A Grammar of Freethought. Chapman Cohen
the history of man is religion. If it were otherwise the justification for writing the following pages, and for attempting the proof that, so far as man's history is concerned with religion, it is little better than a colossal blunder, would not be nearly so complete. Moreover, it is a generalization upon which religionists of all classes love to dwell, or even to parade as one of the strongest evidences in their favour; and it is always pleasant to be able to give your opponent all for which he asks—feeling, meanwhile, that you lose nothing in the giving. Universality of belief in religion really proves no more than the universality of telling lies. "All men are liars" is as true, or as false, as "All men are religious." For some men are not liars, and some men are not religious. All the generalization means is that some of both are found in every age and in every country, and that is true whether we are dealing with the liar or with the religious person.
What is ignored is the consideration that while at one stage of culture religious belief is the widest and most embracing of all beliefs it subsequently weakens, not quite in direct proportion to the advance of culture, but yet in such a way that one can say there is an actual relation between a preponderance of the one and a weakening of the other. In very primitive communities gods are born and flourish with all the rank exuberance of a tropical vegetation. In less primitive times their number diminishes, and their sphere of influence becomes more and more sharply defined. The gods are still credited with the ability to do certain things, but there are other things which do somehow get done without them. How that discovery and that division are made need not detain us for the moment, but the fact is patent. Advancing civilization sees the process continued and quickened, nay, that is civilization; for until nature is rid of her "haughty lords" and man realizes that there are at least some natural forces that come within the control of his intelligence, civilization cannot really be said to have commenced. Continued advance sees the gods so diminished in power and so weakened in numbers that their very impotency is apt to breed for them the kind of pity that one feels for a millionaire who becomes a pauper, or for an autocratic monarch reduced to the level of a voteless citizen.
The truth is that all the gods, like their human creators, have in their birth the promise of death. The nature of their birth gives them life, but cannot promise them immortality. However much man commences by worshipping gods, he sooner or later turns his back upon them. Like the biblical deity he may look at his creation and declare it good, but he also resembles this deity in presently feeling the impulse to destroy what he has made. To the products of his mind man can no more give immortality than he can to the work of his hands. In many cases the work of his hands actually outlives that of his mind, for we have to-day the remains of structures that were built in the honour of gods whose very names are forgotten. And to bury his gods is, after all, the only real apology that man can offer for having created them.
This outgrowing of religion is no new thing in human history. Thoughtful observers have always been struck by the mortality among the gods, although their demise has usually been chronicled in terms of exultation by rival worshippers. But here and there a keener observer has brought to bear on the matter a breadth of thought which robbed the phenomenon of its local character and gave it a universal application. Thus, in one of his wonderfully modern dialogues Lucian depicts the Olympian deities discussing, much in the spirit of a modern Church Congress, the prevalence of unbelief among men. The gods are disturbed at finding that men are reaching the stage of either not believing, or not troubling about them. There is a great deal of talk, and finally one of the minor deities treats them to a little plain truth—which appears to be as rare, and as unwelcome in heaven as on earth. He says—I quote from Froude's translation:—
What other conclusion could they arrive at when they saw the confusion around them? Good men neglected, perishing in penury and slavery, and profligate wretches wealthy, honoured and powerful. Sacrilegious temple robbers undiscovered and unpunished; devotees and saints beaten and crucified. With such phenomena before them, of course men have doubted our existence. … We affect surprise that men who are not fools decline to put their faith in us. We ought rather to be pleased that there is a man left to say his prayers. We are among ourselves with no strangers present. Tell us, then, Zeus, have you ever really taken pains to distinguish between good men and bad? Theseus, not you, destroyed the robbers in Attica. As far as Providence was concerned, Sciron and Pity-O-Campus might have murdered and plundered to the end of time. If Eurystheus had not looked into matters, and sent Hercules upon his labours little would you have troubled yourself with the Hydras and Centaurs. Let us be candid. All that we have really cared for has been a steady altar service. Everything else has been left to chance. And now men are opening their eyes. They perceive that whether they pray or don't pray, go to church or don't go to church, makes no difference to them. And we are receiving our deserts.
The case could hardly be put more effectively. It is the appeal to experience with a vengeance, a form of argument of which religionists in general are very fond. Of course, the argument does not touch the question of the mere existence of a god, but it does set forth the revolt of awakened common sense against the worship of a "moral governor of the universe." We can say of our day, as Lucian said of his, that men are opening their eyes, and as a consequence the gods are receiving their deserts.
Generally speaking, it is not difficult to see the various steps by which man outgrew the conception of the government of the world by intelligent forces. From what we know of primitive thought we may say that at first the gods dominated all. From the fall of a rain-drop to the movement of a planet all was the work of gods. Merely to question their power was the wildest of errors and the gravest of crimes. Bit by bit this vast territory was reclaimed—a task at the side of which the conquest of the fever-stricken tropics or the frozen north is mere child's play. It is quite needless to enter into an elaborate speculation as to the exact steps by which this process of deanthropomorphization—to use a word of the late John Fiske's—was accomplished, but one can picture the main line by what we see taking place at later stages of development. And there is no exception to the rule that so soon as any group of phenomena is brought within the conception of law the notion of deity in connection with those phenomena tends to die out. And the sum of the process is seen in the work of the great law givers of science, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, Lyell, Dalton, Darwin, etc., who between them have presented us with a universe in which the conception of deity simply has no place. Apologies apart, the idea of deity is foreign to the spirit and method of modern science.
In the region of the purely physical sciences this process may be regarded as complete. In morals and sociology, purely on account of the greater complexity of the subjects, mystical and semi-supernatural conceptions still linger, but it is only a question of time for these branches of knowledge to follow the same course as the physical sciences. In morals we are able to trace, more or less completely, the development of the moral sense from its first beginnings in the animal world to its highest developments in man. What is called the "mystery of morality" simply has no existence to anyone who is not a mystery-monger by profession or inclination. And here, too, the gods have been receiving their deserts. For it is now clear that instead of being a help to morals there has been no greater obstacle to a healthy morality than the play of religious ideas. In the name of God vices have been declared virtues and virtues branded as vices. Belief in God has been an unending source of moral perversion, and it lies upon the face of historical development that an intelligent morality, one that is capable of adapting itself to the changing circumstances of human nature, has only become possible with the breaking down of religious authority.
Exactly the same phenomenon faces us in connection with social life. We have to go back but a little way in human history to come to a time when the existence of a State without a religion would have seemed to people impossible. Much as Christians have quarrelled about other things, they have been in agreement on this point. The historic fight between the established Church and the Nonconformists has never really been for the disestablishment of all religion, and the confining of the State to the discharge of purely secular functions, but mainly as to which religion the State shall uphold. To-day, the central issue is whether the State shall teach any religion, whether that does not lie right outside its legitimate functions. And this marks an enormous advance. It is a plain recognition of the truth that the gods have nothing to contribute of any value to the development of our social life. It marks the beginning of the end, and registers the truth that man must be his own