 Chapter 44 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast, Volume 1, by William Cowper Bran. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Brian Keenan. Chapter 44, The Professional Reformer. This is, preeminently, the era of the Reformer. And there are few things great or small upon which he has not tried his Archimedean lever with more or less effect. Progress should ever be the shibboleth of man, but progress and improvement are not always synonyms. When a man becomes possessed of an idea that differs materially from the ideas of mankind in general, when he takes issue with the cumulative wisdom of a world he knows not how many ages old, simple modesty would suggest that, before irrigating to himself superior discernment, he inquire diligently whether he is really a philosopher or a fool. When a man takes issue with the world, the chances are as one to infinity that he is wrong. Since man's appearance upon the earth, a great many sages have graced it, and the present generation is heir of all the ages. Its judgment is grounded upon the net result of thousands of years of careful study and costly experiment, and it is much safer to trust to it than to newborn theories. Occasionally a man appears who can add to the general stock of wisdom, but such men are seldom conscious of the fact that they are wiser than the world they live in. seldom consider that they have a special call to embark on a radical reform crusade. They know that society is an organism, not a machine, and that it cannot be violently transformed any more than a man can be changed into a demigod, or a monkey into a mastodon. They realize that the old order changes yielding place to new, but they also realize that the change must be slow in order to be healthy. Nearly every change that the world has witnessed has been slowly, almost imperceptibly wrought. Even all governments that have stood the test of time were the work of time. The present government of England has been built up almost imperceptibly, and the Constitution of the United States is but a differentiation of Magna Carta, not a new and violent birth. It is much safer to change the old order of human thought in action by evolutionary than by revolutionary methods. It has been the custom of society for many ages to make woman the custodian of her own virtue. But in this age of reformers it has been discovered that this is a grievous mistake. According to the New School of Morals, woman is not competent to distinguish between right and wrong, and even wives of mature years are sometimes led astray by fell destroyers, whom the injured husband feels in duty bound to chase around the world, if need be, with a gatling gun. Instances where designing villains have invaded the sanctity of the home are multiplying, and while the world is not ready to forgive the airing woman, it is daily asked to anathematize her paramour and stand between her husband and the penitentiary should his marksmanship prove successful. In other words, the world is asked to regard every man that a woman may chance to meet as her guardian angel, to place her honor in his keeping instead of her own. To crucify him should he not prove as indifferent as Adonis, as chaste as Joseph. Truly this is very complementary to man, but quite the reverse to woman. It would substitute male for female virtue, and place the sanctity of the home at the mercy of strangers. Unquestionably all men should be pure, but they are not. In fact, the pure man is the exception and not the rule. Every man who takes unto himself a wife must know this. He knows that he places his honor in the keeping of the woman, not in the keeping of his fellow man. He knows that she can live as pure as Diana if she elects to do so, that if she does not so choose, she will have no difficulty in finding companions in crime. He does know, as does the world, that no man will attempt to lead her astray so long as her deportment is such as becomes a true wife, that no wolf in sheep's clothing will ever find his way into the fold without her assistance. It will not do. Every sane woman who has arrived at the age of discretion is the guardian of her own honor. To relieve her of this responsibility is to insult her intelligence. To divide the responsibility with men of the world is to place her on the same moral plane with the ruay and the courtesan, ready to err should opportunity offer. It is a trifle strange that those good people who value female purity so highly that they would reform every ruay in Christendom to secure it have little or nothing to say about the chief cause of hymenial infidelity, loveless marriages. No woman who really loves her husband can be untrue to him. Duty and inclination point the same way. But if a woman does not love her husband, she will, in nearly every instance, love someone else. She may never manifest this illicit affection by word or look. She may not admit it even to her own heart. But no matter how strongly armed she be in honesty, she stands within the pale of danger. From the questionable act of bartering, according to due forms of law and with priestly blessing, an attractive person for wealth or social position is a comparatively easy step to practices no more reprehensible, but wanting the sanction of society. Is it at all strange that an impulsive young woman, whose parents have persuaded her to marry a man she cordially detests, and who is perhaps four times her age, should conclude that moral codes are chiefly fashionable can't, and that a pretense of observing them is all that is really necessary? While the reformers are busy saving the world, it is strange that they do not devise some method of checking the decided misogynistic tendency of the young men of today. Marriages are becoming decidedly unpopular with them, and the result is that thousands of young men, who should be model husbands, are living lives of but quasi-respectability. Thousands of young women, who should be honored wives and happy mothers, are thrown upon their own resources, forced to choose between virtue and rags, and silks, and shame. The latter soon learn that honest poverty brings almost as complete social ostracism, almost as much contumaly as dishonest finery, and despairing of ever becoming true men's wives, too many of them become false men's mistresses. Here is work in abundance for the reformer. To it, O ye saviors of the world, teach the young men of the land that marriage is a thing to be desired, even though they be not millionaires, and no heiress smiles upon them. The true reformer will not wait for some grand mission, some mighty crusade, to call him to action. The world is full of wrong which needs no preternatural prescience to discover, fraud which bears its name boldly upon its very face. The true reformer will denounce fraud and falsehood wherever found, will assail the wrong no matter how strongly entrenched it be in prescriptive right. But he will make haste slowly to change the fundamental principles upon which society is founded. He will proceed cautiously, modestly, until he does know, so far as ought is given to human wisdom to know, that it is a condition and not a theory with which he is dealing. That he can point the world to new truths whose recognition and adoption will make better the condition of his