THE SWORD AND THE CROSS.
A CORRESPONDENT asks "whether the great nations owe
most to the sword or the cross." That were much like
asking whether the usefulness of a watch be due most to
the case or the works. Religion has ever been the heart
of the body social, the dynamics of civilization. A great
nation of Atheists is a practical impossibility, because the
basic principle of such a society must needs be selfishness,
and from such a foundation no mighty superstructure can
ever rise. "Ye cannot gather grapes of thorns nor figs
of thistles." War is but an incident in the history of a nation,
while religion is its very life. In the latter it moves
and breathes and has its being. From the standpoint of a
statesman it makes little difference what the religion of a
people may be so long as most of them believe it. History
abundantly demonstrates that when a nation begins to
doubt its gods, it begins to lose its glory. Without
religion the contract social is simply a rope of sand. "No
union of church and state" is simply a protest against the
union of body and soul. The greatest rulers of ancient and
modern times regarded religion as the palladium of
national power. True it is that religion has time and again
strengthened the hands of the tyrant and stoned the
prophets of progress; but every good gift bequeathed to
man has been at times abused. The sword has been wielded
by the assassin; it has been employed to enslave and
despoil the people; yet we dare not break the blade. Men of
narrow minds, seeing many warring cults, imagine them
to be disturbing factors in the human brotherhood—that
if they could be eliminated, the body politic would have
peace. They cannot understand that the discords of the
finite make the harmony of the infinite. They fail to see
that these warring creeds are but the necessary differentiations
of a common faith. Lay the winds, still the tides,
and old ocean, that perennial fount of health, becomes a
stagnant pool of putrefaction—a malodorous "mother of
dead dogs." Force presupposes friction. Let the
sectaries fight, each doing valiant battle for his own dogma,
for when they all agree religion will be dead and progress
at an end. It is not necessary that you and I should stand
close enough to be stifled with the dust of conflict, to taste
all the bitterness of sectarian controversy—we may mount
above it all and watch it beat like the convolutions of a
mighty brain. We may take refuge in the philosophy of
religion and say that all are right in conception and wrong
in expression; we may call it blind superstition if we will;
but if we mount high enough to obtain a clear vision we
must confess that religion has ever been the dominant
factor in the forging of mighty peoples. Were I required
to give a reason for this fact I would say it is because man
is not altogether a machine—because he is not content to
eat and sleep and propagate his kind like the lower
animals. Despite his thick veneer of selfishness, man is at
heart a creature of sentiment, and religion is the poetry
of the common people. Crude it may be, but its tendency
is toward the stars, while all else in man is animalistic
and of the earth. Strike the religion, the poetry, out of
a people, and you reduce them to the level of educated
animals. Annul the power that draws them upward and
they must sink back to primordial savagery. The individual
may accept logic as a substitute for sentiment, but
a nation cannot do so. The masses are not swayed through
the head, but through the heart. Sentiment is the divine
perfume of the soul. Of sentiment was born the dream of
immortality. It is the efficient cause of every sacrifice
which man makes for his fellow man. It is the parent duty,
and duty pre-supposes the Divine. Could the materialists
inaugurate their belauded age of reason, sentiment would
perish utterly in that pitiless atmosphere, and the world be
reduced to a basis of brute selfishness. The word duty
would disappear, for why should man die for man in a
world whose one sole god was the dollar. Why should a
Damien sacrifice himself if selfish ease be the only divinity?
If there be no Fatherhood of God there can be no Brotherhood
of Man—we are but accidents, spawn of the sun and
slime, each an Ishmel considering only himself. Atheism
means universal anarchy. It means a kingdom without a
king, laws without a legislator, a machine without a
master. An Atheist is a public enemy. He would not only
destroy the state but wreck society. He would render life
not worth the living. He would rob us of our garden roses
and fill our hands with artificial flowers. And why?
Because, forsooth, he finds that some articles of religious
faith are impossible fables. He sits down with a microscope
to examine the tables of the law for tracks of the
finger of him whose sentences are astral fire. He finds a
foolish contradiction in some so-called sacred book and
imagines that he has proven either that man's a fool or
God's a fraud. "By geometric scale he takes the measure
of pots of ale." He calls himself a "liberal," while fanatically
intolerant of the honest opinions of others. He is
forever mistaking shadow for substance, the accidental for
the essential. He "disproves" religion without in the
least comprehending it. He hammers away at the Immaculate
Conception and the miracles with a vigor that amuses
those who realize that cults and creeds are but ephemeral,
while faith in the Almighty endures forever. And of all
the Atheists and Agnostics Bob Ingersoll is the most
insupportable. He is but a mouthful of sweetened wind, a
painted echo, an oratorical hurdy-gurdy that plays the
music of others. He's as innocent of original ideas as a
Mexican fice of feathers. He gets down on the muddy pave
and wrangles with the "locus" preachers. He's a
theological shyster lawyer who takes advantage of technicalities.
He is not a philosopher—he's emphatically "a critic
fly." He examines the Christian cult inch by inch, just as
Gulliver did the cuticle of the Brobdingnagian maid who
sat him astride her nipple. He never contemplates the
tout ensemble. He learns absolutely nothing from the
cumulative wisdom of the world. He doesn't even
appreciate the fact that the dominant religions of the world
to-day are couched in the language of oriental poetry. He
wastes his nervo-muscular energy demolishing the miracles.
When he gets through with the Bible I presume that he'll
take a fall out of æsop's Fables. He doesn't understand
that the soul of man has never learned a language—that
all sacred books are but an outward evidence of an inward
grace. He doesn't know that religion, like love, cannot be
analyzed. Because the orient pearls are imbedded in ocean
slime he denies their existence. Ingersoll and the "plenary
inspiration" people are welcome to fight it out—it's none
of my funeral. You may prove Zoroaster a myth, Moses a
mountebank, Gautama a priestly grafter and Christ the
prototype of Francis Schlatter and other half-witted
frauds; but adoration of a superior power will remain a
living, pulsing thing in the hearts of the people. It is this
poetry, this sentiment, this sense of duty, which transcends
the dollar that constitutes the adhesive principle of society
and makes civilization possible.
