 Part 4 of Damn, a Book of Calumny. This Libber Box recording is in the public domain. Damn, a Book of Calumny by H. L. Lincoln. Part 4. 31. The Holy Estate. Marriage is always a man's second choice. It is entered upon more often than not, as the safest form of intrigue. The Cate of Yield's quickest. The man who loves danger and adventure holds out longest. Behind it one frequently finds not that lofty romantic passion which poets him, but a mere yearning for peace and security. The abominable hazards of the high seas, the rough humors and pestilences of the Forecastle. These drive the timid mariner ashore. The authentic cupid, at least in Christendom, was discovered by the late Albert Ludwig Sigmund Neisser in 1879. 32. Deigtung und Wahrheit. Deponent, being duly sworn, seeth. My taste in poverty is for delicate and fragile things, to be honest, for artificial things. I like a frail, but perfectly articulated stanza. A sonnet wrought like ivory. A song full of glowing nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and participles. But without too much hard sense to it. Poetry to me has but two meanings. On the one hand, it is a magical escape from the sordidness of metabolism and the class war. And on the other hand, it is a subtle, very difficult, and hence very charming heart. Like writing fugues, or mixing mayonnaise. I do not go to poets to be taught anything, or to be heated up to indignation. Or to have my conscience blasted out of its torpor. But to be soothed and caressed. To be lulled with sweet sounds. To be wooed into forgetfulness. To be tickled under the metaphysical chin. My favorite poem is Lausette Woodworth Reese's Tears, which, as a statement of fact, seems to me to be as idiotic as the book of Revelation. The poetry I regard least is such stuff as that of Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold, which argues and illuminates. I dislike poetry of intellectual content as much as I dislike women of intellectual content. And for the same reason. 33. Wild Shots If I had the time, and there were no sweeter follies offering, I should like to write an essay on the books that have quite failed of achieving their original purposes, and are yet of respectable use and potency for other purposes. For example, The Book of Revelation. The obvious aim of the learned author of this work was to bring the early Christians into accord by telling them authoritatively what to expect and hope for. Its actual effect during 1800 years has been to split them into a multitude of camps, and so set them to denouncing, damning, jailing, and murdering one another. Again, consider the autobiography of Ben Venuto Salini. Ben wrote it to prove that he was an honest man, a mirror of all the virtues, and injured innocent. The world reading it hails him respectfully as the noblest, the boldest, the godliest liar that ever lived. Again turned to Gulliver's Travels. The thing was planned by its revered author as a devastating satire, a terrible piece of cynicism. It survives as a storybook for sucklings. Yet again there is Hamlet. Shakespeare wrote it frankly to make money for a theatrical manager. It has lost money for theatrical managers ever since. Yet again there is Caesars de Bello Gallico. Julius composed it to thrill and arouse the Romans. Its sole use today is to stupefy and sicken schoolboys. Finally, there is the celebrated book of General F. Von Bernhardt. He wrote it to inflame Germany. Its effect was to inflame England. The list might be lengthened almost ad infinitum. When a man writes a book, he fires a machine gun into a wood. A game he brings down often astonishes him, and sometimes horrifies him. Consider the case of Ibsen. After my book on Nietzsche, I was actually invited to lecture at Princeton. 34. Beethoven. Romain Rowland's Beethoven, one of the cornerstones of his celebrity as a critic, is based upon a thesis that is of almost inconceivable inaccuracy. To wit, the thesis that Old Ludwig was an apostle of joy, and that his music reveals his determination to experience and utter it, in spite of all the slings and arrows about rage's fortune. Nothing could be more absurd. Joy and truth was precisely the emotion that Beethoven could never conjure up. It simply was not in him. Turn to the cherso of any of his trios, quartets, sonatas, or symphonies. A sardonic waggishness is there, and sometimes even a wistful sort of merriment. But joy in the real sense, a kicking up of legs, a lightheartedness, a complete freedom from care, is not to be found. It is in Haydn, it is in Schubert, and it is often in Mozart. But it is no more in Beethoven than it is in Tchaikovsky. Even the hymn to joy at the end of the Ninth Symphony narrowly escapes being a gruesome parody on the thing itself. A conscious effort is in every note of it. It is almost as lacking and spontaneity as, if it were imaginable at all, a piece of Ver's Libra by Augustus Montague Toplity. Nay. Ludwig was no leaping buck. Nor was it his deafness, nor poverty, nor the crimes of his rascally nephew that pumped joy out of him. The truth is that he lacked it from birth. He was born a Puritan, and though a Puritan may also become a great man, as witness Herbert Spencer and Beelzebub, he can never throw off being a Puritan. Beethoven stemmed from the Low Countries, and the Low Countries in those days were full of Puritan refugees. The very name in its first incarnation may have been bare bones. If you want to