 Chapter 38 of the Complete Works of Brandy Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Cowper Brand This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org This recording is by Coronel Namesh. Chapter 38 Adam and Eve After God had expended five days creating this little dog kennel of the world and one in manufacturing the remainder of the majestic universe out of a job lot of political boom material he planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man he had formed. Adam was at that time a bachelor, therefore his own boss. He was a monarch of all he surveyed and his right. There was none yet to dispute. He could stay out and play poker all night in perfect confidence that when he fell over the picket fence at 5 GM he would find no vinegar faced old female nursing a curtain lecture to keep it warm setting her tear jugs in order and working up a choice assortment of snuffles. There were no lightning rod agents to inveigle him into putting $100 worth of pot metal corkscrews on a $15 barn. He didn't care a rap about the law of rent nor who pay the tariff tax and no political bus fuzz bankrupted his patients trying to explain the silver problem. He didn't have to anchor his smokehouse to the center of gravity with a log chain set a double barrel bear trap in the Don John keep of his Henry nor tie a brace of pessimistic bulldogs in his melon patch for the nigger preacher had not yet arrived with his adjustable morals and omnivorous mouth. No female committee of uncertain age invaded his place of business and bank owed him out of a double sawback for the benefit of a pastor who would expand it seeing what Parkhurst saw and feeling what Parkhurst fell. Collectors for dry goods emporiums and millinery parlors did not haunt him like an accusing conscience and the Pestifero's candidate was still happily hidden in the womb of time with the picnic pissmire and the partisan newspaper. Adam could express an honest opinion without colliding with the platform of his party or being persecuted by the professional heresy hunters. He could shoot out the lights and you without getting into a controversy with the chicken court and being fined one dollar for the benefit of the state and fleeced out of 40 for the behoof of thieving officials. He had no collar buttons to lose, no upper vest pockets to spill his pencils and his patience and his britches never bagged at the knees. There were no tailors to torment him with scraps of ancient history. No almond eyed he washer woman to starch the tail of his Sunday shirt as stiff as a checkerboard. Adam was more than 100 years old when he lost a rib and gained a wife. Genesis does not say so in exact words, but I can make nothing else of the argument. Our first parents received special instructions to be fruitful and multiply. They were given distinctly to understand that was what they were here for. They were brimming with health and strength for the reason that had not yet come into the world. Their blood was pure and thrilled with the passion that is the music of physical perfection. Yet Adam was 130 years old when his third child was born. If Adam and Eve were of equal age and marriage in American high life, the mating of a scarabutic dude with a milliner's sign could scarce make so poor a record. After the birth of Seth, the first of man, begot sons and daughters, seems to have become imbued with an ambition to found a family. As the first years of a marriage are usually the most fruitful, we may fairly conclude that our common mother was an old man's darling. Women does not appear to have been included in the original plan of creation. She was altogether unnecessary for it God could create one man out of the dust of the earth without her assistance he could make a million more, could keep on manufacturing them as long as his dust lasted. But multiplication of masterpieces was no part of the creator's plan. Adam was to rule the earth even as Jehovah rules the heavens. As there is but one Lord of heaven, there should be but one Lord of earth. One only man who should live forever, the good genius of a globe created not for a race of marauders and murderers but for that infinitely happier life which we denominate the lower animals. This beautiful world was not built for politicians and preachers, kings and cock-olds but for the beasts and birds, the forests and the flowers and over all of life animate and inanimate the earthly image of Almighty God was made the absolute but loving Lord. The lion should serve him and the wild deer come at his call. The bald eagle whose bald wings seem to fan the noonday sun to fierce her flames should bend from the Empyrean at his bidding and the rock bearer him over land and sea on its broad pinions. As his great archetype rules the carobim and seraphim so should man a God in miniature reign over the earth born the inhabitants of a lesser heaven. As no queen shares God's eternal throne so none should divide the majesty of earth's diadem. There is neither marrying nor giving in marriage we are told among the angels they rise above sex into the realm of the purely spiritual scorning the sensual joys that are the heritage of bird and beast for intellectual pleasures that never fall and why should man the special object of God's providence be grosser than his ministers? Were I a poet I would ask no grander theme than Adam's first century upon the earth that age of gold when man was sufficient unto himself a century undisputed master of the world a century of familiar converse in Eden's consecrated groves with the great first cause the omnipresent and omnipotent God picture one day of such existence ambition and avarice, jealousy and passion those demons that have deluged the world with blood and tears have no place in Adam's peaceful bosom he's not in the grove of Daphne where lust is law but in the garden of God where love is life his subjects, no dumb as now or speaking a language strange to our dull ears greet him as he comes forth at break of day from his aromatic bower a thousand feather songsters drown his soul in melody divine while everybody and blossom a living sensor sway in the balmy breath of mourn and pours forth its grateful perfume the forest monarch lays his massive head on Adam's knee the spotted leopard pours about him and the fawn nestles between his feet high above the Caucasian peaks a cunder poises motionless in mid-heaven the unrising sun gilding him as with the beaten gold now the saw-like summits cloud-kissing and crowned with eternal snow burst into the brilliant sea and gleam like the brow of gold while the purple mists are drawn up from the deep valleys as though the giant's fain would hide from earth their splendors reserving them alone for heaven higher and higher wheels the great sun driving the river mist before it and sending down through the softly whispering foliage a thousand shafts of burnished gold that seek out the violet drain the nectarius dewdrop from its chalice and kiss the grave until its youthful sap changes to impurpled blood beneath the passionate caress in the cool shadows by the great spring a magic mirror in whose pelucid depths are reflected heaven's imperial concave and Eden's virgin splendors God walks familiar with Adam as with the younger brother explains to him the use and beauty of all that is and spreads before his wandering eyes creation's mighty plan and yet God suspects that Adam is not content for we hear him soliloquizing it is not good that the man should be alone the clay of which the first of man is formed is beginning to assert itself he watches the panther funneling his playful cubs the eagle's solicitude for his imperial brood perched on the beatling crag and the paternal instinct awakes within him he hears the mocking bird thrilling to his mate the dove pitting the loneliness of creation's mystic lord and in the fierce longing for a companionship dearer than he has yet known takes possession of him to the swarming life about him his high thoughts are incomprehensible in God's presence his soul swarms beneath an intellectual glory to which he cannot rise and combered as he is by earthly clay he sends his swift winged messenger forth to summon before his throne every foul of the air and every beast of the field down through the gates of the garden they come countless thousands and pass before their king but for Adam there was not found a help meet for him sick at heart he turns away the sunset has lost its glory the spheres their music life its sweetness the beams of the moon chill his blood and Arterus leads forth his shining sons but to mock his barness the flowers that read his couch stifle him with their sensuous perfume and he flies from the nightingale's passionate song as the slave flees the scourge to the dark paths and over the most grown boulders he stumbles on across the fields where the fireflies glow like showers of flame beneath the tall cedars whose every sigh seems drawn from the depths of an accepted lover soul exhausted he sinks down where the waters burst from the foundations of the earth and dividing into four seem to reiterate in ceaseless monotone behold my mighty sons a feeling of utter loneliness of hopeless desolation falls upon him such as hammers at the heart when death has despoiled us of all that life held dear he pillows his head upon the sleeping lion and shields himself from the sharp night air with the tawny mane a cub already hunting in dreams comes whining and nestles down over his heart while love's brilliant star pours its splendors full upon his face the long black lashes burdened with unshed tears drop low a drowsiness falls upon him and Adam sleeps the heavens are rolled together like a scroll and God descends in the midst of a legion of angels brightest of whom is Lucifer son of the mourning not yet forever fallen it is not good that the man should be alone the fitful slumber deepens the winds are harshed the song of the nightingale sings lower and lower then seizes with an awestruck sigh the lynx and the jackal the horned owl and the scally serpent slink away into the deepest wood while love's emblem glows like a globe of molten gold then comes a burst of melody divine beneath which the earth trembles like a young maid's