as some
+people seem to believe. But as he was obliged to support
+her, he had been forced to take all sorts of odd jobs and to
+compile all sorts of books from “Inquiries concerning Virtue
+and Merit” to a rather disreputable rehash of Boccaccio’s
+“Decameron.” In his heart, however, this pupil of Bayle
+remained faithful to his liberal ideals. Soon the government
+(after the fashion of governments during times of
+stress) discovered that this inoffensive looking young author
+maintained grave doubts about the story of creation as
+rendered in the first chapter of Genesis and otherwise was
+considerable of a heretic. In consequence whereof Diderot
+was conducted to the prison of Vincennes and there held
+under lock and key for almost three months.</p>
+
+<p>It was after his release from jail that he entered the
+service of Lebreton. Diderot was one of the most eloquent
+men of his time. He saw the chance of a lifetime in the
+enterprise of which he was to be the head. A mere rehash
+of Chambers’ old material seemed entirely beneath his dignity.
+It was an era of tremendous mental activity. Very
+well! Let the Encyclopedia of Lebreton contain the latest
+word upon every conceivable subject and let the articles be
+written by the foremost authorities in every line of human
+endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>Diderot was so full of enthusiasm that he actually persuaded
+Lebreton to give him full command and unlimited
+time. Then he made up a tentative list of his coöperators,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_357"></a>[357]</span>
+took a large sheet of foolscap and began, “A: the first letter
+of the alphabet, etc., etc.”</p>
+
+<p>Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was
+done. Rarely, however, has a man worked under such tremendous
+disadvantages. Lebreton had increased his original
+capital when he hired Diderot, but he never paid his editor
+more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the
+other people who were supposed to lend their assistance,
+well, we all know how those things are. They were either
+busy just then, or they would do it next month, or they
+had to go to the country to see their grandmother. With
+the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the work
+himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped
+upon him by the officials of both the Church and the State.</p>
+
+<p>Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not
+because so many people want them but because so many
+people are glad to get rid of them. The book which a
+century and a half ago was howled down as a manifestation
+of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and harmless
+tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative
+element among the clergy of the eighteenth century,
+it sounded like a clarion call of destruction, anarchy,
+atheism and chaos.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the
+editor-in-chief as an enemy of society and religion, a loose
+reprobate who believed neither in God, home or the sanctity
+of the family ties. But the Paris of the year 1770 was still
+an overgrown village where every one knew every one else.
+And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of life
+was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually
+lived up to this motto, who kept open house for all those
+who were hungry, who labored twenty hours a day for the
+sake of humanity and asked nothing in return but a bed,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_358"></a>[358]</span>
+a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded, hard-working
+fellow was so shining an example of those virtues
+in which the prelates and the monarchs of that day were
+so conspicuously lacking, that it was not easy to attack
+him from that particular angle. And so the authorities
+contented themselves with making his life just as unpleasant
+as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage,
+by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding
+Diderot’s home, by confiscating his notes and occasionally
+by suppressing the work altogether.</p>
+
+<p>These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen
+his enthusiasm. At last the work was finished and the
+“Encyclopédie” actually accomplished what Diderot had
+expected of it—it became the rallying point for all those
+who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age
+and who knew that the world was desperately in need of a
+general overhauling.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor
+slightly out of the true perspective.</p>
+
+<p>Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby
+coat, counted himself happy when his rich and brilliant
+friend, the Baron D’Holbach, invited him to a square meal
+once a week, and who was more than satisfied when four
+thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived
+at the same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot
+and Helvétius and Volney and Condorcet and a score of
+others, all of whom gained a much greater personal renown
+than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good
+people would never have been able to exercise the influence
+they did. It was more than a book, it was a social and
+economic program. It told what the leading minds of the
+day were actually thinking. It contained a concrete statement
+of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_359"></a>[359]</span>
+world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the
+human race.</p>
+
+<p>France had reached a point where those who had eyes
+to see and ears to hear knew that something drastic must
+be done to avoid an immediate catastrophe, while those who
+had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused to use them,
+maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that
+peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement
+of a set of antiquated laws that belonged to the
+era of the Merovingians. For the moment, those two parties
+were so evenly balanced that everything remained as it had
+always been and this led to strange complications. The
+same France which on one side of the ocean played such
+a conspicuous rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom
+and addressed the most affectionate letters to Monsieur
+Georges Washington (who was a Free Mason) and arranged
+delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre,
+Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used
+to call a “sceptic” and what we call a plain atheist, this
+country on the other side of the broad Atlantic stood revealed
+as the most vindictive enemy of all forms of spiritual
+progress and only showed her sense of democracy in the
+complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher
+and peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually all this was changed.</p>
+
+<p>But it was changed in a way which no one had been
+able to foresee. For the struggle that was to remove the
+spiritual and social handicaps of all those who were born
+outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves themselves.
+It was the work of a small group of disinterested
+citizens whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated
+quite as bitterly as their Catholic oppressors and who could<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_360"></a>[360]</span>
+count upon no other reward than that which is said to
+await all honest men in Heaven.</p>
+
+<p>The men who during the eighteenth century defended
+the cause of tolerance rarely belonged to any particular
+denomination. For the sake of personal convenience they
+sometimes went through certain outward motions of religious
+conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their
+writing desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned,
+they might just as well have lived in Athens in the fourth
+century B.C. or in China in the days of Confucius.</p>
+
+<p>They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain
+reverence for various things which most of their contemporaries
+held in great respect and which they themselves
+regarded as harmless but childish survivals of a bygone
+day.</p>
+
+<p>They took little stock in that ancient national history
+which the western world, for some curious reason, had
+picked out from among all Babylonian and Assyrian and
+Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and had accepted
+as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true
+disciples of their great master, Socrates, they listened only
+to the inner voice of their own conscience and regardless
+of consequences, they lived fearlessly in a world that had
+long since been surrendered to the timid.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_361"></a>[361]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXVII">CHAPTER XXVII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial
+misery known as the Kingdom of France came
+crashing down on a memorable evening in the month
+of August of the year of grace 1789.</p>
+
+<p>On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing
+emotional fury, the National Assembly worked itself into
+a veritable orgy of brotherly love. Until in a moment of
+intense excitement the privileged classes surrendered all
+those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken
+them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared
+themselves in favor of those theoretical rights of man
+which henceforth would be the foundation-stone for all further
+attempts at popular self-government.</p>
+
+<p>As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of
+the feudal system. An aristocracy which is actually composed
+of the “aristoi,” of the best of the most enterprising
+elements of society, which boldly assumes leadership and
+shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance
+to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active
+service and contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs
+in diverse departments of government is only fit to drink
+tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on Second.</p>
+
+<p>The old France therefore was dead.</p>
+
+<p>Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.</p>
+
+<p>But it was dead and with it there passed away that most<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_362"></a>[362]</span>
+outrageous form of an invisible government which the
+Church, ever since the days of Richelieu, had been able to
+impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint Louis.</p>
+
+<p>Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.</p>
+
+<p>Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts
+and souls of all honest men and women, it is needless to
+speak.</p>
+
+<p>The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.</p>
+
+<p>And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in
+an autocratic form of government was for good and all
+to be eradicated from this fair earth.</p>
+
+<p>Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are
+gone!</p>
+
+<p>And more words to that effect.</p>
+
+<p>Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its
+many iniquities, the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal
+and when it was all over, behold our old friend Intolerance,
+wearing a pair of proletarian pantaloons and his hair
+brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side with the public
+prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.</p>
+
+<p>Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for
+claiming that authority maintaining itself solely by the
+grace of Heaven might sometimes be in error.</p>
+
+<p>Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the
+will of the people need not always and invariably be the
+will of God.</p>
+
+<p>A ghastly joke!</p>
+
+<p>But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular
+fancies) with the blood of a million innocent bystanders.</p>
+
+<p>What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original.