species. Then, if he be a true man, he will speak, not in humble whispers lest he offend potentates and powers, not ambiguously, that he may escape the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, but in clarion tones, like another Peter the Hermit, who, bearing all, swerving neither to the right nor to the left, preached the crusade of the Holy Sepulcher, till at last his words of fire burned through dull understandings, into cold hearts, and steel-clad Europe quivered like a million globules of quicksilver, then massed beneath his ragged standard. End of Chapter 44 The Professional Reformer Recording by Brian Keenan Chapter 45 Trilby and the Trilbyites Apotheosizing the Prostitute The Trilby craze has overrun the land like the Grip Bacillus or the Seven-Year Locust. Here in America, there's become almost as disgusting as the plague of lice sent upon Egypt to eat the chilled steel veneering off the heart of Pharaoh the Fickle. Everything is Trilby. We have Trilby bonnets and bonbons, poses and plays, dresses and drinks. Trilby sermons have been preached from prominent pulpits, and the periodicals from penny-post to pretentious magazine have Trilby-ismus and have it bad. One would think that the world had just found salvation so loud and unctuous as its Hosanna that Trilby with some new caba stone or greater palladium floated down from heaven on the wings of Dumarier's transcendent genus, that after waiting and watching for six thousand or million years a perfect exemplar has been bequeathed to the world. I have read Dumarier's foolish little book as a disagreeable duty. The lot of the critic is an unenviable one. He must read everything even such insufferable rot as coin's financial school, and those literary nightmares turned loose in rejoinder, verbal rosinantes each bearing a chop-logic Don Quixote with paste-board helmet and windmill spear. I knew by the press comments I have already surmised from his popularity with upper tendom that Trilby was simply a highly spiced story of female frailty. Hence I approached it with long teeth, like a politician eating crow or a country boy absorbing his first glass of lager-bear. I had received a surfeit of the chameleon-style of literature in my youth before I learned with Ecclesiastes the preacher or even with Parkhurst that all is vanity. So far as my experience goes the only story of a fallen woman that was worth the writing and reading is that of Mary Magdalene, and it is not French. Her affairs d'amour appear to have ended with her repentance. She did not try to marry a duke, elevate the stage, or break into swell society. After closing her maison de joie, she ceased to be Bon Camerata et Bonville in the tough-to-tough quarter of the Judean metropolis. There were no more strolls on the battery by moonlight alone, love after exchanging her silken robe de champeré for an old-fashioned nightgown with never-ruffle. When she applied the soft pedal, the Bacchic revel became a silent prayer. So far as we can gather the cultured gentlemen of Judea did not fall over each other in a frantic effort to ensnare her with hymen's news. If the apostles recommended her life to the ladies of their congregation as were the emulation, this stenographer must have been nodding worse than Homer. If the elite of Jerusalem named their daughters for her and made her the subject of public discussion, that fact has been forgotten. And yet it is reasonably certain that she was beautiful, even more beautiful than Trillby, the bones of whose face were so attractive, the pink of whose Tutsi Wussies so irresistible. The Magdalene of St. Luke appears to have been, in many respects, the superior of the Magdalene of Dumarier. She does not appear to have been an ignorant and coarse-grained she-gammon who frequented the students' quarters of the sacred city, posing to strolling artists for the altogether, being in the crowded atelier like mother Eve and Eden, naked and not ashamed. We may suppose that the sensuous blood of the Orient ren riot intervenes, that she was swept into the fierce maelstrom by love and passion and would have perished there but for the infinite pity of our Lord, who cast out the seven devils that lurked within her heart like harpies in a Grecian temple, and still the storm that peaked like sulfurous waves of fire within her snowy breast. And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus set at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him, weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with ointment. How stale, flat, and unprofitable the modern stories of semi-repentant prostitutes beside that pathetic passage, which shears down into the very soul, penetrates to the profoundest depths of the sacred lake of tears. And yet this ultra-orthodox age which would suppress the iconoclast, if it could, for poking fun at Paul Parrot preachers, has not become crazed over Mary Magdalene, has not so much as named a canalboat or cocktail for her. Du Maurier says of his heroine, With her it was lightly come and lightly go, and never come back again, sheer gaiety of hard and genial good fellowship, the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading, so little did she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments and clings and jealousies, etc. A woman who had never been in love yet confessed to criminal intimacy with three men, and was not yet at the end of her string. Not even the pride of dress, the scourge of need, the fire-whips of passion to urge her on, she sinned, as the Yankees would say simply, to be a doon. Broke the seventh commandment more in a frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else. That's the way we used to kill people in Texas. Still, I opine that when a young woman gets so awfully jolly that she distributes her favors around promiscuously just to put people in good humor, she's a shaky piece of furniture to make a fad of, a doubtful example to be recommended from the pulpit to America's young daughters. The French enthusiasts once crowned a courtesan in Notre Dame as goddess of reason and worshiped her. But I was hardly prepared to see the American people enthrone another as goddess of respectability and become hysterical in their devotion. I am no he, prude. I have probably said as many kindly things of fallen womanhood as Dumoyer himself, but I dislike to see a rotten drab deified. I dislike to see a great publishing house, like that of harperin brothers, so indifferent to decency, so careless of moral consequences, that for the sake of gain it will turn loose upon this land the foul liaisons of the French capital. I dislike to see the mothers of the next generation of Americans trying to make up to resemble the counterfeit presentiment of a brazen bod. It indicates that our entire social system is sadly in need of fumigation, such as Sodom and Gomorrah received. Trilby, the child of a bummy preacher and a bastard barmaid, was born and bred in the slum of the wickedest city in the world. Little was to be expected of such birth and breeding. We are not surprised that she regards fornication as but a venial fault, like cigarette smoking, and sends capriciously, desultorily, more in frolicsome spirit of camaraderie than anything else. Girls so rare are apt to be a trifle frolicsome. We are not shocked to see her