heart when half in ecstasy, half in fear she first feels burning upon her own the bearded lips of her life's dear lord it is the morning stars singing together there is a profound air on Adam's cheek sweeter than ever swooned in the rose garden of Kashmir or the jasmine bowers of arabid the blessed there is a touch upon his forehead softer than the white dove's fluttering bosom there is a voice in his ear more musical than Israfeel's marshaling the fateful in fields of asphodel crying, awake my lord and the first of men is looking with an raptured soul upon the last best work of an all-wise god a beautiful woman end of chapter 38 Adam and Eve recording by Cornel Nemesh in Reno, Nevada Chapter 39 of The Complete Works of Bran The Iconoclast, Volume 1 by William Calper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Greg Giordano. Chapter 39 Working Fashion's Fools Miss Sally H is one of the very few society women who, aided by nothing but their beauty, wit and talent, lift themselves into national prominence and attain something like fame. Miss H has been for several seasons the acknowledged belle of New York and her position has not been disputed. She is a dark beauty, her features of classical purity, her profile very delicate and her figure superb. She is a brilliant talker and her talents are many and varied. Presumably, she has been the object of many masculine attentions and the subject of many masculine quarrels. But she has kept her head and hand to herself. At least she has done so until a few weeks ago. Then the announcement of her engagement to Mr. Duncan E. was made public. She is to be married at Newport, September 15, and the wedding is to be as quiet an affair as possible. Mr. E. is a young New York businessman, good looking and talented. He goes in for athletics. Chicago News The above slug of Taffy was accompanied by a woodcut portrait of Miss H, which made her resemble a half-naked Indian squaw suffering with an acute attack of multigrups, super-induced by an overfeed of baked dog. If Miss H's face does not hurt her for very homeliness, an e-mailed jury in the country would award her damages against the news in the sum of a million dollars and help her collect it with a shotgun. But those guileless innocents who imagine Miss H and title to sympathy are sadly mistaken. She, her full friends or relatives, paid a good round price for that puff and fully expected that the artist, as well as the penny-aligner, would indulge in a little fulsome flattery instead of turning State's evidence and convicting his co-laborer of perjury. Nearly every metropolitan daily is now engaged in this nauseous puffery business, and the infection is rapidly spreading to the illustrated weeklies and magazines. No wonder that foreigners have much to say about our bad manners. Worst taste, lack of refinement, and offensive loudness when the leading society ladies of the land will pay big prices to have themselves written up like variety actresses or prize cattle, when they will pay to have their portraits paraded in the public prints and their personal charms proclaimed much as auctioneers and antebellum days expatiated upon the physical perfection of slaves put upon the block, when they will beg the attention of the world and pour into its unwilling ear an exaggerated tale of their love affairs, not omitting the suggestion that certain silly, masculine inanities have fought for their favors. The present nauseating puffery of society bells has grown out of the impartable bad taste, not to say presumptuous insolence, which the American press has ever displayed in dealing with the fair sex. First it was the accomplished, or the vivacious Miss so-and-so, that caught. Every woman likes to be thought accomplished or interesting, just as every man delights to see himself paraded in the papers as a public-spirited citizen. Then the press grew bolder and introduced the adjectives charming, fascinating, beautiful, etc. That took still better. The next step was the write-up, inextenso, next the portrait. Thus in a ratio of geometrical progression the bad habit has grown from the daring but courtly compliment to its present disguising proportions and the vanity and folly of their fair followers of fashion have grown with it. What will be its ultimate development? Where will the rivalry of enterprising journals, their determination to outdo each other in fulsome flattery of female fools, who have money to pay for it, finally land them? Already they are freely commenting upon the form and features of the fair sex. What can they do next but go into particulars and inform us how much their patron measures around the bust? They have already told us of the snowy whiteness of her bosom, the actual size of the tiny little foot as sworn to by the bootmaker, and how many inches of elastic it requires to make her garter. When this becomes commonplace, perhaps it will be necessary, in order to command attention, to publish portraits of their patrons, posing as venuses, eaves, hebs, et cetera, in purest naturalibus. It is not strange that a man will pay newspapers to say publicly about his wife or daughter things that he would knock his best friend down for saying to him privately, that he will deliberately set every scurrilous tongue wagging about the woman he loves as to honor, cause her form and features to be discussed in every dive. Should one of our American women overhear a male acquaintance commenting on the whiteness of her bosom, the size of her foot, the shape of her waist, and the latent passion in her dark eyes, she would want him horse-whipped or shot. Yet she will pay a rank stranger a dollar a line to say these things in the public prints. Barely to the strange world, and sadly in need of a few more industrious fool-killers. End of Chapter 39. Working Fashion's Fools. Recording by Greg Giordano. Newport Ritchie, Florida. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 40. The Public Pedagogue. Making Wise Men by Machinery. If I might presume to tender a few words of advice to so high and mighty a personage as the president of the University of Texas, I should recommend that he carefully study the Solemnic proverb. Quote, Even a fool when he holdeth his peace is counted wise, and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. End quote. In other words, never pull your trigger until you're sure you're loaded. For while a fizzle causes the unskillful to laugh, it cannot but make the judicious grieve. Every man capable of tracing effects to their efficient causes, who chance to hear or read President George T. Winston's address, before the association of superintendents and principals of public schools, must have sighed in bitterness of soul, poor old Texas. These gentlemen, assembled for the ostensible purpose of enhancing their proficiency by the interchange of ideas, had a right to expect valuable instruction from the lips of a man who occupies the post of honor in the chief educational institute of the state, but were regaled with a cataclysm of misinformation, precipitated from an amorphous mind which seemed to be a compromise between Milton's unimaginable chaos and that land of darkness as darkness itself and where the light was as darkness. That such an address could proceed from the president of a state university is most remarkable. It should be received as an oracle by the man at whose feet sit the youth of Texas is simply astounding. I read the address in no unfriendly or hypercritic spirit, for none rejoice more than I in whatsoever contributes even a little to the luster of the lone star. Every laurel won by Texas in the forum or the field is worn by all her citizens. Her every failure in the arena of the world is shame to all her sons. President Winston evidently appreciated the importance of the occasion, but was unable to rise to it. Instead of an address at once philosophic and practical, conveying to his auditors a clear concept of duty and the best method of discharging it, he indulged in a rambling country lyceum discourse wherein worthless conclusions were drawn by main strength and awkwardness from false premises, interlarded with glaring misstatements, and seasoned with Anglo-Maniacal slop. It is not pleasant to think of hundreds of bright young minds being molded by a man who is a living vindication of Sheridan, long accused of libeling nature in his character of Mrs. Malaprop. And what, says Pope, must be the priest when the monkey is a god? And what, the taxpayers of Texas, well may ask, must be the day drudges of an educational system wherein a Winston occupies the post of honor? Texas found a party whom she has made president of her boasted university, I cannot imagine. But he talks like an anglicized Yankee, one of those fellows who try to conceal the cerulean hue of their equators by wearing the British flag for a bellyband. It is but mournful consolation to reflect that the chiefs of pretentious educational institutes elsewhere have proven by their parroting that they have as little conception of the social contract and true position of the pedagogue in the scheme of things as has our own varsity president. Texas educational system is probably up to the average, and President Winston, as wise as many other pompous gerund grinders, who look into leather spectacles and see nothing. Yet imagine that, like the adventurer in the Arabian tale, they are gazing upon all the wealth of the world. But that is no reason why we should continue to waste the public revenue on legato professors who would extract sunbeams from cucumbers and calcine ice into gunpowder. While nothing short of a perusal of the complete text of the oration in question can give an adequate idea of how much folly a varsity president can pump through his face in a given period, its salient features can be summed up in a brief paragraph. Quote, The schoolmaster represents the two greatest factors in modern progress, education and organization. These two factors are really one, for education is a means to organization. Power unorganized is no longer power. Organization means strength and progress. Individualism means weakness and decay. The English people have risen by organized effort to the mastery of the globe. They have