+One can find the same idea couched in different if
+more elegant words in the works of many of the ancients.</p>
+
+<p>In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_363"></a>[363]</span>
+apparently there always have been, and most likely there
+always will be two entirely different varieties of human
+beings.</p>
+
+<p>A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the
+serious searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive
+at certain temperate philosophical conclusions which
+will place them above and beyond the common worries of
+mankind.</p>
+
+<p>But the vast majority of the people are not contented
+with a mild diet of spiritual “light wines.” They want something
+with a kick to it, something that burns on the tongue,
+that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit up and take
+notice. What that “something” is does not matter very
+much, provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications
+and is served in a direct and simple fashion and
+in unlimited quantities.</p>
+
+<p>This fact seems to have been little understood by historians
+and this has led to many and serious disappointments.
+No sooner has an outraged populace torn down the stronghold
+of the past (a fact duly and enthusiastically reported
+by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it turns mason,
+carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the
+city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit
+as vile and tyrannical as the old one and used for the same
+purpose of repression and terror.</p>
+
+<p>The very moment a number of proud nations have at last
+succeeded in throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an
+“infallible man” they accept the dictates of an “infallible
+book.”</p>
+
+<p>Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a
+flunkey, is madly galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters
+the deserted palace, puts on the discarded royal raiment
+and forthwith commits herself to those selfsame blunders<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_364"></a>[364]</span>
+and cruelties which have just driven her predecessor into
+exile.</p>
+
+<p>It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our
+story and must be told.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible
+for the great French upheaval were of the best.
+The Declaration of the Rights of Man had laid down the
+principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed in the
+peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not
+even his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not
+disturb the public order as laid down by the various decrees
+and laws.</p>
+
+<p>This however did not mean equal rights for all religious
+denominations. The Protestant faith henceforth was to be
+tolerated, Protestants were not to be annoyed because they
+worshiped in a different church from their Catholic neighbors,
+but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant”
+Church of the state.</p>
+
+<p>Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of
+political life, knew that this far famed concession was only
+a half-way measure. But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn
+a great social cataclysm into a one-man revolution, died
+under the effort and many noblemen and bishops, repenting
+of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of
+August, were already beginning that policy of obstructionism
+which was to be of such fatal consequence to their master
+the king. And it was not until two years later in the year
+1791 (and exactly two years too late for any practical
+purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants
+and the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality
+and were declared to enjoy the same liberty before the law.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed.
+The constitution which the representatives of the French<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_365"></a>[365]</span>
+people finally bestowed upon an expectant country insisted
+that all priests of whatsoever faith should swear an oath of
+allegiance to the new form of government and should regard
+themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the school-teachers
+and postal employees and light-house keepers and
+customs officials who were their fellow-citizens.</p>
+
+<p>Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the
+new constitution were in direct violation of every solemn
+agreement that had been concluded between France and the
+Holy See since the year 1516. But the Assembly was in no
+mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents and
+treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this
+decree or resign their positions and starve to death. A
+few bishops and a few priests accepted what seemed inevitable.
+They crossed their fingers and went through the formality
+of an oath. But by far the greater number, being
+honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf
+out of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted
+during so many years, they began to say mass in
+deserted stables and to give communion in pigsties, to preach
+their sermons behind country hedges and to pay clandestine
+visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the
+middle of the night.</p>
+
+<p>Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the
+Protestants had done under similar circumstances, for
+France was too hopelessly disorganized to take more than
+very perfunctory measures against the enemies of her constitution.
+And as none of them seemed to run the risk of
+the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to
+ask that they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they
+were popularly called, be officially recognized as one of the
+“tolerated sects” and be accorded those privileges which during<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_366"></a>[366]</span>
+the previous three centuries they had so persistently
+refused to grant to their compatriots of the Calvinist faith.</p>
+
+<p>The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the
+safe distance of the year 1925, was not without a certain
+grim humor. But no definite decision was taken, for the
+Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under the denomination
+of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court,
+combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies,
+caused a panic which in less than a week spread from the
+coast of Belgium to the shores of the Mediterranean and
+which was responsible for that series of wholesale assassinations
+which raged from the second to the seventh of September
+of the year 1792.</p>
+
+<p>From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate
+into a reign of terror.</p>
+
+<p>The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers
+came to naught when a starving populace began to suspect
+that their own leaders were engaged in a gigantic plot to
+sell the country to the enemy. The explosion which then
+followed is common history. That the conduct of affairs
+in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the hands
+of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which
+every honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But
+that the principal actor in the drama should have been a
+prig, a model-citizen, a hundred-percenting paragon of
+Virtue, that indeed was something which no one had been
+able to foresee.</p>
+
+<p>When France began to understand the true nature of her
+new master, it was too late, as those who tried in vain to
+utter their belated words of warning from the top of a
+scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have testified.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point
+of view of politics and economics and social organization.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_367"></a>[367]</span>
+But not until the historian shall turn psychologist or the
+psychologist shall turn historian shall we really be able to
+explain and understand those dark forces that shape the
+destinies of nations in their hour of agony and travail.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness
+and light. There are those who maintain that the
+human race respects only one thing, brute force. Some
+hundred years from now, I may be able to make a choice.
