Part 13

"Not so the little ones. For them religion is viewed as a matter of documentary evidence, like a bill of sale. They constantly clamour for 'evidence,' 'proofs' and 'verifications.' Their theologians are solicitors and barristers, but not religious men. If I had asked Pericles for 'evidences' of the religious cult practised by his family or _gens_, the Alcmæonidæ, he would have indignantly told his slaves to put me out of the house, just as if I had asked him to give me 'evidences' of his wife's virtue.

"We held that Religion is not a matter of 'evidences,' any more than Life, Health, Sleep, or Dreams stand in need of being 'proved' by 'evidences.' We know that we live, or that we are in good health; we do not care to listen to long-winded arguments proving it.

"On my rambles in England I met many a clergyman. I remember one who occupied a high position at Canterbury, and was a very learned man. I was rather curious to learn what he thought of the religion of the Greeks. He treated me to the following remarks:

"'The Religion of the Greeks? Why, my dear sir, they had none. The Greeks were pagans, heathens. They believed in all sorts of immoral stories about immoral gods and goddesses; they were sunk in wholesale corruption and rottenness. Their vices smelt to heaven. Did ever any Greek say that he who smiteth you on your left cheek, ought to be offered your right cheek too?'

"'No,' I said, continued Socrates, 'we never said that, because we knew that nobody would ever do it. We did so many noble actions at home and in war that we never felt the urgency of exaggerating actions in words, that we never did in fact.'

"'Is that it?' he answered. 'Do you mean to say that we only say such things, because we never practise them?'

"'Precisely,' said I. '"Incapable of the deed, you try to embrace its shadow, the word," as Democritus said.'

"'Even if we never practised them, is it not sublime to say them? Is it not increasing our moral worth when we profess to be gentle and generous and superhumanly good, not exactly on the day when we make such professions, but possibly on some subsequent day?'

"'I am afraid,' said I, 'this we used to call the talk of sycophants and hypocrites.'

"'But for my Religion, sir, I should reply in very offensive terms. We are no hypocrites. We believe what we say, and all that is required is to believe. We do not trouble about the application of our beliefs, any more than the mathematician troubles about the practical application of his theorems.'

"'This is my very objection to your belief. Religion is not a theorem but an action, an active sentiment. Our religion was like our language: all active verbs, all movement and energy, all expression and sentiment, but no theorems.'

"'But just look at the superstition and downright fiction in all your mythology! Who has ever seen Apollo, Dionysus, the Graces, Aphrodite, or any other of your numberless gods? They are all mere phantasies, meant to amuse, but not to elevate. They belong to the infancy of the religious sentiment, and are only a more artistic form of Fetishism.'

"'I quite believe you,' I said, 'that you never met the Graces, nor Aphrodite. Perhaps they avoided you as carefully as you did them.'

"'Sir, this is frivolous. In our Religion there is nothing frivolous. Allow me to be quite frank with you. It is stated that you confessed to having felt the touch of some Phryne's beautiful hand on your shoulder for several days. Sir, this characterises you, and all the heathen Greeks. My mind staggers at the idea that one of our bishops should ever confess to such a frivolous sentiment. We too have shoulders; and there are still alas! Phrynes amongst us. But none of our class would ever confess to having felt what you admitted to have felt. There you have precisely the difference between you and us.'

"'You are ashamed of your humanity, and we were not; this is the whole difference. We were so full of our humanity, that we humanised even our gods. You are so ashamed of your humanity, that you de-humanise and supra-humanise your god.'

"'Disgraceful, sir, most disgraceful. Our humanity is _in_ God!'

"'And only in Him; so that none is left in you.'

"At these words," continued Socrates, "the man left me.

"A few days later I was at a place which they call Oxford, and where dwell and teach many of their Sophists. A young man is there taught to assume that callous look which is very imposing to Hindoos and negroes. Nothing surprises him, as nothing stirs him, except the latest shape of a cuff or a collar. He becomes in due time a curious blend of a monk, a fop, and a pedant.