created the cheapest and most efficient government, combining in the highest degree individual liberty and national power. They have created the greatest store of things contributing to the welfare, happiness and refinement of humanity, and in education, literature, science and art, have lifted humanity upon the highest plane of civilization. The Irish race is deficient in the faculty of organization, and will be crushed out with the Indian and Negro by the more highly organized races. Football requires better organization than do other games. A higher order of intellect, hence its popularity with the people. The best universities may be expected to furnish the best football teams. The superior organization of the North enabled it to surpass the South in peace and crush it in war. The public school teacher, being the chief factor in organization, to him must be given the credit for the quick recovery of the South from the ravages of civil war. He is the chief power in things material as well as in matters intellectual. He alone can introduce new systems of thought and action in any province of human endeavor." Having thus sained President Winston's rhetorical see, let us examine our catch and determine what is valuable food and what mere jellyfish. That the schoolmaster is a very important factor in the social system, there can be no question. Let him have all the honor to which he is entitled, but let him not seek to appropriate that which belongs to others. The pedagogue is not the fount of wisdom. He is but the pipe, of large or small caliber as the case may be, through which the wisdom of others flows to fertilize the intellectual fields. How much, prithee, have all the public pedagogues of America, including the President of the Texas Varsity, added to the world's stock of wisdom during the last decade? Does it begin to dawn upon President Winston that there is another very important factor in the world's progress, namely the Newton's, Bacon's, Copernic's, Watts, Edison's, Shakespeare's, Burke's, Tepler's, Plato's, Jefferson's, and others, who, by patient research, or the outpourings of supergifted minds, have furnished forth the pedagogues' stock in trade? Science and art, philosophy and religion, all that contributes to man's welfare, material or spiritual, originated in obscure closets and caves, in the open fields beneath the star-domed vault of night, and during all these ages have received chief furtherance from individual genius or application. The schools but recording the progress made, spreading abroad more or less skillfully, the sacred fire rested from heaven by intellectual titans. Still the pedagogue may well be proud of his profession, for it is a privilege to think, or even think at, the thoughts of men of genius, to officiate as their messengers to mankind. Let these royal heralds flourish their birch-rods in every by-path, cry the king, and thereby get much honor. Winston says that education and organization are really the same, because one is a means to the other. How that may be, I know not. And a vowel of love is usually a means to a baby. Still it were a work of super-arrogation to put diapers on a proposal of marriage. Organization is ever education of a certain sort, but education is not always organization. Many of the world's wisest have stood, like Byron, among men, but not of them, in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts. Oxen, organized in teams, may accomplish more than working single, but you cannot yoke Pegasus and a plow-horse. Balerophans winged mount, peremptorily refuses to be organized and turn rectilinear furrows, but plunges through time and space in an orbit of its own making. Often mistaken by the patient organizers for a lawless comet, its appearance a dire portent. You cannot drive Shakespeare and Charles Hoyt in double harness, nor make the mockbird and night-hawk sing in harmony. The public pedagogue does not go out every morning before breakfast, and with ferrilla for Archimedean lever, and three oars for fulcrum, prize open the gates of day. The organization of infants of every conceivable degree of intellectuality into classes, and their formal elevation through successive grades by means of cunningly devised educational jack-screws, or block-and-tackle, does not constitute the complete dynamics of the universe, President Winston to the contrary, not withstanding. Knowledge must exist somewhere before there be any pedagogue to impart it, and though under the name of truth it hide in emirs well, those whose souls are at thirst therefore will assuredly find it, though denied all mechanical furtherance. Education is simply the acquirement of useful information. It matters not how, nor where, nor when. Deprive any man, even a varsity president, of all knowledge but that obtained in the schools, and he were helpless as an infant abandoned in mid-ocean. He could not so much as distinguish between peas and beans, between dogs and wolves, by the descriptions furnished by naturalists. That man who has lived to learn wisely and well has reached the ultimate duly of terrestrial knowledge. The nay plus ultra of human understanding. More can no college professor or varsity president impart. If he know not this, he is uneducated, though he be graduate of every university from Salamanca to the Sorbonne, and from Oxford to Austin. Organization connotes mutual interdependence of the component parts, limitation of individualism, the circumscription of personal liberty. To a certain extent this is advantageous to man. Without it civilization, human progress were impossible. But to draw a line between wise use and abuse were a task of some difficulty. President Winston assures us that the British government is the best in the world, yet it is a chaos compared to the organization of the Russian autocracy. Because we find beneficial that organization which makes cooperation possible, would he carry it to the extent of communism? Because concentration of capital reduces cost of production, does he approve of that organization which enables trusts to juggle prices? When organization has reached that point where one third of our wealth producers must stand idle, because denied the privilege of producing the wherewithal to feed and clothe and house themselves, it might be well for varsity presidents to apply the soft pedal to their peon of praise and inquire diligently whether it be possible to get entirely too much of a good thing. Too many accept St. Paul's concession of a little wine for the stomach's sake for license to become sots. Thomas Carlisle, who could see almost as far into a millstone as the average varsity president, was of the opinion that the tendency to ever more compact organization was transforming both education and religion into farces, blighting the spiritual and intellectual life of man, and precipitating in the world of industry the most important and complex question with which political economists had ever been called upon to deal. That was nearly seventy years ago, when vast organization of capital had just begun, when the age of machinery, both for the grinding of corn and the inculcation of knowledge, was but nascent. Hear him growl. Quote, Though mechanism wisely contrived has done much for man, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the chief source of his worth or happiness. We have machines for education. Instruction, that mysterious communing of wisdom and ignorance, is no longer an indefinable tentative process requiring a study of individual aptitude and a perpetual variation of means and methods to attain the same end. But a secure universal straightforward business to be conducted in the gross by proper mechanism with such intellect as comes to hand. Philosophy, science, art, literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world by the falling of an apple. But some quite other than Newton stands in his museum, his scientific institution, and behind whole batteries of retorts, digesters, and galvanic piles, imperatively interrogates nature, who, however, shows no haste to answer. In defect of Raphael's and Angelo's and Mozart's, we have royal academies of painting, sculpture, music, whereby the languishing spirit of art may be strengthened by the more generous diet of a public kitchen. Hence the royal and imperial societies, the bibliotechs, glyphotechs, technotechs, which front us in all capital cities, like so many well-finished hives, to which it is expected the stray agencies of wisdom will swarm of their own accord, and hive and make honey. Men have grown mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavor and in natural force of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combination and arrangement, for institutions, constitutions, for mechanism of one sort or another, do they hope and struggle. Science and art have derived only partial help from the culture or maneuvering of institutions, often have suffered damage." Of course, Carlisle may have been mistaken. Still the fact that since he uttered his warning, the world has not produced one man of genius, except in the Department of Mechanics, that intellectually the last half of the present century is to the first half as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine. That religion is becoming even more materialistic, patriotism passing, and poetry dying or already dead. That millionaires are multiplying, while the legion of idle labor grows larger, suggests that important inferences may be drawn from this ever-increasing organization of powers, spiritual, and material, and like Quintius Fixlian, I invite the reader to draw them. If the English race be indeed rising to the mastery of the globe, there is no cause for immediate alarm, for at his present rate of progress it will be some ages yet before John Bull succeeds in stealing it all. Nations, like individuals, have their youth, their lusty manhood, and their decline, and there is every indication that Britain has passed the meridian of her power, while Russia and America, her equals in the arena of the world, still find their shadows falling toward the west. Persia, Assyria, Rome, and Spain have aspired to the lordship of the world, and each in turn has been brought