+This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest
+of all experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French
+revolution, was a noisy apotheosis of violence.</p>
+
+<p>Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world
+by way of reason were either dead or were put to death by
+the very people whom they had helped to glory. And with
+the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots and the Condorcets
+out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New
+Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s
+fate. What a ghastly mess they made of their high
+mission!</p>
+
+<p>During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the
+out-and-out enemies of religion, those who had some particular
+reason to detest the very symbols of Christianity;
+those who in some silent and hidden way had suffered so
+deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere
+sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that
+the smell of incense made them turn pale with long forgotten
+rage. Together with a few others who believed that they
+could disprove the existence of a personal God with the help
+of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy the
+Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful
+task but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary
+psychology that the normal becomes abnormal and
+the impossible is turned into an every day occurrence.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_368"></a>[368]</span>
+Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old
+Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing
+Christmas and Easter; abolishing weeks and months and
+re-dividing the year into periods of ten days each with a new
+pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another paper pronunciamento
+which abolished the worship of God and left
+the universe without a master.</p>
+
+<p>But not for long.</p>
+
+<p>However eloquently explained and defended within the
+bare rooms of the Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and
+empty void was too repellent to most citizens to be tolerated
+for more than a couple of weeks. The old Deity
+no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example
+of Moses and Mahomet and invent a new one that
+should suit the demands of the times?</p>
+
+<p>As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!</p>
+
+<p>Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime
+a comely actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek
+draperies, would fill the bill perfectly. The lady was found
+among the dancers of his late Majesty’s corps de ballet
+and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to
+the high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the
+loyal followers of an older faith.</p>
+
+<p>As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries,
+had stood a tender watch over all those who had bared the
+wounds of their soul before the patient eyes of perfect understanding,
+she too was gone, hastily hidden by loving
+hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned into
+mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty,
+the proud product of an amateur sculptor and done rather
+carelessly in white plaster. But that was not all. Notre
+Dame had seen other innovations. In the middle of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_369"></a>[369]</span>
+choir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple of
+Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a
+throne for the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl
+was not holding court and receiving the worship of her
+trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy harbored a
+“Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry
+high the burning flame of world enlightenment.</p>
+
+<p>The “end of time” came before another six months.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794
+the French people were officially informed that God had been
+reëstablished and that the immortality of the soul was once
+more a recognized article of faith. On the eighth of June,
+the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the
+second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques
+Rousseau) was officially presented to his eager disciples.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address
+of welcome. He had reached the highest point of his
+career. The obscure law clerk from a third rate country
+town had become the high priest of the Revolution. More
+than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine
+Théot, revered by thousands as the true mother of God,
+had just proclaimed the forthcoming return of the Messiah
+and she had even revealed his name. It was Maximilian
+Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic
+uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing
+reams of oratory in which he assured God that from now
+on all would be well with His little world.</p>
+
+<p>And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law
+by which those suspected of treason and heresy (for once
+more they were held to be the same, as in the good old days of
+the Inquisition) were deprived of all means of defense, a
+measure so ably conceived that during the next six weeks<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_370"></a>[370]</span>
+more than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath
+the slanting knife of the guillotine.</p>
+
+<p>The rest of his story is only too well known.</p>
+
+<p>As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself
+held to be Good (with a capital G) he could, in his
+quality of a logical fanatic, not possibly recognize the right
+of other men, less perfect, to exist on the same planet with
+himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a capital
+E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the
+brink of depopulation.</p>
+
+<p>Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the
+enemies of Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate
+struggle destroyed this Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.</p>
+
+<p>Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent
+itself. The constitution which the French people then
+adopted recognized the existence of different denominations
+and gave them the same rights and privileges. Officially
+at least the Republic washed her hands of all religion.
+Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an association,
+were free to do so but they were obliged to support
+their own ministers and priests and recognize the superior
+rights of the state and the complete freedom of choice of
+the individual.</p>
+
+<p>Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have
+lived peacefully side by side.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat,
+continues to deny the principle of a division of state and
+church (see the decree of Pope Pius IX of December 8th,
+1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back to power by
+supporting those political parties who hope to upset the
+republican form of government and bring back the monarchy
+or the empire. But these battles are usually fought in the
+private parlors of some minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodge<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_371"></a>[371]</span>
+of a retired general with an ambitious
+mother-in-law.</p>
+
+<p>They have thus far provided the funny papers with some
+excellent material but they are proving themselves increasingly
+futile.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_372"></a>[372]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII">CHAPTER XXVIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">LESSING</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>On the twentieth of September of the year 1792 a
+battle was fought between the armies of the French
+Revolution and the armies of the allied monarchs
+who had set forth to annihilate the terrible monster of insurrection.</p>
+
+<p>It was a glorious victory, but not for the allies. Their
+infantry could not be employed on the slippery hillsides of
+the village of Valmy. The battle therefore consisted of a
+series of solemn broadsides. The rebels fired harder and
+faster than the royalists. Hence the latter were the first
+to leave the field. In the evening the allied troops retreated
+northward. Among those present at the engagement was
+a certain Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, aide to the hereditary
+Prince of Weimar.</p>
+
+<p>Several years afterwards this young man published his
+memoirs of that day. While standing ankle-deep in the
+sticky mud of Lorraine, he had turned prophet. And he had
+predicted that after this cannonade, the world would never
+be the same. He had been right. On that ever memorable
+day, Sovereignty by the grace of God was blown into limbo.
+The Crusaders of the Rights of Man did not run like
+chickens, as they had been expected to do. They stuck
+to their guns. And they pushed those guns forward through
+valleys and across mountains until they had carried their
+ideal of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” to the furthermost<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_373"></a>[373]</span>
+corners of Europe and had stabled their horses in
+every castle and church of the entire continent.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence.
+The revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one
+hundred and fifty years and we can poke as much fun at
+them as we like. We can even be grateful for the many
+good things which they bestowed upon this world.</p>
+
+<p>But the men and women who lived through those days,
+who one morning had gaily danced around the Tree of
+Liberty and then during the next three months had been
+chased like rats through the sewers of their own city, could
+not possibly take such a detached view of those problems
+of civic upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their
+cellars and garrets and had combed the cobwebs out of their
+perukes, they began to devise measures by which to prevent
+a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity.</p>
+
+<p>But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must
+first of all bury the past. Not a vague past in the broad
+historical sense of the word but their own individual “pasts”
+when they had surreptitiously read the works of Monsieur
+de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for
+the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de
+Voltaire were stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur
+Diderot were sold to the junk-man. Pamphlets that had
+been reverently read as the true revelation of reason were
+relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an effort
+was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short
+sojourn in the realm of liberalism.</p>
+
+<p>Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the
+literary material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant
+brotherhood overlooked one item which was even more important
+as a telltale of the popular mind. That was the
+stage. It was a bit childish on the part of the generation<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_374"></a>[374]</span>
+that had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The Marriage
+of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment
+believed in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and
+the people who had wept over “Nathan the Wise” could
+never successfully prove that they had always regarded religious
+tolerance as a misguided expression of governmental
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>The play and its success were there to convict them of
+the opposite.</p>
+
+<p>The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment
+of the latter half of the eighteenth century was a
+German, one Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was the son
+of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology in the
+University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination
+for a religious career and had played hooky so persistently
+that his father heard of it, had told him to come home and
+had placed him before the choice of immediate resignation
+from the university or diligent application as a member of
+the medical department. Gotthold, who was no more of a
+doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was
+asked of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of
+his beloved actor friends and upon their subsequent disappearance
+from town was obliged to hasten to Wittenberg
+that he might escape arrest for debt.</p>
+
+<p>His flight meant the beginning of a period of long walks
+and short meals. First of all he went to Berlin where he
+spent several years writing badly paid articles for a number
+of theatrical papers. Then he engaged himself as private
+secretary to a rich friend who was going to take a trip
+around the world. But no sooner had they started than the
+Seven Years’ war must break out. The friend, obliged to
+join his regiment, had taken the first post-chaise for home<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_375"></a>[375]</span>
+and Lessing, once more without a job, found himself stranded
+in the city of Leipzig.</p>
+
+<p>But he was of a sociable nature and soon found a new
+friend in the person of one Eduard Christian von Kleist, an
+officer by day and a poet by night, a sensitive soul who gave
+the hungry ex-theologian insight into the new spirit that
+was slowly coming over this world. But von Kleist was shot
+to death in the battle of Kunersdorf and Lessing was driven
+to such dire extremes of want that he became a columnist.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed a period as private secretary to the commander
+of the fortress of Breslau where the boredom of garrison
+life was mitigated by a profound study of the works
+of Spinoza which then, a hundred years after the philosopher’s
+death, were beginning to find their way to foreign
+countries.</p>
+
+<p>All this, however, did not settle the problem of the daily
+Butterbrod. Lessing was now almost forty years old and
+wanted a home of his own. His friends suggested that he
+be appointed keeper of the Royal Library. But years before,
+something had happened that had made Lessing
+persona non grata at the Prussian court. During his first
+visit to Berlin he had made the acquaintance of Voltaire.