"I was led to one of the most renowned of their theologians, whose name in our language means a coachman. He received me with a curious smile. Before I could say anything he spoke as follows:

"'I understand, sir, that you pose as the late Socrates. Well, well--come, come! I must tell you in confidence that I, being a higher critic, am a perfect adept in the great science of the vanishing trick. Suppose you bring forward a famous personage of history, and want him to disappear. Nothing is easier to me. I ask the man first of all very simple questions, such as:

"'Who asked him to exist?

"'Why did he choose his mother in preference to many other able women?

"'What made him prefer his father to so many other capable men?

"'For what reason did he fix his particular place of birth, let alone the time of the year, month, week and day where and when he was born?

"'What motive had he in filling the air with his screamings soon after his birth?

"'Could he give any satisfactory explanation of his various illnesses as a child? That is, whether he had measles and whooping-cough out of malice prepense, out of cussedness, or out of any hopes of receiving more attention?

"'When the man cannot satisfactorily answer these clear and positive questions, I put him down first as a suspect. Then I proceed to further questions.

"'If he is said to have won a battle, I ask him why he fought it on land and not on sea? Or _vice versâ_.

"'Why he did not, while fighting the battle, accurately determine the degrees of longitude and latitude of the locality of the battle?

"'Or why his chief general's name began with an L and not with an S?

"'If he is said to have been an ancient legislator, I ask him why he took his laws from his neighbours?

"'What mode of registration and publication of the law he observed?

"'Whether the paper of his code was hand-made, or wood-pulp?

"'Whether the water-marks on it were original or were imitations?

"'Whether he used ink or paint?

"'Whether he wrote them standing or sitting?

"'Whether he used the same pen for writing his nouns and verbs? Or whether he had different pens for the different parts of speech?

"'Whether he really knew what a noun was? Whether he liked male terminations, or preferred to revel in female endings? Whether he was not prejudiced against pronouns, or felt an idiosyncracy against the letters b, k, and z?

"'If the man cannot satisfactorily answer all these pertinent questions, I declare him to be a fraud. I tell him straight into his face that he never existed, and then I revile him as a low character for pretending an existence that is totally unfounded. Now, as to your case. You say, you are Socrates. Can you answer any of the questions I enumerated? Let us take the first question: "Who asked you to exist?"'

"'Athens, I presume,' said Socrates.

"'Athens? To dispose of this answer, we must first of all see whether Athens existed. I put it to you, sir, can you prove that Athens existed?'

"'I can; for, it still exists.'

"'Note the glaring fallacy! A thing that now exists, now, that is, on the brink of the present and the future, can that be said to have _eo ipso_ existed in the past? I put it to you most seriously, is the brink of the present, the past? Is the brink of the future, the past? Can, then, the brink of the present _and_ the future be called the past? Athens may have existed. That is, a number of houses and streets, once called Athens, may have existed. But can you say, I put it to you most mostly, can you say that the houses of Athens asked you to exist? Or did the streets do so?'

"'By Athens we mean the Athenians.'

"'Oh, I see, the Athenians. Who were they? Two-thirds were foreign slaves; one-fifth were _metiks_, that is, denizens of foreign extraction. Consequently, two-thirds and one-fifth being thirteen-fifteenths, the overwhelming majority of the town being _uitlanders_, you cannot possibly be said to have been asked into existence by them. Remain two-fifteenths of Athenians proper. Of these the great majority were your enemies, who drove you into death. Can they, who furiously clamoured for your death, be said to have violently wished for your birth?

"'Remain, therefore, only a handful of Athenians who _may_ have desired you to exist. How could they give due expression to their wish? In the Assembly matters were decided by a majority, which they did not control. In the law courts were hundreds, nay thousands of judges in each case, of whom, as _per supra_, the great majority were your enemies, who would have decided against your birth. In the Temples such decisions were never taken.