stripped, stark naked, in Carol's atelier in the presence of half a hundred hoolems in the Latin Quarter, sewing as unconcerned as a society-bell, at opera or ball, with half her back exposed, her bust ready to spill itself out of her corsades if she chance to stoop. We even feel that it is in perfect accord with the eternal fitness of things when these wild sprouts of Bohemia, with kindly solicitude, help her on with her clothes. We can even pause to admire the experienced skill with which they put each garment in its proper place and deftly button it. That she should have the rival slaying of the free and easy neighborhood at her tongue's end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected. But we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so utterly stupid as not to know when her companions are guying her. Trilby-croaking bin bolt for the edification of the trois anglicés were a sight worthy of a lune tecassalum. It was even more ridiculous than the social performance of the other half-wit little billy in Carol's atelier. Stupidity covers even more sins than charity. Hence we should not judge Du Maillet's heroine too harshly, as weak intellects yield readily to hypnotic power. Sven Galle had an easy victim. I have no word of criticism for the poor creature. I do not blame Du Maillet for drawing her as he found, or imagined her, nor can I blame popular preachers, able editors, and half-wit women for worshiping the freckled and faulty grisette as a goddess. For does not Carlisle truly tell us that what we see and cannot see over her is good as infinity? Still I cannot entertain an exalted opinion of either the intelligence or morals of a people who will place such a character on a pedestal and prostrate themselves before it. I confess my surprise at the phenomenal popularity of the book, among people familiar with Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray, who by then transcended the fiction. I had hoped when Ben Hur made its great hit that the golden age of flash fiction was passed that it could henceforward count among its patrons only stable boys and scolions. But the same nation that received Ben Hur with tears of thankfulness, thankfulness for a priceless jewel of spotless purity, a blaze with the immortal fire of genius, has gone mad with joy over a dirty tale of pottery that might have been better told by a cheap reporter bordering on the gem-jams. Has the American nation subtly declined into intellectual dotage, reached the bald head and dizzy sobrette finale in the mighty drama of life? I can account for the success of Du Marier's book only on the hypothesis that light takes to light, that the world is full of frail trilbees and half-baked dovers like a little Billy who nor sisters like worship their own image. They don't mind the contradictions and absurdities with which the book abounds. In fact, those who read up-to-date French novels are seldom gifted with sufficient continuity of thought to detect contradictions if they appear two pages apart. The bulk is ultra-bizarre, a thin intellectual soup served in grotesque, even impossible dishes and highly-flavored with vulgar animalism, just the mental pablum craved by those whose culture is artificial, mentality weak, and morals mere matter of form. The plot was evidently loaded to scatter. It is about as probable as Jack in the Beanstalk and has worked out with the scale of a country editor trying to cover a national convention. The story affords about as much food for thought as one of Talmadge's plate-matter sermons. It is fully as fillin' as drinkin' the froth out of a pop bottle and equally as exhilarating. Like other psalts, the more the literary Bacchanel drinks, the more he thirsts, appetite increased by what it feeds upon. We can forgive Byron and Boccaccio, the lax morals of their productions because of their literary excellence, just as we wink at the little social lapses of Sarah Bernhardt because of her unapproachable genius. But Dumaurier's book is wolly bad. It could only have been made worse by being made bigger. It is a moral crime, a literary abortion. The style is faulty and the narrative marred if a bad egg can be spoiled by slang logged in from the slums of two continents with evident labor. Employed naturally, slang may serve in a pinch for attic salt, but slang for its own sake is smut on the nose instead of a beauty spot on the cheek of Venus, sure evidence of a paucity of ideas. A trite proverb, a non-translatable phrase from a foreign tongue, may be permissible, but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscriminately is but a pedantic prig. It were bad enough if Dumaurier mixed good English with better French, but he employs in his bilingual book the very worst of both, obsolete American provincialisms and the patois of the quarter-Latin side-by-side. To the cultured American who knows only the English of dwindly Murray and scholastic French, the book is about as intelligible as Greek Tukasca or the dog-Latin of the American schoolboy to Julius Caesar. His characters resemble the distorted freaks of nature in a dime museum. They may all be possible, but not one of them is probable. Taffy and Gekko are the best of the lot. The first is a big, good-natured Englishman who wants to see his sweetheart married to his friend, weds another, and supports her quite handsomely by painting pictures he cannot sell. The latter a pole with an Italian's temperament yet who sees the woman he loves in the power of a demon by whom she is presumably debauched and makes no effort to rescue her. It's not even jealous. Savingale is the greatest musician in the world yet cannot make a living in Paris the modern home of art. He is altogether an irretrievably bad despite the harmony in which his soul is steeped. Think of a hawk out-warbling a nightingale of a demon flooding the world with melody most divine. We may now expect Mephistopheles to warble near my god to thee between the acts. Trilpe can sing no more than a burrow. Like the useful animal she has plenty of voice and like him she can knock the horns off the moon with it or send it on a hot chase after the receding ghost of Hamlet's sire but she is tone deaf. Can't tell Ophelia's plate from the performance of Thomas's orchestra. Sven Galle hypnotizes her and beneath his magic spell she becomes the greatest contritease in Europe. Hypnotism is a power but little understood. So we must permit Dumarier to make such jewels verne excursions into that unknown realm as may please him. Had Sven Galle made a contortionist of the stiff old Devonshire vicar we could not cry impossible. The Laird of Cockburn is a good-natured fellow to whom Trilpe tells her troubles instead of pouring them into the capacious ear of a policeman. He is a kind of bewiskered sir Gallehead who goes in quest of Trilpe instead of the holy grail and having found her sits down on her bed and cheers her up while she kisses and caresses him. As she is in love with his friend the performance is eminently proper, quite platonic. The Laird advises Trilpe to give up sitting for the altogether yet Dumarier assures us that nothing is so chaste as nudity that Venus herself, as she drops her garments and steps onto the model-throne, leaves behind her on the floor every weapon by which she can pierce