+The French philosopher was nothing if not generous and
+being a person without any idea of “system” he had allowed
+the young man to borrow the manuscript of the “Century of
+Louis XIV,” then ready for publication. Unfortunately,
+Lessing, when he hastily left Berlin, had (entirely by accident)
+packed the manuscript among his own belongings.
+Voltaire, exasperated by the bad coffee and the hard beds of
+the penurious Prussian court, immediately cried out that he
+had been robbed. The young German had stolen his most
+important manuscript, the police must watch the frontier,
+etc., etc., etc., after the manner of an excited Frenchman<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_376"></a>[376]</span>
+in a foreign country. Within a few days the postman returned
+the lost document, but it was accompanied by a letter
+from Lessing in which the blunt young Teuton expressed
+his own ideas of people who would dare to suspect his
+honesty.</p>
+
+<p>This storm in a chocolate-pot might have easily been forgotten,
+but the eighteenth century was a period when chocolate-pots
+played a great rôle in the lives of men and women
+and Frederick, even after a lapse of almost twenty years,
+still loved his pesky French friend and would not hear of
+having Lessing at his court.</p>
+
+<p>And so farewell to Berlin and off to Hamburg, where there
+was rumor of a newly to be founded national theater. This
+enterprise came to nothing and Lessing in his despair accepted
+the office of librarian to the hereditary grand duke
+of Brunswick. The town of Wolfenbüttel which then became
+his home was not exactly a metropolis, but the grand-ducal
+library was one of the finest in all Germany. It contained
+more than ten thousand manuscripts and several of
+these were of prime importance in the history of the Reformation.</p>
+
+<p>Boredom of course is the main incentive to scandal mongering
+and gossip. In Wolfenbüttel a former art critic,
+columnist and dramatic essayist was by this very fact a
+highly suspicious person and soon Lessing was once more
+in trouble. Not because of anything he had done but on
+account of something he was vaguely supposed to have done,
+to wit: the publication of a series of articles attacking the
+orthodox opinions of the old school of Lutheran theology.</p>
+
+<p>These sermons (for sermons they were) had actually been
+written by a former Hamburg minister, but the grand duke
+of Brunswick, panic stricken at the prospect of a religious
+war within his domains, ordered his librarian to be discreet<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_377"></a>[377]</span>
+and keep away from all controversies. Lessing complied
+with the wishes of his employer. Nothing, however, had
+been said about treating the subject dramatically and so he
+set to work to re-valuate his opinions in terms of the stage.</p>
+
+<p>The play which was born out of this small-town rumpus
+was called “Nathan the Wise.” The theme was very old and
+I have mentioned it before in this book. Lovers of literary
+antiquities can find it (if Mr. Sumner will allow them) in
+Boccaccio’s “Decameron” where it is called the “Sad Story
+of the Three Rings” and where it is told as follows:</p>
+
+<p>Once upon a time a Mohammedan prince tried to extract
+a large sum of money from one of his Jewish subjects. But
+as he had no valid reason to deprive the poor man of his
+property, he bethought himself of a ruse. He sent for the
+victim and having complimented him gracefully upon his
+learning and wisdom, he asked him which of the three most
+widely spread religions, the Turkish, the Jewish and the
+Christian, he held to be most true. The worthy patriarch
+did not answer the Padishah directly but said, “Let me, oh
+great Sultan, tell you a little story. Once upon a time there
+was a very rich man who had a beautiful ring and he made
+a will that whichever of his sons at the time of his death
+should be found with that ring upon his finger should fall
+heir to all his estates. His son made a like will. His grandson
+too, and for centuries the ring changed hands and all
+was well. But finally it happened that the owner of the
+ring had three sons whom he loved equally well. He simply
+could not decide which of the three should own that much
+valued treasure. So he went to a goldsmith and ordered
+him to make two other rings exactly like the one he had.
+On his death-bed he sent for his children and gave them
+each his blessing and what they supposed was the one and
+only ring. Of course, as soon as the father had been buried,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_378"></a>[378]</span>
+the three boys all claimed to be his heir because they had
+The Ring. This led to many quarrels and finally they laid
+the matter before the Kadi. But as the rings were absolutely
+alike, even the judges could not decide which was the right
+one and so the case has been dragged on and on and very
+likely will drag on until the end of the world. Amen.”</p>
+
+<p>Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that
+no one religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it
+was the inner spirit of man that counted rather than his
+outward conformity to certain prescribed rituals and dogmas
+and that therefore it was the duty of people to bear with
+each other in love and friendship and that no one had the
+right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured
+perfection and say, “I am better than all others because
+I alone possess the Truth.”</p>
+
+<p>But this idea, much applauded in the year 1778, was no
+longer popular with the little princelings who thirty years
+later returned to salvage such goods and chattels as had
+survived the deluge of the Revolution. For the purpose of
+regaining their lost prestige, they abjectly surrendered their
+lands to the rule of the police-sergeant and expected the
+clerical gentlemen who depended upon them for their livelihood
+to act as a spiritual militia and help the regular cops
+to reëstablish law and order.</p>
+
+<p>But whereas the purely political reaction was completely
+successful, the attempt to reshape men’s minds after the
+pattern of fifty years before ended in failure. And it could
+not be otherwise. It was true that the vast majority of the
+people in all countries were sick and tired of revolution and
+unrest, of parliaments and futile speeches and forms of taxation
+that had completely ruined commerce and industry.