"'The intention of your prenatal friends could thus remain but a mere private wish of a few citizens, but could not possibly be an inherent tendency or desire of Athens. _Quod erat demonstrandum._ And since you have been unable to give a satisfactory answer to the first of the crucial questions, I put you down as a suspect.'

"I did not say anything," said Socrates. "I was amazed beyond expression that such nonsense could be allowed to pose as searching and 'scientific' analysis of facts. But he triumphantly continued:

"'You say nothing? _Qui tacet consentire videtur_,--silence means consent. I can see in your face how overawed you are by my sagacity, I have unmasked you. We unmask everything and anything. We unmask stones, pyramids, crocodiles, ichneumons, princes, kings, prophets, and heroes. We strike terror into the common people by our vast erudition and our penetrating sagacity.

"'We are the Sherlock Holmes of theology.

"'We run down any pretender, any scribe, any man who has the impudence of posing as a somebody. Given that we are not much; how can he be anything?

"'If you will stay here for some time, you will soon know a lot about what did not happen in ancient Israel.

"'Oxford is the Scotland Yard of all those humbugs that pass by the name of Abraham, Moses, King David, Samson, the Prophets, and other impostors. We have pin-pricked them out of existence!

"'At present we have proved that all the Religion of Israel was stolen from Babylon. In a few years we shall prove that the Babylonians stole it all from the Elamites, farther east. This, once well established, will give us a welcome means of proving that the Elamites stole it all from the Thibetans; who stole it from the Chinese; who stole it from the Japanese; who stole it from the Redskins in America; who stole it from the Yankees; who stole it from Oxford. And so we shall return to this great University and provide occupation and fame for the higher critics of the next three hundred years. Where are you now, O Pseudo-Socrates?'

"I was unable to say a word for some time. When I collected myself to a certain extent, I said:

"'O Sophist, if our Religion in ancient Greece had had no other advantage than that of saving us from the works of "higher critics," it has deserved well of us. We were immune from that disease, at any rate. Dion of Prusa and others wrote declamations against the historicity of the Trojan War; but nobody took them for more than what they were, for rhetorical exercises. No Hellene would have paid the slightest attention, nor accorded the slightest recognition to men like yourself. The English must be suffering from very ugly religious crochets and spiritual eczemas, to have recourse to drugs and pills offered by such medicine-men.'

* * * * *

"Other friends in England to whom I expressed my profound aversion to this puny scepticism in matters of Religion, advised me to attend the sermons given by a relatively young man with white hair in a temple in the city. They said that in him and his addresses there was religious sentiment. I accepted their advice and went repeatedly to hear what was called _The New Religion_.

"The young man talked well and impressively. He told them that two and two made four, and absolutely refused to make five.

"With much emphasis he declared that he could not believe in miracles, because of the miraculous way in which they happened. If, he said, a miracle should happen in an orderly fashion, performed under police revision, say, in Regent Street in front of Peter Robinson's, the arrangement and whole sequence of the procedure being duly anticipated and announced by the _Daily Nail_ or the _Daily X-Rays_, then indeed he would say: 'O Lord, O Lord, I am convinced.'

"'But,' the white-haired young man said, 'how can you, the rest of the world, or anyone else suppose that I could believe a miracle, that pops in from mid-air, in the most disorderly and unreasonable fashion, without having given notice either to the police or to the editor of the _Daily Nail_ or the _Daily X-Rays_?

"'Such a miracle is a mere vagrant, a loafer, a _déclassé_ or _déraciné_, as we say in Burmese. It has neither documents to legitimate itself with, nor any decent social connections. It disturbs the professor of physics at that great seat of untaught knowledge, the London University; it annoys all chemists, and confirms my colleagues in the other pulpits in their preposterous superstitions.

"'My brethren and _sithren_, I tell you there are no miracles; there never were any; there never can be any. Just let me tell you an interesting experience I had the other day with a man who travelled in the south of France, a country which, but for the fact that England is good enough to patronise her, would long since have disappeared from the surface of this or any other planet.