to the grosser passions of men. He informs us that a naked woman is such a fright that Dunwan himself were feigned to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes. How thankful Cupid must be that he was born blind! Still, the most of us are willing to risk one eye on the average altogether model. Dumarier, who is somewhat better artist than author, illustrates his own book. He gives us several portraits of Trilpe all open-mouth with a vacant stare. Strange that he did not draw his heroine nude, as she said on the bed, hucking and kissing the Laird. That he did not hang up on the floor every weapon by which Venus herself can pierce to the grosser passions of men. But perchance he was afraid the Laird would hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes. He could not be spared just yet. Despite his plea for the nude, I think he exercised excellent judgment in leaving Trilpe clothed and in her right mind, such as it was, while the Laird roosted on her couch in that attic bedroom and was, to us, a tenisonianism, mouthed and mumbled. Even New York's 400 might have felt a little squimmy at seeing this pair of platonic turtle-nose hit away in an obscure corner of Naughty Paris in purest naturalibus, even if there is nothing so chaste as nudity. Dumarier says that Trilpe never sat to him for the altogether and adds, I would soon have asked the Queen of Spain to let me paint her legs. If nudity be so chaste and Trilpe didn't mind the exposure even a little bit, why should he hesitate? And why should he not paint the legs of the Queen of Spain or even the underpinnings of the Queen of Hawaii as well as her arms? But if we pause to point out all the absurd contradictions in this flake of ultra-French froth we shall wear out more than one pencil. Little Billy is a very nice young man who has been kept too close to his mother's apron strings for his own good. A girlish, hysterical kind of boy who should have been given spoon, victuals, and put to bed early. Of course he wants to marry Trilpe for he is of that age when the switch of a petticoat makes us seasick. She is perfectly willing to become his mistress although she had repented of her sins and been forgiven, but just a few days before. She has sense enough, despite Dermotier's portraits of her, to know that she is unworthy to become a gentleman's wife, to be mated with a he-version like Little Billy, but she is over-persuaded as usual and consents. When the young calf's mother comes on the scene and asks her to spare her little pansy blossom not to blight his life with the frost of her follies and of course she consents again. She is the great consenter always in the hands of friends like an American politician. The difficulty of saying nay to Ernest's pleading prevents a messalience. Trilpe skips the tra-la and Little Billy, who has no chance to secure a reconsideration, cries himself sick, but recovers. Comes up smiling like a cotton patch after a spring shower. He is taken to England, but fails to find that absence makes the heart grow fonder. He gets wedded to his art quite prettily and even thinks of turning Mormon and taking the vicar's daughter for a second bride, but slips up on an atheistic orange peel. Something has gone wrong with his head. Where his bump of emotiveness will stick out like a walnut, there is a discouraging depression which alarms him greatly and worries the reader not a little. But finally he sees Trilpe again and the wheel in his head which has stuck fast for five years begins to whizz around like the internal economy of an alarm clock or a sky terrier with a clothespin on his tail. Of course there is nothing now for Trilpe to do but to die. They could be paired off in a kind of morganotic marriage but it is customary in novels where the heroine has been too frolicsome for her to get comfortably buried instead of happily married and perhaps it is just as well. Even a French novelist must make some little mock concessions to the orthodox belief that the wages of sin is death. So Trilpe sinks into the grave with a song like the Dine Swan and little Billy follows suit. Upsets the entire Christian religion by dying very peaceably as an atheist without so much as a shudder on the brink of that outer darkness where there is supposed to be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Svangali has also fallen by the wayside. A number of characters have been very happily forgotten so the story drags along to the close on three not very attractive legs. Taffy, the Laird and Gekko. It is a bad drama, worst staged with an ignorant bard for a heroine, a weak little thing for a leading man, an impossible collarband for the heavy villain and atheism for a moral. Such is the wonderful work that has given this alleged land of intelligence a case of literary mania, a poutou set into singing the praises of a grimy grisette more melodiously than she warped. Mirantone, mirantane at the bidding of the villainous Svangali. Such is this new line of literature who has set American maids and matrons to paddling about home barefoot and posing in public with open mouths flattering themselves that they resemble a female whom they would scald in the backyard. In Dove Chapter 45 Trilby and the Trilbyites Chapter 46 of the Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Calper Brand This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit the link in the description. Chapter 46 Balem's Ass and Other Burrows Sonnet by Alexander Pope First made Conquest and that conquest Law Till superstition talked the tyrant awe, then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid, and gods of conquerors slaves of subjects made it. She, from the rinding earth and bursting skies, saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise. Here fixed the dreadful, there the blessed abodes. Fear made her devils and weak hope her gods. Gods, partial, changeful, passionate, unjust whose attributes were rage, revenge, and lust such as the souls of powers might conceive and formed like tyrants tyrants would believe. Zeal, then, not charity, became the guide, and hell was built on spite and heaven on pride in the poem by Alexander Pope. Kind reader, have care for odd I know this article may be the rankest blasphemy and reading it a regular mortal soul granting, of course, that you are in possession of such perishable property. I submitted it to several of my brother ministers and sought their opinion as to the propriety of publishing it. But while some assured me that it was calculated to purify the moral atmosphere somewhat, and foster respect for true religion, others were equally certain that Satan had inspired it that it was, in fact, a choice bit of immigration literature for the lower regions. Finding even the elders unable to decide what should be done with Malim's ass, whether it should be turned loose upon the land like another evangelist, or consigned to the flames as a hopeless heretic, I determined to give it the benefit of the doubt. The animal may break into the preserves of some unctuous hypocrites and travel a few choice flowers of saccordial folly. But I opined that no honest man of average intellect will find herein an occasion for complaint. I would not wantonly wound the sensibilities of those earnest but ignorant souls who believe the very