+They wanted peace. Peace at any price. They wanted to
+do business and sit in their own front parlors and drink<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_379"></a>[379]</span>
+coffee and not be disturbed by the soldiers billeted upon them
+and forced to drink an odious extract of oak-leaves. Provided
+they could enjoy this blessed state of well-being, they
+were willing to put up with certain small inconveniences such
+as saluting whoever wore brass buttons, bowing low before
+every imperial letter-box and saying “Sir” to every assistant
+official chimney-sweep.</p>
+
+<p>But this attitude of humble obedience was the result of
+sheer necessity, of the need for a short breathing space after
+the long and tumultuous years when every new morning
+brought new uniforms, new political platforms, new police
+regulations and new rulers, both of Heaven and earth. It
+would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this general
+air of subservience, from this loud hurray-ing for the divinely
+appointed masters, that the people in their heart of
+hearts had forgotten the new doctrines which the drums of
+Sergeant Le Grand had so merrily beaten into their heads
+and hearts.</p>
+
+<p>As their governments, with that moral cynicism inherent
+in all reactionary dictatorships, insisted chiefly upon an outward
+semblance of decency and order and cared not one
+whit for the inner spirit, the average subject enjoyed a fairly
+wide degree of independence. On Sunday he went to church
+with a large Bible under his arm. The rest of the week
+he thought as he pleased. Only he held his tongue and kept
+his private opinions to himself and aired his views when a
+careful inspection of the premises had first assured him that
+no secret agent was hidden underneath the sofa or was lurking
+behind the tile stove. Then however he discussed the
+events of the day with great gusto and sadly shook his head
+when his duly censored, fumigated and sterilized newspaper
+told him what new idiotic measures his masters had taken<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_380"></a>[380]</span>
+to assure the peace of the realm and bring about a return
+to the status quo of the year of grace 1600.</p>
+
+<p>What his masters were doing was exactly what similar
+masters with an imperfect knowledge of the history of human
+nature under similar circumstances have been doing ever
+since the year one. They thought that they had destroyed
+free speech when they ordered the removal of the cracker-barrels
+from which the speeches that had so severely criticized
+their government had been made. And whenever they
+could, they sent the offending orators to jail with such stiff
+sentences (forty, fifty, a hundred years) that the poor devils
+gained great renown as martyrs, whereas in most instances
+they were scatter-brained idiots who had read a few books
+and pamphlets which they had failed to understand.</p>
+
+<p>Warned by this example, the others kept away from the
+public parks and did their grumbling in obscure wine shops
+or in the public lodging houses of overcrowded cities where
+they were certain of a discreet audience and where their influence
+was infinitely more harmful than it would have been
+on a public platform.</p>
+
+<p>There are few things more pathetic in this world than the
+man upon whom the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a
+little bit of authority and who is in eternal fear for his
+official prestige. A king may lose his throne and may laugh
+at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption
+of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king,
+whether he wears his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s
+crown. But the mayor of a third rate town, once
+he has been deprived of his gavel and his badge of office,
+is just plain Bill Smith, a ridiculous fellow who gave himself
+airs and who is now laughed at for his troubles. Therefore
+woe unto him who dares to approach such a potentate<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_381"></a>[381]</span>
+pro tem without visible manifestations of that reverence and
+worship due to so exalted a human being.</p>
+
+<p>But those who did not stop at burgomasters, but who
+openly questioned the existing order of things in learned
+tomes and handbooks of geology and anthropology and
+economics, fared infinitely worse.</p>
+
+<p>They were instantly and dishonorably deprived of their
+livelihood. Then they were exiled from the town in which
+they had taught their pernicious doctrines and with their
+wives and children were left to the charitable mercies of the
+neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>This outbreak of the reactionary spirit caused great inconvenience
+to a large number of perfectly sincere people
+who were honestly trying to go to the root of our many
+social ills. Time, however, the great laundress, has long
+since removed whatever spots the local police magistrates
+were able to detect upon the professorial garments of these
+amiable scholars. Today, King Frederick William of
+Prussia is chiefly remembered because he interfered with
+the teachings of Emanuel Kant, that dangerous radical
+who taught that the maxims of our own actions must be
+worthy of being turned into universal laws and whose doctrines,
+according to the police reports, appealed only to
+“beardless youths and idle babblers.” The Duke of Cumberland
+has gained lasting notoriety because as King of Hanover
+he exiled a certain Jacob Grimm who had signed a
+protest against “His Majesty’s unlawful abrogation of the
+country’s constitution.” And Metternich has retained a certain
+notoriety because he extended his watchful suspicion
+to the field of music and once censored the music of Schubert.</p>
+
+<p>Poor old Austria!</p>
+
+<p>Now that it is dead and gone, all the world feels kindly
+disposed towards the “gay empire” and forgets that once<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_382"></a>[382]</span>
+upon a time it had an active intellectual life of its own and
+was something more than an amusing and well-mannered
+county-fair with excellent and cheap wine, atrocious cigars
+and the most enticing of waltzes, composed and conducted
+by no one less than Johann Strauss himself.</p>
+
+<p>We may go even further and state that during the entire
+eighteenth century Austria played a very important rôle in
+the development of the idea of religious tolerance. Immediately
+after the Reformation the Protestants had found a
+fertile field for their operations in the rich province between
+the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains. But this had
+changed when Rudolf II became emperor.</p>
+
+<p>This Rudolf was a German version of Spanish Philip, a
+ruler to whom treaties made with heretics were of no consequence
+whatsoever. But although educated by the Jesuits,
+he was incurably lazy and this saved his empire from too
+drastic a change of policy.</p>
+
+<p>That came when Ferdinand II was chosen emperor. This
+monarch’s chief qualification for office was the fact that he
+alone among all the Habsburgs was possessed of a few sons.
+Early during his reign he had visited the famous House of
+the Annunciation, bodily moved in the year 1291 by a number
+of angels from Nazareth to Dalmatia and hence to central
+Italy, and there in an outburst of religious fervor he had
+sworn a dire oath to make his country one-hundred-percent
+Catholic.</p>
+
+<p>He had been as good as his word. In the year 1629 Catholicism
+once more was proclaimed the official and exclusive
+faith of Austria and Styria and Bohemia and Silesia.</p>
+
+<p>Hungary having been meanwhile married into that strange
+family, which acquired vast quantities of European real
+estate with every new wife, an effort was made to drive the
+Protestants from their Magyar strongholds. But backed up<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_383"></a>[383]</span>
+by the Transylvanians, who were Unitarians, and by the
+Turks, who were heathen, the Hungarians were able to maintain
+their independence until the second half of the eighteenth
+century. And by that time a great change had taken
+place in Austria itself.</p>
+
+<p>The Habsburgs were loyal sons of the Church, but at last
+even their sluggish brains grew tired of the constant interference
+with their affairs on the part of the Popes and they
+were willing for once to risk a policy contrary to the wishes
+of Rome.</p>
+
+<p>In an earlier part of this book I have already told how
+many medieval Catholics believed that the organization of
+the Church was all wrong. In the days of the martyrs,
+these critics argued, the Church was a true democracy ruled
+by elders and bishops who were appointed by common consent
+of all the parishioners. They were willing to concede
+that the Bishop of Rome, because he claimed to be the direct
+successor of the Apostle Peter, had been entitled to a favorite
+position in the councils of the Church, but they insisted that
+this power had been purely honorary and that the popes
+therefore should never have considered themselves superior
+to the other bishops and should not have tried to extend
+their influence beyond the confines of their own territory.</p>
+
+<p>The popes from their side had fought this idea with all
+the bulls, anathemas and excommunications at their disposal
+and several brave reformers had lost their lives as a result
+of their bold agitation for greater clerical decentralization.</p>
+
+<p>The question had never been definitely settled, and then
+during the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea was
+revived by the vicar-general of the rich and powerful archbishop
+of Trier. His name was Johann von Hontheim, but
+he is better known by his Latin pseudonym of Febronius.