low by that insidious power that for a century has been draining the iron from the blood of England. The love of luxury, the subjection of glory, to greed. If history be philosophy teaching by example, the lion of Britain is senescent, if not already dead, and stuffed with sawdust. But let the world look well to that savage brute known as the Russian bear. No, England is not master of the globe, nor can she ever be, for her home territory is trifling, and distant provinces are a source of weakness in war. It were idle to discuss with a confirmed Anglo-Maniac the respective merits of the British and American governments. It may be that the former is cheapest, despite the maintenance of an established church, a great army and navy, and a sovereign who, with her worthless spawn, cost the taxpayers $3,145,000 per annum. While our president requires less than one sixtieth of that sum. England does not pension the adult orphan children of men who sprain their moral character in an effort to dodge the draft, nor does Queen Victoria sell government bonds to banker syndicates on private bids. Hence I will have no controversy with the learned Theban on the question of economy. The British subject may enjoy greater individual liberty than does the American sovereign, for ought I am prepared to prove. True, he is taxed to support a church founded by that eminent Christian apostle, Henry VIII, and whose next fide defensor will be the present worshipful Prince of Wales, is represented in but one branch of parliament, and has no voice in the selection of his chief executive officer. If the sovereign and hereditary House of Lords refuse to do his bidding, he must grin and bear it, while we can turn the rascals out, even if we turn a more disreputable crew of chronic gab traps and industrial cutthroats in. He enjoys one privilege which is denied us, much to the dissatisfaction of our Anglo-Maniacs, that of purchasing titles of nobility. But we can acquire a life tenure of the title of judge by arbitrating a horse trade or officiating one term as justice of the peace, while by assiduous bootlicking we may, like Rienzi Miltiades Johnson, obtain a Lieutenant Colonelcy, or even a Gigadier Brindleship, on the gilded staff of some two-by-four governor, and this port in all the glorious pomp and circumstance of war at inaugural balls or on mimic battlefields. Hence, honors are easy. That the Irish race is deficient in the organizing faculty is a great discovery, and I would advise President Winston to apply for a patent. John Bull will prove himself ungrateful indeed, if he neglects to pension him, for having demonstrated that those Irish organizations which, for half a century, have kept his public servants looking under their beds on nights, for things neither ornamental nor useful were mere phatamoganas, brockenspectors, or disease of the imagination. Winston has evidently been misled by a more-than-be-ocean ignorance, blithely footing it hand-in-hand with a vivid, anti-Celtic imagination. He does not know that Ireland was the seed of learning and the expounder of law, both human and divine, when the rest of Europe was a wide-weltering chaos in which shrieked the demons, ignorance, and disorder. He was oblivious of the fact that the American people, the master organizers of the age, are far more Irish than English. You can scare-scratch an American babe of the third generation without drawing Celtic blood. Strange that the only federal regiment which did not go to pieces at the battle of Bull Run, though occupying the hottest part of the field, was composed of these very Irishmen who are incapable of organization. McClellan, the greatest military organizer of modern times, though by no means the ablest commander, was of Celtic extraction, as was the Duke of Wellington, as are the men at the head of the British and American armies today. Were President Winston better informed, he would not talk so glibly of what the English race has done for literature. No Englishman of pure Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Saxon-Norman lineage has ever reached the front rank in the Great Republic of Letters. In art and science, in oratory and music, even in war and commerce, they have had to content themselves with walking well to the rear of the bandwagon. Shakespeare was of Welsh descent, but whether of Celtic or Kimberick stock it were difficult to determine. The Kimbrie and Celts are both very ancient races. A remnant of the former is found in Wales, while the survivors of the latter are the Irish and Scotch Highlanders. Northern France and Wales have strong Celtic contingents. Byron, Rare, Ben Johnson, Christopher North, Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Lawrence Stern, and Louis Stevenson were Celts by blood. Scott, Burns, Carlisle, and Macaulay were Scots of Celtic extraction. Tom Moore, Brinsley Sheridan, and Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are Balfe and Sullivan, the musical composers. Disraeli was a Jew. The genealogy of Pope and Tennyson remained to be traced. That the original Duke of Marlborough was an Englishman by birth and breeding goes without saying. He acted like one. No Celtic commander could have robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of Belle Lettre, John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin, his present poet laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic decadent. Dr. Jameson is England's military lion, and President George T. Winston of the Texas Farsity, her representative of learning. The English proper are but a nation of shopkeepers, and the greatest shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons. England's great manufacturers are Scots. Her merchant princes are Irishmen. Her leading bankers are Jews, and her reigning family an indifferent breed of low Dutch. The Romans overran England, but unable to subjugate either Scotland or Ireland, abandoned perfidious Albion as a worthless conquest. Everybody took a turn at robbing it whenever it had anything worth carrying off, until the Norman Buccaneers appropriated it bodily and reduced the Saxons to serfdom. By amalgamation with the inferior race, they produced the Tudors, who gave them Ansemary and a virgin parenthetical question mark, Queen. Then the Scotch stewards took a turn at ruling and robbing England, and were followed by the religious bigots and witch burners. The French ruled in a while through their puppets, and were succeeded by the Dutch, who held it in such contempt that they would not prevent its language to be spoken at court. They are still milking it for more than three millions per annum, with an extra pull at the utter whenever one of the seventy odd descendants of the sovereign concludes to found a family. The Scotch, the Welsh, and Dutch enabled England to enslave and plunder Ireland, and upon this meet John Bull, the Jay Caesar of pawnbrokers, is growing great. I much fear that President Winston studied sports under the tuition of referee Earp, else he could have scarce given a decision to the favorite of the college campus. Football requires neither the intellect nor the perfect organization, which is a sine qua non to success in our great national game. Its chief requisites are long hair, leathery lungs, and abnormally developed legs. The game owes its popularity to the average boy's predilection for the brutal, his inherent animalism. Football has for ages been a favorite game with savages, while baseball is a product of civilization. I am not decrying football. I inclined to the view that an occasional rough and tumble scrapping match in which there is imminent danger of black eyes and even of broken bones is good for a boy. I simply point out that as an intellectual game, it not only ranks far below chess, billiards, and baseball, but does not rise to a parody with pugilism. It is a mistake to assume that an intellectual divertissement must be popular with an intellectual people. The highest culture is but a film cast over a fathomless sea of savagery. The most learned of the Greeks, the most cultured of the Romans, gloried in brutal games. And today a dogfight, a slugging match, or even a college football game, is relished by the titan of intellect as keenly as by the bowery tough. I cannot imagine where President Winston absorbed the idea that lack of organization has been the curse of the South. It may surprise him to be told that in antebellum days it was not only the chief repository of culture, but possessed a fair proportion of the nation's wealth. The South has ever been chiefly an agricultural country, and will so remain despite the frantic efforts of enthusiasts to subvert natural laws. Not until the resources of our soil are in great measure exhausted, or increase of population forces people from the fields, can the South become a great manufacturing country. Such is the lesson of history which we can only ignore to our loss. Wealth accumulates at large manufacturing and trade centers as it cannot elsewhere, and naturally seeks to further its interest by organization. The concentration of forces, intellectual and industrial, on that stupendous scale which has won President Winston's admiration, is a postbellum development both North and South. The greatest of American organizers have been Southern men. Washington and Jefferson were types of the individualism which is supposed to have been our bane. Yet one organized the Continental Army which won our independence, the other organized the federal government. It is not true that the Southern Confederacy was crushed by superior organization. Better disciplined troops than the veterans of Lee and Jackson never faced a battery. Hardy's tactics, one of the most highly esteemed of military manuals, was the work of a Confederate general. The assault on the heights of Gettysburg has become historic as much because of the wonderful organization displayed by the Confederate troops as because it marked the supreme hour of a nation's agony. It was the only time in the history of this world when an assaulting column was greeted with cheers of admiration by the soldiers who stood to receive the shock. That fact alone should suffice to make an American college president proud of his