chapter headings of the Bible to have been inspired who interpret literally every foolish fable preserved therein like flies in amber. But the car of progress cannot roll forward without crushing an occasional pidge smire. We cannot bid it stand forever in the same old rut like an abandoned road cart or Jeffersonian Democrat because across its shining pathway lie the honest prejudices of zealous stupidity. The Bible is a great gold mine in which inexhaustible store of yellow metal is mixed with much worthless rubbish that must be purged away by honest criticism before the book becomes really profitable, even fit for general circulation. I would rather place in the hands of an innocent girl a copy of the police gazette or Sunday Sun than an unexpurgated Bible. It is the book I value much yet keep under lock and key with Don Juan and the Decameron. It contains both the grandest morality and most degrading obscenity ever conceived in the brain of mortal man. There are passages whose beauty and power might cause the heart of an angel to leap in ecstasy. Others that would call a blush of shame to the brassy front of the foulest fiend that ever howled and shrieked through the sulfurous valleys of hell. The man who rejects the Bible altogether because it is honeycombed with barbarous traditions, ranked with revolting stories and darkened by the shadow of a savvy superstition is cousin German to him that cast aside a priceless pearl because it is coated with ocean slime. He that accepts it in its entirety gulps it down like an anaconda of serene and unwashed goat who makes no attempt to separate the essential from the accidental the utterance of inspiration from the gerulity of helpless nations. Who forgets that it is half epic poem filled with the gorgeous imagery of the Orient may, like the ass which Balam Road in its mouth and speak. But he never saw the angel of the Lord he uttered the words of emptiness and ignorance. Had the Bible been taught intelligently and truthfully the entire world would have accepted its centuries ago. Its very worst enemies are those who insist on its inerrancy who strive by some esoteric alchemy of logic to transmute its every element of base metal into bars of yellow gold the folly of the creature into the wisdom of the creator. During the Dark Ages Hyde bound orthodoxy prevailed and practically every man was a church communicant. It is paramount today only in those countries that have failed to keep pace with the car of progress. It is a sad commentary upon all religious faiths that they flourish best where ignorance prevails. That atheism is rapidly becoming the recognized correlative of education. By presuming to know too much of God's great plan by decrying intelligent criticism and attempting to seal the lips of living students with the dicta of dead scholastics, by standing already to brand as blasphemers those who presume to question or dare to differ the dogmatists are driving millions of God fearing men into passive indifference or overt opposition. Ignorance is not a crime per se but it is the mother of superstition and intolerance, those twin demons that have time and again deluge the world with blood and tears for 40 centuries have stood like raveless wolves in the path of human progress. That with their empoison fangs have torn a thousand times the snowy breast of liberty that have done more to inspire doubt and foster infidelity than all the French philosophes that ever wielded pen. The logical, well-informed man who today becomes a church communicant does not do so because of the doctrine promulgated by the average pulpiteer, but despite of it. The long night of intellectual slavery has not altogether passed but on the higher hills already flame the harbingers of reasons glorious mourn. Gone is the inquisition with its sacred infamies the Christian rack is broken and the thumb screw untwain. The persuasive wheel no longer twists the nonconformist into full communion the iron virgin has ceased to press the writhing heretic to her orthodox heart. The facet has fallen from the hand of the saintly fanatic and the brandy-nired from the loving grass of the benevolent bigot. While superstition that once did rule the world with autocratic sway can only shriek her impotent curses forth and flourish her foolish boycott at reasons growing flame. If I can but enable sectarians to understand that all so-called sacred books are essentially the same that Brahma and Baal, Jupiter and Jehovah are really identical if I can but make them cognizant of the crime they commit in decrying honest criticism if I can but convince them that the man who is slave to no sect that takes no private road but looks through nature up to nature's god is not necessarily an active emissary of evil whom it is their duty to denounce if I can but create a suspicion in the minds of the clergy that perhaps they know no more of the omnipotent than do other men are possibly mistaking vile for benevolence gall for godliness and chronic laziness for a call to preach I will feel that these few hours expended grooming Baalum's burrow have not been cast away. Our information concerning the Reverend Mr. Baalum and his burrow is very limited although the latter was endowed with the gift of gab spoken but once and then at the special bidding of an angel which fact leads us to suspect that the viable jackasses now extend have deteriorated at both ends since the days of their distinguished ancestor have parted with all their brain as well as with half their legs Brother Baalum does not appear to have syndicated his sermons or made any special bid for notoriety if he ever hired half-starved courtesans a la parkhurst to dance the can can then hastened into court to file complaint against the very bods he had filled with booze and dandled naked on his knee if he called the ladies of his congregation old sows after the manner of Sam Jones if he got himself tried on a charge of heresy or became entangled by a half-wit sister whose religious fervor led her to mistake Levite for the Lord no record of the shameful circumstance has been preserved he appears to have attended pretty strictly to the prophet business and we may assume from such stray bits of his biography as have come down to us that he prospered the Israelites who had gotten out of Egypt with considerable of the portable property of other people concealed about their persons had gone into the Bill Dalton business under the direct guidance as they claimed of their deity and were for some time eminently successful full sale murder and robbery became their only industry arson and oppression their recognized amusement they had swiped up several cities leaving not a soul alive and were now grinding the snickers-snee for Moab and Median the people of the petty nations of Palestine whom God's anointed received an imperative command to utterly destroy had build them happy homes and accumulated considerable property by patient industry they appear to have been peacefully disposed and devout worshipers of those deities the better attributes of Jehovah were subsequently borrowed the Israelites had not struck a lick of honest labor for 40 years they had drifted about like coxies common-wheelers and developed into the most fiendish mob of God-fearing guerrillas and marauding cutthroats of