+Hontheim had enjoyed the advantages of a very liberal<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_384"></a>[384]</span>
+education. After a few years spent at the University of
+Louvain he had temporarily forsaken his own people and
+had gone to the University of Leiden. He got there at a
+time when that old citadel of undiluted Calvinism was beginning
+to be suspected of liberal tendencies. This suspicion
+had ripened into open conviction when Professor Gerard
+Noodt, a member of the legal faculty, had been allowed to
+enter the field of theology and had been permitted to publish
+a speech in which he had extolled the ideal of religious
+tolerance.</p>
+
+<p>His line of reasoning had been ingenious, to say the least.</p>
+
+<p>“God is allpowerful,” so he had said. “God is able to
+lay down certain laws of science which hold good for all
+people at all times and under all conditions. It follows that
+it would have been very easy for him, had he desired to do
+so, to guide the minds of men in such a fashion that they
+all of them should have had the same opinions upon the subject
+of religion. We know that He did not do anything
+of the sort. Therefore, we act against the express will of
+God if we try to coerce others by force to believe that which
+we ourselves hold to be true.”</p>
+
+<p>Whether Hontheim was directly influenced by Noodt or
+not, it is hard to say. But something of that same spirit
+of Erasmian rationalism can be found in those works of
+Hontheim in which he afterwards developed his own ideas
+upon the subject of episcopal authority and papal decentralization.</p>
+
+<p>That his books were immediately condemned by Rome (in
+February of the year 1764) is of course no more than was
+to be expected. But it happened to suit the interests of
+Maria Theresa to support Hontheim and Febronianism or
+Episcopalianism, as the movement which he had started was
+called, continued to flourish in Austria and finally took practical<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_385"></a>[385]</span>
+shape in a Patent of Tolerance which Joseph II, the
+son of Maria Theresa, bestowed upon his subjects on the
+thirteenth of October of the year 1781.</p>
+
+<p>Joseph, who was a weak imitation of his mother’s great
+enemy, Frederick of Prussia, had a wonderful gift for doing
+the right thing at the wrong moment. During the last two
+hundred years the little children of Austria had been sent
+to bed with the threat that the Protestants would get them
+if they did not go to sleep at once. To insist that those
+same infants henceforth regard their Protestant neighbors
+(who, as they all knew, had horns and a long black tail),
+as their dearly beloved brothers and sisters was to ask the
+impossible. All the same, poor, honest, hard working, blundering
+Joseph, forever surrounded by a horde of uncles and
+aunts and cousins who enjoyed fat incomes as bishops and
+cardinals and deaconesses, deserves great credit for this sudden
+outburst of courage. He was the first among the Catholic
+rulers who dared to advocate tolerance as a desirable
+and practical possibility of statecraft.</p>
+
+<p>And what he did three months later was even more startling.
+On the second of February of the year of grace 1782
+he issued his famous decree concerning the Jews and extended
+the liberty then only enjoyed by Protestants and Catholics
+to a category of people who thus far had considered themselves
+fortunate when they were allowed to breathe the same
+air as their Christian neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>Right here we ought to stop and let the reader believe
+that the good work continued indefinitely and that Austria
+now became a Paradise for those who wished to follow the
+dictates of their own conscience.</p>
+
+<p>I wish it were true. Joseph and a few of his ministers
+might rise to a sudden height of common sense, but the
+Austrian peasant, taught since time immemorial to regard<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_386"></a>[386]</span>
+the Jew as his natural enemy and the Protestant as a rebel
+and a renegade, could not possibly overcome that old and
+deep-rooted prejudice which told him to regard such people
+as his natural enemies.</p>
+
+<p>A century and a half after the promulgation of these
+excellent Edicts of Tolerance, the position of those who did
+not belong to the Catholic Church was quite as unfavorable
+as it had been in the sixteenth century. Theoretically a
+Jew and a Protestant could hope to become prime ministers
+or to be appointed commander-in-chief of the army. And
+in practice it was impossible for them to be invited to dinner
+by the imperial boot-black.</p>
+
+<p>So much for paper decrees.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_387"></a>[387]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXIX">CHAPTER XXIX<br>
+<span class="smaller">TOM PAINE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect
+that God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to
+perform.</p>
+
+<p>The truth of this statement is most apparent to those
+who have studied the history of the Atlantic seaboard.</p>
+
+<p>During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern
+part of the American continent was settled by people
+who had gone so far in their devotion to the ideals of the
+Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor might have taken
+them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of the
+words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very
+wide and very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these
+pioneers had set up a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated
+in the witch-hunting orgies of the Mather family.</p>
+
+<p>Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two
+reverend gentlemen could in any way be held responsible
+for the very tolerant tendencies which we find expounded
+with such able vigor in the Constitution of the United
+States and in the many documents that were written immediately
+before the outbreak of hostilities between England
+and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case,
+for the period of repression of the seventeenth century was
+so terrible that it was bound to create a furious reaction
+in favor of a more liberal point of view.</p>
+
+<p>This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent
+for the collected works of Socinius and ceased to frighten
+little children with stories about Sodom and Gomorrah. But<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_388"></a>[388]</span>
+their leaders were almost without exception representatives
+of the new school of thought and with great ability and
+tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into
+the parchment platform upon which the edifice of their
+new and independent nation was to be erected.</p>
+
+<p>They might not have been quite so successful if they had
+been obliged to deal with one united country. But colonization
+in the northern part of America had always been a complicated
+business. The Swedish Lutherans had explored
+part of the territory. The French had sent over some
+of their Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied
+a large share of the land. While almost every sort and
+variety of English sect had at one time or another tried
+to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness between
+the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>This had made for a variety of religious expression and
+so well had the different denominations been balanced that in
+several of the colonies a crude and rudimentary form of
+mutual forbearance had been forced upon a people who
+under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at
+each other’s throats.</p>
+
+<p>This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend
+gentlemen who prospered where others quarreled. For
+years after the advent of the new spirit of charity they had
+continued their struggle for the maintenance of the old ideal
+of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had successfully
+estranged many of the younger men from a creed
+which seemed to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and
+kindliness from some of its more ferocious Indian neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt
+of battle in the long struggle for freedom belonged to this
+small but courageous group of dissenters.</p>
+
+<p>Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_389"></a>[389]</span>
+of eighty tons can carry enough new notions to upset an
+entire continent. The American colonists of the eighteenth
+century were obliged to do without sculpture and grand
+pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more intelligent
+among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand
+that there was something astir in the big world,
+of which they had never heard anything in their Sunday
+sermons. The booksellers then became their prophets. And
+although they did not officially break away from the established
+church and changed little in their outer mode of life,
+they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they
+were faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania,
+who had refused to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the