"'The gentleman in question spoke of Lourdes, and the miracles he had seen there. I listened for a while with patience; at last I could bear it no longer, and the following dialogue arose between us:

"He: '"Lourdes is the most convincing case of the miraculous power of the true Church."

"I: '"The true Church is in the city of London, sir, and there is no miracle going on there whatever."

"He: '"I completely differ, especially if, for argument's sake, I accept your statement that the temple in the city is the true Church. If that be so, then the miracles wrought there are even greater than those observable at Lourdes."

"I: '"I thank you for your rapid conversion. I am glad to see that you feel the power of my Church. This power comes from the great truths I teach. But as to miracles proper, I must, if reluctantly, decline the honour. I repeat it, there are no miracles in my Church, neither taught nor wrought."

"He: '"Come, come! Not only are there miracles in your Church, but they are also of the very same type that I noted at Lourdes."

"I: '"Sir, how can you insult me so gratuitously? Lourdes swarms with so-called miracles, which are no miracles at all, but only the effects of auto-hypnotisation. A person who can believe in the healing power of St ----"

"He: '"Steady, steady, my dear sir. I do not allude to that healing power at all. Again, placing myself on your standpoint, I will, for argument's sake, admit that the waters at Lourdes have no miraculous healing power owing to the influence of this saint or that. You might permit me to remark, nevertheless, that it is just as much of a miracle as when the drugs prescribed by our doctors happen to cure us. For, what could be more miraculous than that? But this is only by the way. I allude to quite another miracle, and I can only express my amazement that you do not guess it more quickly."

"I: '"I am quite out of touch with miracles."

"He: '"Bravo! This is precisely what the great Lessing used to say: the greatest of all miracles is the one that people do not notice as such at all. Just consider: do you not draw vast masses of people to your sermons? Have you not persuaded most of them that you have founded a new Religion? What on earth could be more miraculous than that!

"'"In your sermons you dance on a thin rope of logic made out of the guts of a few anæmic cats dropped from the dissecting table of science. If therefore you had won a reputation as a rope-dancer, one could readily understand it. But you have won the reputation of a founder of a new religion, which is to a logical rope what catguts are to a great violinist. Is that not marvellous? Savonarola would have charged you, at best, with blacking his shoes, and yet people take you for a modern Savonarola. Is that not marvellous? Is it anything short of a miracle? Is not this the very miracle of Lourdes? Hundreds of thousands of intelligent Frenchmen believe in the healing power of water in consequence of its canonisation by a saint. Is this not a miracle in our time?"

"I: '"If I am to be infinitely less worthy a man than Savonarola because I believe in the infinity and truth of Science, I gladly forego the honour. The more light we pour into the human heart, the nobler it will be."

"He: '"So you believe that your hearers follow you on account of the light you give them? Pray, abandon any such idea forthwith. They cling to you because of your interesting personality, and because you give satisfaction to their vanity. In persuading them that the life-blood of the 'old' Religion is mere stale water, they congratulate themselves on their being intellectually superior to the orthodox believers.

"'"Is there no one who has the courage to say aloud that the canker of all Religions in England is their constant toadying to Reason and Science? The theory of Evolution, first rightly condemned by the clergy, is now an established costume without which no bishop would dare to officiate in sermons or books. Naturalists all over the world lustily attack and combat Evolution; but no English clergyman ventures to doubt it. He will and must toady to what he thinks is 'Science.'

"'"Formerly Science was the _ancilla_, or maid of Theology; now Theology is the mere charwoman of any physiologist or biologist."

"I: '"And so it shall be. I see, my good man, I must talk to you a little more plainly. We theologians want nothing but authority. We have long since learned that this world is governed by authority, and by nothing else; just as is the next world, if there be any. Now, in former times Science was not imposing enough. Being, as it was, in its infancy, it had little authority. So we trampled upon it, and side-tracked it with disdain. At present, on the other hand, Science has become quite an influential member of society. It goes on doing marvellous things and inventing incredible feats of physical, chemical, or biological triumph.