which history makes mention compared with Joshua's murderous Jews the Huns who followed Attila were avatars of mercy and the Sue of Sitting Bull were good Samaritans a careful comparison of crimes committed by the Kurds in Armenia with those perpetrated by God's chosen people in Palestine will prove that the followers of Allah are but amateurs in the art of outrage doubtless any other people brutalized by centuries of bondage then turned loose without king or company with only ignorant prophets for guides and avaricious priests for law-givers would have become equally cruel would have adopted a divinity devoid of mercy and a stranger to justice the God of a people is and must of necessity ever be a reflection of themselves an idealization of their own virtues and vices a magic mirror in which Narcissus like man worships his own image the Jews are one of the grandest people that ever dwelt upon the earth a more intellectual and progressive race is unknown to human history but like all others it had its age of savagery and its epic of barbarism before it reached the golden era of civilization I am not criticizing the Jews for their treatment of the Canaanites during that century when crass ignorance made them credulous and bondage rendered them brutal but to assume that the excesses of semi-savages were heaven inspired were a damning libel of the deity I rather enjoy being lied about by malicious lollipops but did I sit secure in some celestial citadel holding the thunderbolts of heaven within my hand it were hardly safe to assert that I instigated such unparalleled atrocities as were perpetrated by the emancipated Israelites in Palestine I would certainly be tempted to take a pot shot at an occasional preacher who persisted in defaming me with his foolish dogmatism Baelic, the king of Moab and Midian saw that he was not strong enough to withstand the sacred marauders and well knew that surrender meant a wholesale massacre that those who had dared to defend their homes would be placed under heralds of iron that this silvery head of the aged grand sire would sink beneath a sword wielded in the name of God that unborn babies would be ripped from the wombs of the late women and the maidens of Midian coerced into concubinage by their heaven led captors in this dire extremity Baelic rethought him of brother Baelum who was not a prophet of God as popularly supposed but a priest of Baal the deity devoutly worshipped in Moab and Midian it were ridiculous to suppose that the king of Moab and Midian would appeal for aid to the God of their enemies instead of to their own divinity for in those days the principal business of a deity was to wage war in behalf of his worshippers Baelum was a Midian knight and Baelic sent messengers to him with the reward of divination in their hand and begged that he would kindly offer and knock the Israelites off the Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore muzzle-loading maledictions for, said he with a pious fervor that proves he was addressing a priest of his own faith I want that he whom thou blesseth is blessed and whom thou curseth is cursed he evidently believed that Baelum carried the celestial thunderbolts concealed about his person that when he turned them loose those on whom they alighted frizzled up like a fat angle worm on a sea-cold fire the good man said he would see what could be done to help Baelic out of the hole and God came to Baelum and said what men are these with thee as Baelum was evidently expecting to visit we may conclude the caller was Baal as Jehovah was not at that time on visiting terms with the Gentile priests was busily engaged in pulling down their altars and putting them to the sword Baelum gratified the very natural curiosity of his celestial visitor in the letter after learning all the particulars cautioned his diviner or priest not to make any bad breaks Baelum sent the ambassador back with the word that Baal was a trifle shy of curses at that particular time Baelum evidently understood the situation for he sent other agents with larger offerings Baelum still insisted that he had received no permission to wipe up the plain of Moab with the ex-brick builders but saddled his ass and went along promising to do the best he could for his bleeding country he evidently desired to size up the situation and be quite sure that none of his curses would come home to roost doubtless he also desired to see if Baelum was bidding all he could afford for celestial aid for we have no reason to believe that brother Baelum was in the profit business for his health or peddling curses for recreation while en route probably informed him that the Jews were as frequent as jugs in a prohibition precinct that they had slaughtered the people of Eye driven Og from the earth overcome Ammon and were making the rest of the Canaanites nations hard to catch for the good man was seized with a sudden desire to take the back track his burl bawled and Baelum told his fellow travelers that an angel was interfering with his transportation facilities perhaps the princes of Moab made rivaled remarks annant the celestial obstruction even hinted that Baelum had best get a mod s move on him or he might contract a vigorous case of unavailing regret then the burl began to blab like many of the old pagan priests Baelum was doubtless and adept in the art of ventriloquism that may have convinced the ambassadors and bold the price of curses for then as now it was no uncommon thing for the utterance of an ass to be mistaken for that of an oracle or some doubting Thomas may have twisted the burl's tail for some reason not set forth by the sacred chronicler the angel withdrew his objections and the prophet proceeded on his way but still protesting that no permit had been accorded him to put a kibosh on Joshua's freebooters Baelum was entirely too smart to pray for rain when the wind was in the wrong quarter altogether too smooth to launch his anathemas at an army he knew could take Moab by the back hair and rub their noses in the sawdust he counted the capfires of Israel and concluded that Baelum's promises of high honors were worth no more than a camp meeting certificate of conversion that he would soon be hoofing it over the hills with his coat tails full of arrows so after working his patrons for all the spare cash insight he made a sneak leaving his sovereign to wage war without the aid of supernatural weapons like many of his sacerdotal successors Baelum took precious good care to get on the winning side ever since the days of brother Baelum there has been considerable trading of curses for cold cash the industry has been patiently built up from humble beginnings to a magnificent business from an itinerant curse peddler prodding about on a spave-ine burl and resorting to the methods of the multibank to create a market for his merchandise Baelum a vast commercial concern with costly establishments in every country the first curses as might have been expected were very crude affairs little more than hoodoos intended to promote the material welfare of the purchaser at the expense of other people a king of ye olden times bought a curse and turned it loose upon his enemies played the god an engine in his foe much as a modern prince might a gatling gun but it seems to have slowly dawned upon the royal