+ground that the good Lord had expressly reserved for himself
+the right to three things: “To be able to create something
+out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate
+man’s conscience.”</p>
+
+<p>And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political
+and social program for the future conduct of their
+country, these brave patriots incorporated their ideas into
+the documents in which they placed their ideals before the
+high court of public opinion.</p>
+
+<p>It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of
+Virginia had they known that some of the oratory to which
+they listened with such profound respect was directly inspired
+by their arch-enemies, the Libertines. But Thomas
+Jefferson, their most successful politician, was himself a man
+of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that religion
+could only be regulated by reason and conviction and
+not by force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal
+right to the free exercise of their religion according to the
+dictates of their conscience, he merely repeated what had<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_390"></a>[390]</span>
+been thought and written before by Voltaire and Bayle and
+Spinoza and Erasmus.</p>
+
+<p>And later when the following heresies were heard: “that
+no declaration of faith should be required as a condition of
+obtaining any public office in the United States,” or “that
+Congress should make no law which referred to the establishment
+of religion or which prohibited the free exercise
+thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.</p>
+
+<p>In this way the United States came to be the first country
+where religion was definitely separated from politics; the first
+country where no candidate for office was forced to show his
+Sunday School certificate before he could accept the nomination;
+the first country in which people could, as far as the law
+was concerned, worship or fail to worship as they pleased.</p>
+
+<p>But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter)
+the average man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable
+to follow them as soon as they deviated the least little bit
+from the beaten track. Not only did many of the states
+continue to impose certain restrictions upon those of their
+subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but
+the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or
+Bostonians or Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant
+of those who did not share their own views as if they
+had never read a single line of their own Constitution. All
+of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the case of
+Thomas Paine.</p>
+
+<p>Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of
+the Americans.</p>
+
+<p>He was the publicity man of the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor;
+by instinct and training, a rebel. He was forty years old
+before he visited the colonies. While on a visit to London
+he had met Benjamin Franklin and had received the excellent<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_391"></a>[391]</span>
+advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided
+with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had
+sailed for Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the
+son-in-law of Franklin, to found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania
+Gazette.”</p>
+
+<p>Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon
+found himself in the midst of those events that were trying
+men’s souls. And being possessed of a singularly well-ordered
+mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted collection
+of American grievances and had incorporated them into
+a pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application
+of “common sense” should convince the people that the
+American cause was a just cause and deserved the hearty
+coöperation of all loyal patriots.</p>
+
+<p>This little book at once found its way to England and to
+the continent where it informed many people for the first
+time in their lives that there was such a thing as “an
+American nation” and that it had an excellent right, yea, it
+was its sacred duty to make war upon the mother country.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the Revolution was over, Paine went back to
+Europe to show the English people the supposed absurdities
+of the government under which they lived. It was a time
+when terrible things were happening along the banks of
+the Seine and when respectable Britishers were beginning
+to look across the Channel with very serious misgivings.</p>
+
+<p>A certain Edmund Burke had just published his panic-stricken
+“Reflections on the French Revolution.” Paine
+answered with a furious counter-blast of his own called “The
+Rights of Man” and as a result the English government
+ordered him to be tried for high treason.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile his French admirers had elected him to the
+Convention and Paine, who did not know a word of French<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_392"></a>[392]</span>
+but was an optimist, accepted the honor and went to Paris.
+There he lived until he fell under the suspicion of Robespierre.
+Knowing that at any moment he might be arrested
+and decapitated, he hastily finished a book that was to contain
+his philosophy of life. It was called “The Age of
+Reason.” The first part was published just before he was
+taken to prison. The second part was written during the
+ten months he spent in jail.</p>
+
+<p>Paine believed that true religion, what he called “the religion
+of humanity,” had two enemies, atheism on the one hand
+and fanaticism on the other. But when he gave expression
+to this thought he was attacked by every one and when he
+returned to America in 1802 he was treated with such profound
+and relentless hatred that his reputation as a “dirty
+little atheist” has survived him by more than a century.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that nothing happened to him. He was not
+hanged or burned or broken on the wheel. He was merely
+shunned by all his neighbors, little boys were encouraged to
+stick their tongues out at him when he ventured to leave
+his home, and at the time of his death he was an embittered
+and forgotten man who found relief for his anger in writing
+foolish political tracts against the other heroes of the
+Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>This seems a most unfortunate sequel to a splendid beginning.</p>
+
+<p>But it is typical of something that has repeatedly happened
+during the history of the last two thousand years.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private
+intolerance begins.</p>
+
+<p>And lynchings start when official executions have come
+to an end.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_393"></a>[393]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_XXX">CHAPTER XXX<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Twelve years ago it would have been quite easy to
+write this book. The word “Intolerance,” in the
+minds of most people, was then almost exclusively
+identified with the idea of “religious intolerance” and when
+an historian wrote that “so and so had been a champion of
+tolerance” it was generally accepted that so and so had
+spent his life fighting the abuses of the Church and the
+tyranny of a professional priesthood.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the war.</p>
+
+<p>And much was changed in this world.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of one system of intolerance, we got a dozen.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of one form of cruelty, practiced by man upon his
+fellow-men, we got a hundred.</p>
+
+<p>And a society which was just beginning to rid itself of
+the horrors of religious bigotry was obliged to put up with
+the infinitely more painful manifestations of a paltry form
+of racial intolerance and social intolerance and a score of
+petty forms of intolerance, the existence of which had not
+even been suspected a decade ago.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>This seems very terrible to many good people who until
+recently lived in the happy delusion that progress was
+a sort of automatic time-piece which needed no other winding
+than their occasional approbation.</p>
+
+<p>They sadly shake their heads, whisper “Vanity, vanity,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_394"></a>[394]</span>
+all is vanity!” and mutter disagreeable things about the cussedness
+of the human race which goes everlastingly to school,
+yet always refuses to learn.</p>
+
+<p>Until, in sheer despair, they join the rapidly increasing
+ranks of our spiritual defeatists, attach themselves to this
+or that or the other religious institution (that they may
+transfer their own burden to the back of some one else), and
+in the most doleful tones acknowledge themselves beaten and
+retire from all further participation in the affairs of their
+community.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t like such people.</p>
+
+<p>They are not merely cowards.</p>
+
+<p>They are traitors to the future of the human race.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>So far so good, but what is the solution, if a solution