country, should purge him of every a tribularious taint of Anglo-Maniacism. Only once have the sons of men in any age or climb displayed a grander heroism than did those who hurled themselves against the heights of Gettysburg, and that when the Federal silenced their guns to cheer the dauntless courage of their foe. It is not my present purpose to re-fight the Civil War and trace every effect to its efficient cause. I have simply undertaken to make good my original proposition. That President Winston is, as Thurcity says of Patroclus, a fool positive, and should therefore hold his peace. The schoolteacher has doubtless played no unimportant part in the rehabilitation of the South, but he should not set up as autocrat of the universe on a salary of forty dollars a month and burden the asses' bridge with the idea that he maketh all things, and without him was nothing made that is made. His ferrilla may be an errand's rod which buds and blossoms, but it does not bear sufficient fruit to furnish a hungry world with necessary element. We still crave manna from heaven and grapes from hebron. The public pedagogue does not make the laws of trade. His province is to interpret them, and proud may he be of his labor if his protégés do not find it necessary to forget at the very gateway of a commercial career that he ever had a name and habitation on the earth. Nor does he frequently alarm the plodding natives by the introduction of new systems of thought and action. Such systems do not spring completely panopled from the cerebrum of our educational jove, and stand about on one foot like a lost goose or country lad awaiting an introduction. New systems of thought and action are usually the growth of ages, the seed often sown by man we hear not of. When of such sudden development that they require a formal introduction, they are apt to be received with the scant courtesy of a poor relation, the introducer reviled as a crank or condemned as a heretic and crucified. Generally speaking, the professional educator confines himself pretty closely to his birch and his textbooks, being quite content to propagate, as best he may, the ideas of others. Neither the birch nor the textbook, it may be well to remark, constitutes the world's stock of wisdom, but only an incidental furtherance there too, the key, as it were, by which the treasure is more readily come at. When the schoolmaster has put his pupil in possession of the open sesame, he considers his duty done, that he has earned his provinder, and perhaps he has. In this day and age it is all that is expected of him, all that he is paid for. He is not required to inculcate wisdom, which is well, for that can no man do. He is not even expected to impart much knowledge, but to put his pupil through a course of mental calisthenics miscalled education. But even this is by no means to be despised. With mind strengthened by exercise, even in a desert, and lungs developed by football, the youth may be able to delve the harder for knowledge, when happily released from the gerund grinder, to pray the more lustily to the immortal gods for understanding, which transmutes what were else base metal into ingots of fine gold. There was a time when more was expected of a teacher, but that was before the application of labor-saving machinery to spiritual matters. Before colleges became known as places where coals are brightened and diamonds are dimmed, before it became customary to cast potential homers and hanibals, topsees and blind toms into the same educational hopper, and hire some gabby holofernies from God knows where to manipulate the mill. It was a time when men considered qualified to teach, declined to waste effort on numbskulls, no matter whose brats they might be. It was a time when the fame of a great, the honor of a good, and the infamy of a bad man were shared by their preceptors. Those were the days of individualism which President Winston so much deplores. The era which fashioned those men whom the world for twenty centuries has been proud to hail as masters. As the doctors have decided that all human frailties are but diseases, I do not despair of our varsity president. Some Theodorus may yet arise to purge him canonically with antiquarian hellebore, and thus clear out the perverse habit of his brain, and make him a man of as goodly sense as the rejuvenated gargantua. Volume 1 by William Cowper Brand This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Josh Kibbe. Chapter 41 Puffery of the Press The Able Editor is perhaps the only quack-doctor extant who greedily swallows his own medicine and foolishly imagines that it does him good. Puffery is the Able Editor's invariable prescription, no matter whether the patient be a moss-grown town, a broken-down political ruay, the victim of early indiscretions, or a cheap-john merchant suffering the first paroxysms of financial dissolution. Although he knows how his medicine is made, knows that it is a nauseous compound of rank-apocracy and brazen mendacity, he actually believes that, if taken in liberal doses, is potent to cure commercial paralysis or put new life into a political corpse. When the first experiment fails to prove satisfactory, instead of changing the treatment, he doubles the dose. One would suppose that, like most kegliostras who pick up a precarious livelihood by pumping the bellies of their bedders full of the east wind, the Able Editor would laugh in his sleeves at his dupes. But not so. He is more earnest than the legato doctor, described by Gulliver, who had discovered a shortcut for the cure of colic, as little discouraged when a patient bursts under the somewhat peculiar treatment. So greedy is he for his own medicine, so fond of working the bellows for the expansion of his own bowels, that he can scarce find time to attend to his patients. Pick up any newspaper, big or little, great daily, with fake voting contest annex, or country weekly shot full of ads of city swindling concerns, and note what the Able Editor thinks of himself, how he twists and turns to find some pretext for parading his own transcendent greatness. See how he greedily seizes upon every little chunk of taffy, and rolls it as a sweet morsel under his tongue, how he places in his cap every foolish feather which the idle wind of puffery wafts within his clutch, and then struts in the face of heaven, a sight to provoke the contempt of men, the pity of the gods. Let the Boomerville broadaxe, but intimate that the bung town boomer knows a thing or two, and forthwith the latter transfers the saccharine slug to its own columns, and perchance points to it with pride, bids the bung town world behold what the world of Boomerville thinks of it. Then the bung town boomer intimates that the Boomerville broadaxe likewise knows a thing or two, and the latter, which has been eagerly watching for this role and for its Oliver, swoops hungrily down upon this delectable morsel and cries, Ha Ha! It is obtained a value received, has tickled, and been tickled in return. Then the editors of these two great public educators begin a crossfire of sugar-plums, much to the edification of the world and their own mutual satisfaction. What would we think of that lawyer, doctor, or merchant who went about assiduously proclaiming with sound of trumpet what his fellow said about him? Would we not vote him a fool? At best a conceited prig, lacking in taste and good manners? Commendation is sweet to all, but it is just as permissible for a bell to boast her conquests in the ballroom, the lawyer to inform Judge and jury what his fellow disciples of Blackstone think of him, the scholars to parade his erudition or the merchant's integrity, as for an editor to reproduce in his own paper fulsome compliments paid him for no other purpose under heaven than to get a puff in return. End of Chapter 41 PUFFERY OF THE PRESS CHAPTER 42 THE BIKE BACILLUS The woman's rescue league met recently at Washington and launched a double-shotted anathema at the female bike fiend. The leaguers attributed to the bicycle craze the alarming increase in the number of courtesans and call upon ministers and respectable women everywhere to denounce cycling by the sex as vulgar and indecent. Nor do they stop there. The bike, in their opinion, is irremediably bad. While destroying the morals of the maid, it wrecks the prospective motherhood of the matron. It is provocative of diseases peculiar to women and calculated to transform the sex into a grand army of invalids. These are a few of the reasons why the women's rescue league is scattering tax in the pathway of the pneumatic tire. There are others. Those whose specialty is the conservation of virtue should carefully study the causation of vice. In dealing with a red light district, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To remove the causes which produces courtesans were a nobler work than to drag debased womanhood out of the depths. Doubtless the rescuers imagine they have made a new discovery of inestimable benefit to society, have laid the axe to the root of that evil of which the body-house is the flower and hell the fruitage. After patient research in the science of sexual criminology, they have determined that the bicycle is naughty without being nice. It is perversity personified. It is the incarnation of cousinness, the avatar of evil. Turn it which way you will, it rolls into the primrose path of dalliance, whose objective point is the akaldama. No more do women's feet take hold in hell. She goes scorching over the brink with her tutsis on the handlebar. So say the ladies of the rescue league. What are we going to do about it? Clearly it were useless to denounce a craze, sheer folly to argue against a fad. We had better save our breath to cool our broth. The ministers cannot be depended upon to lend their moral support to this new movement against the Magdalen maker. They have bought bikes and are chasing the girl in bloomers. One half the great she-worlds on wheels, the other wondering how it feels to ride clothespin fashion. Clearly the women's rescue league cannot stem the tide, not even with the help of the iconoclast and ex-governor Hogg. It must either straddle a bike or join in a stampede, climb a fence or get run