ignorammy that the lord is usually on the side of the heaviest battalions a fact which Napoleon emphasized the practice of fencing in a nation with a few wild-eyed prophets or sending a single soldier forth with a hair-trigger hoodoo and the jawbone of a defunct jackass to drive great armies into the earth gradually fell into disuse curses and blessings became a drug in the market about this time the Jewish priesthood began to take kindly to the doctrine of future rewards and punishments this theological thesis promulgated before the age of Abraham had influenced to some extent the religious thought of the entire eastern hemisphere that the Jews were among the last to admit the immortality of the soul was doubtless due to the fact that because of their long enslavement they did not emerge from semi-savagery so soon as did the other divisions of the great Semitic family furthermore, for a long period after their emancipation the Jews seemed to have received the rewards of their peculiar virtues here on earth and were little inclined to defer their happiness to the hereafter were amply able to punish their enemies and had no occasion to delegate that pleasant duty to superior power finally however the fortunes of war began to go against them they were no longer able to make on earth a heaven for themselves and a hell for other people instead of despoiling others they discovered an occasional hiatus in their own smokehouse instead of burning the cities of their inoffensive neighbors their own began to blaze the priests and prophets insisted that these evils befell them because they had neglected their deity that the more devout they became the more fat kids fine meal and first fruits they referred to the Levite Larderez offerings to the Lord the more deplorable became their condition the people began to drift to the more reasonable religion of their neighbors and even the wisest of their kings could not be held to the faith of their fathers the Jewish priesthood gradually adopted the old Parsi doctrine of heaven and hell a doctrine unrecognized by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and having no place in the theology of Moses the Jews eventually discovered that robbery was wrong and assassination a crime that the practice of ripping open pregnant women and putting prisoners of war under heros of iron was displeasing to the Lord it was a forcible illustration of the ancient axiom that it makes a great difference whose ox is gored instead of founding a mighty nation dictated by their prophets the Jews were conquered scattered enslaved Palestine was filled with foreigners had become a religious babel a theological chaos the time was ripe for a religious revolution such as had been inaugurated in India six centuries before it was accomplished and this might have been expected the result was a curious composition a religious Ola Podurita in which the profound wisdom of Zoroaster and the childly superstition of western barbarians grand morality and monumental absurdity elbow each other like specters in a delirium in which is heard both the still small voice of omnipotent God and the megalophonous bray of Balaam's ass Jehovah the national god of the Jews supplanted Job in Baal Ashtarov and Oremazdis and with their thrones took many of their attributes the doctrine of future rewards and punishments became the cornerstone of the new theology while further concessions were made to ethnic creeds in various stages of decay by the adoption of their trinity incarnation and resurrection the Jewish prophets were accepted by the composite cult which Christ may have originated but certainly did not develop but their every utterance was given a new interpretation of which the Hebrew hierarchy had never dreamed the great kingdom which they had predicted was to be spiritual instead of temporal the Jerusalem predestined to become the capital of a powerful prince to whom all nations should acknowledge and pay tribute was not the leprosy eaten old town among the Judean hills but a city not made with hands existing eternal in the heavens Christianity does not contain a single original idea it borrowed liberally on every hand but chiefly of parseism in which faith is taught by Zoroaster Aristotle says 6,000 years before Plato may be found its most important features it owes absolutely nothing to Judaism but the name of its god and an idle string of misinterpreted prophecies is, from first to last essentially a gentile faith there never was a religion instituted upon the earth that the priesthood failed to transform into errant folly to debase until it finally fell into disrepute such was the fate of that established by Zoroaster and upon the ruins of the grandest theology this world has known Siddhartha Gautama erected the Buddhist credo which is really a revolt to first principles a search for happiness here on earth the attainment of Nirvana so too the priesthood has corrupted the teachings of Christ until the logical mind revolts from the jumble of self-evident absurdities rejects revelations as a nursery tale and seeks by the dim light of science to find the cause of all existence the new cult was not regarded kindly by the old priesthoods and the methods adopted for its suppression were almost as rigorous as those it in turn employed some centuries later for the discouragement of other blasphemers inheritance hence it is not surprising that the old Hebrew doctrine that whom the Lord loves he makes mighty gives wealth and plenty and concubines galore power over his enemies and privilege to despoil his neighbors should have been early transformed into whom the Lord loveth he chaseneth the doctrine of temporal rewards and punishments revived somewhat as Christianity became powerful but has remained a subordinate feature as not a sparrow falls to the earth without a special permit from the Almighty it follows as a natural sequence that every brutal crime is gracefully permitted if not ordained by that dear Lord whose protection we daily pray and whose apostles we support if we inquire why this is so we are cautioned not to commit blasphemy some worthy brother of Malim's ass bids us beware the angel of the Lord the claim of the ancient priesthoods to support was based on the presumption that they promoted the national welfare of the people by keeping the national deity in good humor he contracted a case of assaults the smell of fresh blood would usually bring him around all right sometimes the butchery of a few innocent birds and beasts would do the business but it not infrequently became necessary to commit a number of homicides to get him actually gay when even the sweet incense of blazing cities and roasting babes fail to restore his hilarity the prophets sounded the alarm much as the weather bureau gives warning of approaching cyclones and other atmospheric disturbances in the case the dire predictions failed to materialize the Lord had listened to their protestations that he was not doing the proper thing and repented him the immutable had changed his mind the prophets were supposed to make a man prosperous as a tamony politician by blessing or pours a Houston post editorial by laying a curse upon him as civilization invests the people able to pay the rewards of divination became too intelligent to be taken in by the