+there be?</p>
+
+<p>Let us be honest with ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>There is not any.</p>
+
+<p>At least not in the eyes of a world which asks for quick
+results and expects to settle all difficulties of this earth comfortably
+and speedily with the help of a mathematical or
+medical formula or by an act of Congress. But those of
+us who have accustomed ourselves to consider history in the
+light of eternity and who know that civilization does not
+begin and end with the twentieth century, feel a little more
+hopeful.</p>
+
+<p>That vicious circle of despair of which we hear so much
+nowadays (“man has always been that way,” “man always
+will be that way,” “the world never changes,” “things are
+just about the same as they were four thousand years ago,”)
+does not exist.</p>
+
+<p>It is an optical illusion.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_395"></a>[395]</span></p>
+
+<p>The line of progress is often interrupted but if we set
+aside all sentimental prejudices and render a sober judgment
+upon the record of the last twenty thousand years
+(the only period about which we possess more or less concrete
+information) we notice an indubitable if slow rise
+from a condition of almost unspeakable brutality and crudeness
+to a state which holds the promise of something infinitely
+nobler and better than what has ever gone before
+and even the ghastly blunder of the Great War can not
+shake the firm conviction that this is true.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>The human race is possessed of almost incredible vitality.</p>
+
+<p>It has survived theology.</p>
+
+<p>It due time it will survive industrialism.</p>
+
+<p>It has lived through cholera and plague, high heels and
+blue laws.</p>
+
+<p>It will also learn how to overcome the many spiritual ills
+which beset the present generation.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>History, chary of revealing her secrets, has thus far
+taught us one great lesson.</p>
+
+<p>What the hand of man has done, the hand of man can
+also undo.</p>
+
+<p>It is a question of courage, and next to courage, of education.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>That of course sounds like a platitude. For the last
+hundred years we have had “education” driven into our ears
+until we are sick and tired of the word and look longingly
+back to a time when people could neither read nor write<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_396"></a>[396]</span>
+but used their surplus intellectual energy for occasional moments
+of independent thinking.</p>
+
+<p>But when I here speak of “education” I do not mean
+the mere accumulation of facts which is regarded as the
+necessary mental ballast of our modern children. Rather,
+I have in mind that true understanding of the present which
+is born out of a charitable and generous knowledge of the
+past.</p>
+
+<p>In this book I have tried to prove that intolerance is merely
+a manifestation of the protective instinct of the herd.</p>
+
+<p>A group of wolves is intolerant of the wolf that is different
+(be it through weakness or strength) from the rest of
+the pack and invariably tries to get rid of this offending
+and unwelcome companion.</p>
+
+<p>A tribe of cannibals is intolerant of the individual who by
+his idiosyncrasies threatens to provoke the wrath of the Gods
+and bring disaster upon the whole village and brutally relegates
+him or her to the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>The Greek commonwealth can ill afford to harbor within
+its sacred walls a citizen who dares to question the very
+fundaments upon which the success of the community has
+been built and in a poor outburst of intolerance condemns
+the offending philosopher to the merciful death of poison.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman state cannot possibly hope to survive if a
+small group of well-meaning zealots is allowed to play fast
+and loose with certain laws which have been held indispensable
+ever since the days of Romulus, and much against
+her own will she is driven into deeds of intolerance which
+are entirely at variance with her age-old policy of liberal
+aloofness.</p>
+
+<p>The Church, spiritual heir to the material dominions of
+the ancient Empire, depends for her continued existence
+upon the absolute and unquestioning obedience of even the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_397"></a>[397]</span>
+humblest of her subjects and is driven to such extremes of
+suppression and cruelty that many people prefer the ruthlessness
+of the Turk to the charity of the Christian.</p>
+
+<p>The great insurgents against ecclesiastical tyranny, beset
+by a thousand difficulties, can only maintain their rule if
+they show themselves intolerant to all spiritual innovations
+and scientific experiments and in the name of “Reform”
+they commit (or rather try to commit) the self-same mistakes
+which have just deprived their enemies of most of
+their former power and influence.</p>
+
+<p>And so it goes throughout the ages until life, which might
+be a glorious adventure, is turned into a horrible experience
+and all this happens because human existence so far has
+been entirely dominated by fear.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>For fear, I repeat it, is at the bottom of all intolerance.</p>
+
+<p>No matter what form or shape a persecution may take, it
+is caused by fear and its very vehemence is indicative of the
+degree of anguish experienced by those who erect the gallows
+or throw fresh logs upon the funeral pyre.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Once we recognize this fact, the solution of the difficulty
+immediately presents itself.</p>
+
+<p>Man, when not under the influence of fear, is strongly
+inclined to be righteous and just.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far he has had very few opportunities to practice
+these two virtues.</p>
+
+<p>But I cannot for the life of me see that this matters
+overmuch. It is part of the necessary development of the
+human race. And that race is young, hopelessly, almost
+ridiculously young. To ask that a certain form of mammal,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_398"></a>[398]</span>
+which began its independent career only a few thousand
+years ago should already have acquired those virtues which
+go only with age and experience, seems both unreasonable
+and unfair.</p>
+
+<p>And furthermore, it warps our point of view.</p>
+
+<p>It causes us to be irritated when we should be patient.</p>
+
+<p>It makes us say harsh things where we should only feel
+pity.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>In the last chapters of a book like this, there is a serious
+temptation to assume the rôle of the prophet of woe and indulge
+in a little amateur preaching.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven forbid!</p>
+
+<p>Life is short and sermons are apt to be long.</p>
+
+<p>And what cannot be said in a hundred words had better
+never be said at all.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>Our historians are guilty of one great error. They speak
+of prehistoric times, they tell us about the Golden Age of
+Greece and Rome, they talk nonsense about a supposedly
+dark period, they compose rhapsodies upon the tenfold
+glories of our modern era.</p>
+
+<p>If perchance these learned doctors perceive certain characteristics
+which do not seem to fit into the picture they
+have so prettily put together, they offer a few humble apologies
+and mumble something about certain undesirable qualities
+which are part of our unfortunate and barbaric heritage
+but which in due course of time will disappear, just as the
+stage-coach has given way before the railroad engine.</p>
+
+<p>It is all very pretty but it is not true. It may flatter
+our pride to believe ourselves heir to the ages. It will be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_399"></a>[399]</span>
+better for our spiritual health if we know ourselves for what
+we are—contemporaries of the folks that lived in caves, neolithic
+men with cigarettes and Ford cars, cliff-dwellers who
+reach their homes in an elevator.</p>
+
+<p>For then and only then shall we be able to make a first
+step toward that goal that still lies hidden beyond the
+vast mountain ranges of the future.</p>
+
+<hr class="tb">
+
+<p>To speak of Golden Ages and Modern Eras and Progress
+is sheer waste of time as long as this world is dominated by
+fear.</p>
+
+<p>To ask for tolerance, as long as intolerance must of
+need be an integral part of our law of self-preservation, is
+little short of a crime.</p>
+
+<p>The day will come when tolerance shall be the rule, when
+intolerance shall be a myth like the slaughter of innocent
+captives, the burning of widows, the blind worship of a
+printed page.</p>
+
+<p>It may take ten thousand years, it may take a hundred
+thousand.</p>
+
+<p>But it will come, and it will follow close upon the first
+true victory of which history shall have any record, the
+triumph of man over his own fear.</p>
+
+<p class="hanging"><i>Westport, Connecticut</i><br>
+<i>July, 19, 1925</i></p>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74798 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+