"'"What is more natural than that we now not only receive the _homo novus_, the man of Science, but that we also try to avail ourselves of the authority his exploits give him?

"'"Take this nation. It is thoroughly materialist and on its knees before Science. For the last sixty years Science, and nothing but physical Science has been knocked into its head. This nation thinks that any study outside Science proper is pleasant humbugging. They are completely ignorant of human history. Give us Science! Give us facts, facts! Of course they say so, because facts save them the trouble of thinking, and do not allow one to pose as a thinker.

"'"Facts, scientific facts, that is all that they want. Human thought, they think, is a physical excretion from the brain, just as tears are from the lachrymal glands, or other liquids from the kidneys. Hence, they infer, all that is needed is to study, in a physiological laboratory, the brain.

"'"What's the use of literary history, for instance? If you want to know it, you have only to study the brain which is the cause of at least some portions of literature.

"'"What is the use of military history? Study, in a physiological laboratory, the arm, not arms; since it is the arm that fights.

"'"What is the use of Sociology, say, the study of the Family? Study, in a physiological laboratory, the nerves of certain organs which constitute the true cause of families. And similarly with all other studies relating to the humanities. Science; it is all a matter of Science proper."

"'Under these conditions,' the white-haired one continued, 'what can we do but take the requisite authority there where we find it best developed, in Science? Anything that pleases the _grand seigneur_, we hasten to acquiesce in while shoe-licking him. Science proper, that is, Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology disavow Imponderables, Tendencies, Present Projections of the Future, Incomprehensibles, etc., etc.; so do we.

"'Science cannot move from certain mathematical principles; speedily we too cry aloud that we cannot cease hugging these dear principles.

"'Science can never analyse or reconstrue the mystery of all mysteries: Personality; at once we novel theologians exclaim, beating our worn breasts, that Personality is no historic force at all.

"'Science cannot possibly so much as approach the problem of creativeness, creation, or origin of life; hence we gallop after it like newsboys, screaming at the top of our voices: "Latest news! No creation! No origins! Bill just passed! Enormous majority! One penny! Latest news!"

"'Cannot you see that? Can you not grasp that as in Republican countries we are Republicans, and in Monarchical ones, Monarchists; even so in an age overawed by the surface-scratchers of physical Science, we too must feel the itch and scratch away with violence?

"'We cannot possibly afford to forego the authority at present in the gift of Science. How could I dare to treat Jesus as one of those mysterious persons that bring to a head both vast and secular tendencies of the Past, and Present Projections of an immense Future? He, I hear from a certain humanist, was the heir of all that marvellous Power of Personality, called Cephalism, which shaped all classical antiquity; and at the same time He was the Anticipative Projection of a vast Future.

"'Perhaps.

"'But could any process approved by Science proper be applied to such a mode of thinking? None. Consequently I am bound to belittle, to ignore it.

"'As long as Jesus is not amenable to that mode of biography or to that kind of reflections which we apply to the life of cockroaches or gnats, we cannot seriously speak of Him.

"'Or is not His preaching like the laying of eggs by a bird, out of which eggs new birds arise in due time?

"'Is not His Church like the nest of a spotted woodpecker made in the hollow of some ancient tree?

"'Are not His apostles like the watch-birds amongst wandering cranes?

"'If, then, we want to study Him scientifically, we must treat Him and His exactly as we treat a hoopoe or a jackdaw. Not that we really know anything about a hoopoe or a jackdaw. But in treating Him in that fashion we can use all the sounding terms of Science, and thus, don't you see, secure all the authority of which Science to-day has so plentiful a share.

"'I have so far founded the New Religion. But I am not quite satisfied with it. I feel we need a Newest Religion. Ever since my birth the world has stepped into a new era. Something has been wrenched from its former place. I must at once see to it.

"'Meanwhile I am preparing a Life of Jesus on a truly scientific basis. The Lives hitherto published are completely out of date. They lack the true scientific spirit.