transparent tricks of brother Balem hence the new priesthood devoted itself chiefly to the spiritual welfare of the people made a specialty of the hereafter business for obvious reasons it is the safer enterprise man was now told to believe thus and so and he would be blessed eternally but if he believed not he would be cursed ever lastingly the rewards promised by the early priesthoods had by the centuries of evolution developed from good crops and fat cattle fruitful vines and successful villainy into mansions of heaven the punishment from a protracted drought or a descent of the Assyrians a bad case of buck egg or boils into a hell of fire for the souls of aged unbelievers and unbaptized babes forever burned this was the old argument ad hominem and a new mother Hubbard but the masses were still ignorant and those who could not be bribed to heaven were bluffed with the fires of hell the old priesthoods were crushed and kings became the sworn defenders of the new faith even propagated it with the sword dispensed saving grace with gallows robes and with the bludgeon drove heaven inspired precepts into the heads of unbelievers wisdom could not withstand such logic the philosopher yielded to the unanswerable argument of the inquisition as no one could disprove the comforting doctrine of eternal damnation and there is a strong vein of superstition and even the best of men the ignorant populace cowered in terror most pitiful at the feet of a presumptuous priesthood and to this good day men who have managed in some mysterious manner to dodge the madhouse believe that priests or preachers are the special deputies of the deity that a criticism of the clergy is an insult to the almighty that if you dare dissent from the foolish opinions of some wooden-headed dominoes and at the divine plan you might as well curse God and die once this old ethnic cult in a new dress became well established in the course of considerable revenue to the latter-day Levites its most glaring absurdities were able to withstand for a time even the invention of the printing press and the general dissemination of knowledge for that monster custom of habits devil is very potent in shaping the minds of men and retarding human progress thus we find in the so-called enlightened age millions of men defending the rights of certain score-beauty families of indifferent minds and muddy morals to sway the sovereign's scepter mental kulasi men who tower up like titans in the world of intellect are proud to acknowledge themselves the dutiful subjects of some brainless fop or very old female who chance to be born in a royal bed while their bedders were ushered in as the brats of beggars so too we find men possessing clear judicial minds defending with all the fervor of fifteenth-sensory fanatics not the Christian faith per se but some special interpretation thereof not the philosophy of religion but the inconsequential theorems of some sacerdotal reformer which was added to the world's discord by founding a new faith these various religious divisions have become little more than rival commercial establishments each peddling its own peculiar brand of saving grace warranted the only genuine and dealing damnation round on all the centers dogmatism began to doubt and men began to study the Bible not to search out as a wisdom and as truth but it's folly and it's falsehood they represent the recoil from one extreme to the other from blind belief to unreasoning skepticism from intellectual slavery to liberty degenerated into license instead of judging the Bible by God they judge the God by the Bible and finding by this ridiculous formula that he is little better than a brutal maniac they reject him altogether and try to account for the creature without the creator to explain any effect without an efficient cause if we could but muzzle the dogmatist infidelity would quickly die the essentials of the Christian religion do not depend upon the inerrancy of the scriptures they do not depend upon direct revelation or the miracle the incarnation or the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb of Joseph of Eremathia in fact these very evidences adduced in behalf of the true faith produce all the doubt with which it is called to contend let us grant that Moses was not called to signize flaming crest to receive Paul's promulgated centuries before Joseph was carried a captive into Egypt that the Bible is but the history of a barbarous people a compendium of their poetry, religion and philosophy that the incarnation and resurrection are but myths borrowed from decaying ethnic cults and what have we lost simply indefensible non-essentials the tawdry garment with which ignorance has brought her poor idea of the infinite what matters it whether we call our creator Jehovah or Jupiter Brahma or Buddha who knoweth the name by which the Seraphim adress him why should we care whether Christ came into the world with or without the intervention of an earthly father are we not all sons of the most high God bright sparkles of the infinite suppose that the story of the incarnation older than Jerusalem itself be literally true that the Almighty was the immediate father of Mary's child is not the birth of each and all of us as much a mystery as great a miracle as though we sprang full grown from the brow of Olympian Job is it necessary that the creator should violate his own laws to convince us that he does exist more wonderful that the sun should stand still upon Gibyan and the moon in the valley of Ajealon than the great world should spend forever bringing the night and the morning the seed time in the harvest is not a miracle an interruption of nature's harmony rather calculated to make a man of logical mind suspect that he is the sport of chance and believe himself the special character of an omniscient power that ordereth all things well when this great globe hangs motionless in space and the rotting dead arrives in their sermons when the great multitudes are fed with a few small fishes and virgins are found with child then and not till then will I relinquish faith in an intelligent architect and acknowledge lawless force the only deity man is but a microbe lost in immensity he peers about him and by the uncertain light of his small intelligence reads here a word there aligned in the great book of nature and putting together these scattered fragments makes a faith which he defends with fanatical fervor dare to call in question its most inconsequential thesis and you are branded as a heretic denied in total and you are denounced as an enemy of the almighty the curses of brother Balaam no longer kill the body but they are expected to play sad havoc with soul when the priest of Baal was enroute to Moab's capital for cursing purposes an angel tried to withhold him and even his burrow rebuked him but neither angels nor asses are exempt from the law of evolution now when a priest or preacher lets slip a curse at those who presume to question the supernal wisdom of his greed the angels are supposed to flap their wings until heaven is filled with flying feathers while every blatant jackass who takes his spiritual fodder at that particular rick unbraids his ears and braves approvingly End of Chapter 46 Balaam's Ass End of the Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast Volume 1 of 12