over. Heavens, is there no help for us, no halting place this side of heterism? Are we all peddling at breakneck pace to the grove of Daphne where lust is law? Is the bike transforming this staid old world into one wild bucky orgy or phallic revel? Have we toiled a foot thus far up the social mountainside only to go bowling down on a pneumatic tire as low as to the fiends? Help us somebody, police! Just why the bicycle affects women so unfavorably, the leaguers do not inform us. We are left to surmise why tramping a bike should make her more reckless than treading a sewing machine. Why exercise in the open air should be more deletorious to health and morals than the round dance in a heated ballroom or even the delightfully dangerous back-parler hug. Why segregation on the cycle should be more potent to evoke those passions which make for perdition than the narrow-seated buggy, with its surreptitious pressure of limb to limb, and the moral euthanasia, which the man of the world knows so well how to distill into the air of womanhood. Why the bike should be more dangerous to morals than the French fiddle mentioned by Shakespeare appears to be a question solely within the province of the pathologist. A pategralism is proceeding almost exclusively on micrological lines. We may expect that sooner or later some eminent physician will startle the world by discovering the bicycle bacillus. All our ills appear to be caused by minute insects that get inside of us, demoralize our system of government, and inaugurate a reign of anarchy. Everything, from mugwumpery to the metalers itch, from corns to crime is now traced to the pernicious activity of some microbion. Even our currency system is blasted by gold bugs, and prohibition to milk sickness is being treated with vermifuge. A Kansas MD has succeeded in hyping the old age microbe, and is now treating the ballet girls whom Weiss and Greenwall and Riggs B. N. Walker will bring south next winter, while a New York empiric has discovered the insanity insect and is fumigating the brain of the Reverend Mr. Parkhurst. Thus does medical science go marching from conquest to conquest, reforming and rejuvenating this wicked and suffering world. Clearly the rescue league should have cried for aid to the doctors of medicine, instead of to the doctors of divinity. If the bicycle bacillus can be caught and killed, the red light district will disappear and the rescuers turn their wonderful energies in new directions. Once the existence of this nymphomanium micrococcus, as we philomaths would call it, is established, the rest will be dead easy. Whether patients will be treated externally or internally depends of course upon the habits of the infinitesimal vulture that is feeding on our social vitals. We do not know as yet whether it is a moral microbore physical phylloexora. If the former, the mind will have to be taken out, sand-papered, carefully rinsed in a strong aseptic solution and treated with susing antephrodisiacs after each meat of the bicycle brigade. If the latter, the evil can easily be aviated by providing the softer sex with medicated cycling suits or half-soling their bloomers with asbestos. If the rescuers really have the good of their frail sisters at heart, they should cooperate with the physician, should provide themselves with compound microscopes and search assiduously for bacilli instead of appealing to preachers who may themselves be veritable breeding grounds for the most destructive of all bacteria. It may be necessary in order to compel success for the rescuers to sacrifice themselves upon the altar of science to become martyrs to the cause, in striving to save others from the pestilence that walketh in darkness, they may be themselves destroyed, but the true reformer draws back from no danger. Let them take their lives in their hands if need be, boldly seize the bicycle bacillus by the ears and bump his head. The crisis is indeed acute. Still, we may rely on science to save us. It is possible that the first step in that direction has been already taken, for it's not the insanity germ discovered by the New York doctor responsible for the bicycle craze as well as the reform frenzy. And if a free silver lunatech or gold bug crank can be permanently cured by the simple expedient of boring a hole in his lumbar region and drawing off the cerebral spinal fluid, and in it the microbes that build wheels in his head, is there not hope that the bicycle habit may be altogether abolished by the return of the fiends to mental normality? Now that Dr. Babcock has learned to cast out devils, will not the world be redeemed? Cert! Let the woman's rescue league take courage and bask in the sunny optimism of the iconoclast. We'll soon have all the various brands of bacteria in the bouillon. Then there'll be nobody to rescue, nothing to reform, and the leakers and the public can take a much needed rest. In all seriousness, I opine that the bike is a harmless instrument when properly handled. The trouble is not so much with the evasive machine as with the woman who straddles it. It will carry its rider to church as rapidly as to the reservation. Doubtless many women employ it to seek opportunities for evil as a means of attracting the attention of the bitterness men. But had the bike never been built they would find some other way into the path of sin would get there just the same. There were courtesans before it came. There will be de Mimondane's ages after its departure. Mary Magdalene either walked or rode a mule. Asbege was a scorcher but she couldn't coast. Helen of Troy never saw a pneumatic tire. Semi-Ramos preferred a side saddle. Cleopatra didn't attract Colonel Anthony's attention by mounting a machine in the marketplace. The bike is no more an incentive to Baudry than is a wheel-barrow. It doesn't make a woman depraved. It only renders her ridiculous. End of Chapter 42 The Bike Basilis Chapter 43 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. This recording is by Jim Gallagher. Chapter 43 Evidences of Man's Immortality Unless you accept the testimony of the Bible as conclusive, what evidence have you of God's existence and man's immortality? Gladstone The same evidence that we would have of the existence of the ocean were one drop of water withdrawn of the life of a forest if a single leaf were to fall. The Bible did not create man's belief in God's existence and his own immortality, but of this belief Old Azor Aster, and to dating Babylon, is the Bible born. It is simply an outward evidence of man's inward grace. I do accept the testimony of the Bible, but only as one of a cloud of witnesses. In questions of such grave import we cannot have too much evidence. Hence, it is strange indeed that anyone should make the Bible the sole foundation of his faith, should take a stand upon an infinitesimal portion of what the world knew in ages past. The Bible is one of many sacred books in which man has borne witness that he is the favorite creature of an almighty being, but one voice and a multitude singing Hosannas to the most high, a single note in the mighty Diapason of the universe. 100 men are shipwrecked upon an island in the Arctic Ocean. By day and night they dream of absent friends, of mother, wife and child, the pleasant meadows or the sunny hills of their distant homes. Hourly they scan the horizon with eager eyes. Daily they ask each other, is there hope? All former animosities are forgotten, for they are brothers in misfortune. One declares that the island lies in the pathway of a regular line of steamers, and that they must soon be rescued. This view is approved by many, and their hearts beat high with hope. Their sufferings are born with cheerfulness, their hardships appear trivial, for their probation is soon to pass, and they will be at home. Another reveres that they are too far north to be reached by the ocean liners, but that a whaler will soon be due in that vicinity, and all will be well. This view is approved by some, and thus there are two parties confidently expecting sugar, but from different sources. A third studies the map, notes the advanced season, inspects the food supply and shakes his head. We shall be lost, he says. Desire has misled your judgment. You do but dream. Do the two parties then entertain hope's strife, each to disprove the theory of the other, and unite in persecuting the dissenter? No, they reason together, each anxious to ascertain the truth, knowing that it will profit him nothing to believe a lie. Suddenly a cry is heard, a sale! Do those who put their trust in the whaler turn their backs to the sea, and say, O-H-L. That's only one of those regular steamship heretics. No rag of canvas will he discover. Do those who were destitute of hope decline to look? No. All rush to the shore, and strain their eyes to penetrate the mist, little carrying whether it be whaler or steamer, so they do but see a ship. When one makes out the vessel, he is not content until the eyes of others confirm his vision, and all look, not with the jealous hope that he may be wrong, but with an earnest prayer that he may be right. That island is this little earth, its shipwrecked mariners, all sons of men. Yet how different we set about determining whether, from out the everlasting sea that encircles us, there comes indeed a ship of Zion to succour and to save. What one man believes or disbelieves is a matter of little moment, for belief will not put gods on high Olympus, nor unbelief extinguish the fires of hell. Man can neither create nor uncreate the actual by a mental emanation. If deities exist, you would continue to exist to the universe deny him. If he exists not, then all the faith and prayers and sacrifices of a thousand centuries will not evolve him from the night of nothingness. There is or there is not a life beyond the grave, regardless of the denial of every atheist and the affirmation of every prophet. What boots it whether we believe or disbelieve in God's existence or man's immortality? Nothing insofar as he concerns the factual, much in that upon our hopes and fears is based our terrestrial bane or blessing. Banish all belief in God, eliminate the idea of man's responsibility to a higher power, make him the sole lord of his life and earthly good, his greatest garden, and you destroy the dynamics of progress the genius of civilization. Man has a tendency to become what he believes himself to be. Consciously or unconsciously, he strives with less or greater strength towards his ideal. Hence it is all important that he consider himself an immortal rather than the pitiful sport of time and space, a child of omniscience rather than the ephemeral emanation of unclean ooze. Had man always considered himself simply an animal, his tendencies would have been ever-earthward, believing himself half-divine, he is striven to mount above the stars. True, many great men have been atheists, but they were formed by ancestry and environment permeated by worship of divine power. Without a belief in his own semi-divinity to lead the race onward and upward, the conditions which produced a Voltaire or Ingersoll were impossible. Realization is further advanced than ever before, and atheism more general. But those who employ this fact as argument against religious faith forget that a body thrown upward will continue to ascend for a time after it is parted from the propelling power. Atheism is no wise responsible for human progress, for atheism is nothing, a mere negation. And out of nothing, nothing comes. God affords man a basis upon which to build. It is an acknowledgement of authority, the chief prerequisite of order. But in atheism there is no constructive element. While it may be no more immoral to deny the existence of deity than to question the wondrous tale of Troy, history teaches that, considered from a purely utilitarian standpoint, the most absurd faith is better for a nation than none. That the civic virtues do not long survive the sacrifice, that when a people desert their altars their glory soon decay. The civilization of the world has been time and again imperiled by the spirit of denial. When Rome began to mock her gods, she found the barbarians thundering at her gates. When France insulted her priesthood and crowned a courtesian as goddess of reason in Notre Dame, Paris was a maelstrom in the nation, a chaos in which murder raged and discord shrieked. Today we are boasting of our progress, but is the onward march of juggernaut, beneath whose iron wheels patriotism, honesty, purity, and the manly spirit of independence are crushed into the mire. We have drifted into an atheistical age, and its concomitance are selfishness, sensationalism, and sham. The old heartiness and healthiness have gone out of life, have been supplanted by the artificial. Everything is now show and seeming, leather and prunella. The body social become merely a galvanic machine or electric motor. In our grandsire's day, the great man helped the poor, and the poor man loved the great. Now the great man systematically despoils the poor, and the poor man regards the great with a feeling of envy and hatred, akin to that of which the French Revolution was born. Character no longer counts for ought unless reinforced by a bank account. Men who have despoiled the widow of her might and the orphan of his patrimony are hailed with the acclaimed due to conquering heroes. Our most successful books and periodicals would pollute a Parisian sewer or disgrace of Portuguese banjo. The suffrages of the people are bought and sold like sheep. The national policy is dictated by divies. Men are sent to Congress whom God intended for the gallows, while those he ticketed for the penitentiary spout in annities and fashionable pulpits. The merchant who pays his debts in full when he might settle for ten cents on the dollar is considered deficient in common sense. The grandsons of revolutionary soldiers, who considered themselves the equal of kings and the superior of princes, were the livery of lackeys to obtain an easy living. The president saves seven-figure fortunes on five-figure salaries and are plotted by people who profess to be respectable. Governors waste the public revenues in suppressing feudalistic enterprises, begotten of their own encouragement, only to be re-elected by fools and slobbered over by Pharisees. Bradley Martin Balls are given, while half a million better people go hungry to bed. Friendship has become a farce, the preface of fraud. Revolting crimes increase and sexuality is tinged with infamy of the Orient. Men who were too proud to borrow leave sons who are not ashamed to beg. In man great riches are preferable to a good name, and in woman a silken gown covers a multitude of sins. The only virtues of the old mothers of Israel are mocked, while strumpets fowler than sycorrex are received in society boasting itself select. Why is this? It is because the old religious spirit is dormant, if not dead. It is because when people consider themselves but as the beasts that perish, they can make no spiritual progress but imitate their supposed ancestors. Religion is becoming little more than a luxury. The temple, a sumptuous palace wherein people, ennui'd with themselves, may parade their costly clothes, have their jaded passions soothed by sensuous music, their greed for the bizarre satiated by sensational sermons. This being true, the question of evidence of God's existence and man's immortality becomes the most important ever propounded. The devout worshipper points to his sacred book, but we have had sacred books in abundance so far back as we can trace human history. The wave of atheism, of unbelief, rises ever higher and higher, threatens to engulf the world. After nearly 19 centuries of earnest proselyting, less than a third of the world has accepted Christianity, and in those countries professed like Christian, atheism flourishes as it does nowhere else. Of more than 70 million Americans, less than 24 million are church communicans, and it is doubtful if half of these really believe the Bible. Beecher criticized it almost as freely as does Ingersoll, while a number of prominent preachers of the Briggs Abbot brand are even now explaining in the pulpit and the press that it is little more than a collection of myths. The people are drifting ever further from the book of books, and the pulpit appears ambitious to lead the procession. It is idle to urge that man should believe the Bible, for man should believe nothing, man can believe nothing but what receives the sanction of his reason. He is no more responsible for what he believes or disbelieves than for the color of his eyes or the place of birth. He may deceive the world with a false profession of faith, but can deceive neither God nor himself. The mind of even the worst of men is a court in which every cause is tried with rigid impartiality with absolute honesty. A fool may mislead it, a child may convince it, but not even as possessor can coerce it. Hence to command one to believe without first providing him with a satisfactory basis for his faith were an idle waste of breath. A man is no more blamable for doubting the existence of deity than for doubting ought else that may seem to him absurd. He doubts because the evidence submitted is unsatisfactory, or his mind is incapable of properly analyzing it. Probably none of the sacred books ever yet convinced an intelligent human being that there is ought in the universe greater than himself. I do not mean by this that the Bible and the Quran and the Zanavesta and the Vedas are all false, but there is lack of sufficient evidence that they are true. Those who accept them do so because they harmonize with their own half-conscious religious conceptions, because their truth is established by esoteric rather than by exoteric evidence. All attempts to supplant Buddhism and Mohamedism by Christianity have proven futile, and that because the former do, while Christianity does not, voice the religious sentiment of the Orient, a sentiment which exists regardless of their sacred books, and of which the latter are but indications. You can no more demonstrate the truth of the Bible to a Hindu than you can demonstrate the truth of the Vedas to a Christian, for in either case outward evidence is wanting and the subject is not on report with the new doctrine. It is not infrequently urged that evidence sufficient to convince Mr. Gladstone should likewise convince Colonel Ingersoll, and so it doubtless would in a court of law, but in matter spiritual what may appear confirmation strong as proofs of holy writ to the one may seem absurdity absolute to the other. Neither had the pleasure of Moses acquaintance, all witnesses of his miracles have been dead so long that their very graves are forgotten. There is nothing in the accounts, however, violative of Mr. Gladstone's conception of deity, hence he finds no difficulty in accepting them. To Colonel Ingersoll, however, there is something ridiculous in the idea of the creator of the cosmos become a bonfire in holding a private confab with the stuttering Hebrew. He demands undisputable evidence, it is not forthcoming, and he brands the story as a fraud. For the same reason that Mr. Gladstone accepts the miracles of Moses, he accepts Christ as the savior. For the same reason that he denies the burning bush, Colonel Ingersoll denies Christ's divinity. The story of a suffering savior appeals directly to Mr. Gladstone's heart, but it gets no further than Colonel Ingersoll's head. The one tries it by his sympathies, the other by the rules of evidence that obtained in a court of law. In summing up, Colonel Ingersoll might say it has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of this court that Jesus ever claimed to be the only begotten Son of God. The testimony to the effect that he raised the dead, walked upon the waves, came forth from the grave, and ascended bodily into heaven, appears to be all hearsay, and by witnesses of unknown credibility. If we consider the impression made upon his contemporaries, we find that his miracles and resurrection fail to convince those best qualified to analyze evidence. He seems to have been regarded as nothing more than a popular religious reformer or schismatic. From the New Testament we learn that he did not found a new faith, but lived and died in that of his fathers, that it is impossible to follow the instructions of Jesus without becoming in religion a Jew. As he was the sixteenth savior the world has crucified, his tragic death does not prove him divine. As immaculate conceptions were quite common among the Greeks and Romans, with whom both he and his immediate following came much in contact, I incline to the view that he entered the world in the good old way. Granting the correctness of such a conclusion, it does not necessarily follow that Jesus was not heaven sent, or that he was in any way unworthy the love and veneration of the world. The proposition of the eloquent father Brennan that Jesus was either in very truth the only begotten son of the father, or an impious fraud deserving execration, is only tenable on the supposition that the language attributed to him by New Testament writers is properly authenticated. When we remember that the art of printing had not then been invented, that Christ wrote nothing himself, the record of his life was probably not composed until he had been long dead, that the besetting sin of the East is exaggeration, that it was the custom of the Greeks in whose language the New Testament was first written to assign a heavenly origin to popular heroes, we must concede that there is some reason for doubt whether Jesus ever claimed to be other than the son of Joseph the carpenter. Granting that his life and language are correctly reported, that he was indeed divinity. The fact remains that a vast majority of mankind declined to accept him as such, that while the church is striving with so little success to raise his standard in pain and lands, atheism is striking its roots ever deeper into our own. The church should recognize the fact that no man is an atheist from choice. Deep in the heart of every human being is implanted a horror of annihilation. A man may become reconciled to the idea just as he may become resigned to the necessity of being hanged, but he strives as desperately to escape the one as he does to avoid the other. Does the church owe any duty to the honest doubter further than the reiteration of a dogma which his reason rejects? When he asks for evidence of God's existence, Judaism points him to the miracles of Moses, Christianity to those of Jesus, Mohammedanism to the revelations of its prophet, and if he finds these beyond his comprehension or violative of his reason, they dismiss him with a gentle reminder that the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. He retorts by accusing of critics either of superstitious ignorance or rank dishonesty, so honors are easy. He is told that if he doesn't perform the impossible, work a miracle by altering the construction of his own mind, he will be damned, and it is touched up semi-occasionally by the pulpiteers as an emissary of the devil. Being thus put on the defensive, he undertakes to demonstrate that all revealed religions are a fraud deliberately perpetrated by the various priesthoods. He searches through their sacred books for contradictions and absurdities, and not without success. Proves that their guide knew little about astronomy and less about geography, then sits him down over against the church, like Jonah squatting under his miraculous gourd vine in the suburbs of Nineveh, and confidently expects to see it collapse. He imagines that in pointing out a number of evident errors and inconsistencies in revealed religion, he hissed theism in its stronghold, but he hasn't. He has but torn and trampled the rag-investment of religion, struck it non-essentials, called attention to the clumsy manner which, finite man, has bodied forth his idea of infinity, has made the unskillful laugh and the judicious grieve. In an ignorant age the supernatural appeals most powerfully to the people, as it is not strange that revealed religion, so-called, should have been grounded upon the miraculous. But the passage of the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus, and the kindred works are not readily accepted in an enlightened era, and are utilized by scoffers to bring all religions into contempt. We can scarce conceive of God being reduced to the necessity of violating his own laws to demonstrate his presence and power. While it were presumption to ask any church to abate one jot or tittle of its dogma, it seems to me that all would gain by relying less upon the evidential value of the miracles, that a broader, nobler basis can be found for religious faith, one more in accord with the wisdom and dignity of the great all-father, than tradition of signs and wonders in a foreign land in the long ago. Had God desired to personally manifest himself unto man, to deliver a code of laws, to establish a particular form of worship, it is reasonable to suppose that he would have done so in a manner that would have left no doubt in the mind of any man, of any age or climb, and in either his divinity or his desires. That he has not done this argues that all revealed religions are but the voices of the Godlike within man, rather than direct revelations from without. All religions are fundamentally the same, and each is the highest spiritual concept of its devotees. Whence came the gods of the ancient Greek and Egyptian, of the Mede and Persian? If they were made known by direct revelation, how came they to be false gods? If they were the result of a spirit of worship inherent in all men, who implanted that spirit? If God, he must have done so for a purpose, and what purpose other than to enable man to work out his own salvation? Would we not expect him to operate through this spirit of universal guidance, rather than leave the world in darkness while he retired to an obscure corner thereof, and practice ledger domain for the edification of a few half-civilized people? If we adopt the internal instead of the external view of the origin of Judaism and Christianity, all the other sacred books range themselves about the Bible, and with it bear witness that man is a creature of design and not a freak of chance. We bring to confirm the teachings of Moses and Christ and the wise Zoroaster, the loving Guantanamo, the patient Mohammed, the priests and prophets of every climb, the altars of every age, the countless millions who, since man's advent on the earth, have worshipped the all in all. If this be not basis broad enough for man's belief, add there too the story of God's wisdom written in the stars and the never-ceasing anthem of the sea, the history of every consecrated man who has died for man, whether his name be Christ or Damian, the song of every bird and a gleam of every beauty, the eternal truth that shines in a mother's eyes, the laughter of little children, and the Leonine courage of creation's Lord, every burning tear that has fallen on the face of the dead and every cry of anguish that has gone up from the open grave to the throne of the living God. Were not this revelation enough? Yet it is but the binding of humanity's sacred book of that universal Bible in which God speaks from the age and from hour to hour to all who have ears to hear. The fact that man desires immortality is proof enough that he was not born to perish. It is a direct revelation to the individual, if he will but heed it, will get out of the grime and the man-created city with its artificialities into the God-created country where he may hear the still small voice, speaking to that subtler sense, which in animals is instinct and man is inspiration. There was no error in the ordering of the universe. It was not jumbled together by self-created force, operating in accordance with the laws self-evolved from chaos, on matter which, like Mrs. Stowe's juvenile nigger, just grow. It is the work of a master who ordereth all things well. Beauty might be born of chance, but only omniscience could have decreed the adoration it inspires. Hate might spring from the womb of chaos, but love must be the child of order. Pain might be begotten of monsters, but only infinite wisdom could have invented sorrow. Nature does not put feathers on fish, fins on birds, nor give ought that lives an impossible desire or an objectless instinct. Then why should man desire immortality? Why should he fear annihilation more than the fires of hell? During a third of his life he is unconscious and annihilation is but an ever-dreamless sleep. Whether he sleeps the sleep of hell or that of death, an hour and an eternity are the same to him. Yet he desires the one and dreads the other. If man's fierce longing for immortal life is not to be gratified, then is the whole universe a cruel lie, its wonderful arrangement from star to flower, its careful adaptation of means to ends, the provision for the satisfaction of every sense, and errant fraud a colossal falsehood. If there be no God, then is creation a calamity. If there be a God, and no immortality for man, then it is a crime. God does not reveal himself to beasts nor to men of brutish minds. How can those who have no ear for music, no eye for beauty, hear the melody of the universe or comprehend the symmetry of the all? What need of those for immortality to whom love is only lust, charity a pander to pride, a full stomach the greatest good, and gold a God? It is these who become motive grinders, dig genius out of the earth like spuds and goobers, with perpetual emotion by making the universe a self-operative machine needing neither key nor steam generator to make it go. They pride themselves, sometimes justly, on their reasoning powers. But the product of their logic mill is like artificial flowers, as unprofitable as the icy kiss of the venus deminici. Of that knowledge gleaned in the veil of sorrow they know nothing. Of that wisdom, which cannot be demonstrated by the laws of logic, they have no more conception than has a mold of the glories of the morning. They are of the earth earthy. To make them understand a message, God would have had to typewrite it, add the seal of a notary public, and deliver it in person. They hear not the silver tones of memnon, heed not the wondrous messages that come from the dumb lips of the dead. They search through musty tomes and explored long-forgotten languages to prove the rhapsodies of some will profit false, while the grave of the babe that was buried yesterday is more than a prophecy, is an ark of the covenant. End of Chapter 43 Evidences of Man's Immortality Recording by Jim Gallagher