comprehend the authentic man, don't linger over Roland's fancies, but go to his own philosophisings, as garnered in Beethoven, the man and the artist, by Friedrich Kirst, Englished by Krebjel. Here you will find a collection of moral banalities that would have delighted Jonathan Edwards. A collection that might well be emblazoned on guilt cards and hung in Sunday schools. He begins with a naïve anthropomorphism that is now almost perished from the world. He ends with a solemn repudiation of adultery. But a great man, my master, is a great man. We have enough biographies of him and Talmuds upon his works. Who will do a full-length psychological study of him? 35. The Tone Art. The notion that the aim of art is to fix the shifting aspects of nature, that all art is primarily representative, this notion is as unsound as the theory that Friday is an unlucky day. And is dying as hard. One even finds some trace of it in Anatoly, France, surely a man who should have known better. The true function of art is to criticize, embellish, and edit nature, particularly to edit it, and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, penciling the lapsus callomy of God. The sounds in a Beethoven symphony, even the pastoral, are infinitely more orderly, varied, and beautiful than those of the woods. The worst flute is never as bad as the worst soprano. The best violin cello is immeasurably better than the best tenor. All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it has to be performed by human beings. That is, that nature must be permitted to corrupt it. The performance one hears in a concert hall or opera house is no more than a baroque parody upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra of eighty men, there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb or bad kidneys or a brutal wife or kaizenjamer, and one is enough. Someday, the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips, and larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beauty that it will be almost unbearable. If half as much ingenuity had been lavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone and the steam engine, we would have had mechanical orchestras longer ago. Mechanical pianos are already here. Piano players, bound to put some value on the tortures of Ceresni, affect to laugh at all such contrivances. But that is no more than a pale phosphorescence of an outrage wills or mocht, setting aside half a dozen, perhaps a dozen, great masters of a moribund craft who will say that the average mechanical piano is not as competent as the average pianist. When the human performer of music goes the way of the galley slave, the charm of personality, of course, will be pumped out of the performance of music. But the charm of personality does not help music, it hinders it. It is not a reinforcement to music, it is a rival. When a beautiful singer comes upon the stage, two shows, as it were, go on at once. First, the music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck, nose, ankles, eyes, hips, calves, and ruby lips, and breathe. The sex show. The second of these shows, to the majority of persons present, is more interesting than the first. To the men because of the sex interest, and to the women because of the professional or technical interest, and so music is forced into the background. What it becomes indeed is no more than a half-herd accompaniment to an imagined anecdote. Just as color, line, and mass become mere accomplishments to an anecdote, in a picture by an English academician, or by a sentimental German of the Bochmann School. The purified and deflogi-skated music of the future, to be sure, will never appeal to the mob, which will keep on demanding its chance to gloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob, even disregarding its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a natural hero-worshipper. It loves not the beautiful, but the strange, the unprecedented, the astounding. It suffers from an incurable heliogabalisma. A soprano who can gargle her way up to G-sharp in Altissimo interests it almost as much as a contralto who has slept publicly with a grand duke. If it cannot get the tenor who receives $3,000 a night, it will take the tenor who fought the manager with Bungstarters last Tuesday, but this is merely saying that the tastes and desires of the mob have nothing to do with music as an art. For its ears, as for its eyes, it demands anecdotes. On the one hand the suicide symphony, the forge and the forest, and the general run of Italian opera, and on the other hand such things as the Angelus, playing grandpa, and the so-called Mona Lisa. To not imagine art as devoid of moral content, as beauty pure and simple, it always demands something to edify it, or, feeling that, to shock it. These concepts of the edifying and the shocking are closer together in the psyche than most persons imagine. The one in fact depends on the other. Without some definite notion of the improving, it is almost impossible to conjure up an active notion of the improper. All salacious art is addressed, not to the damned, but to the consciously saved. It is Sunday school superintendents, not bartenders, who chiefly patronize peep shows and know the dirty books, and have a high artistic admiration for sopranos of superior gluteal development. The man who has risen above the petty ethical superstitions of Christendom gets little pleasure out of impropriety. For very few ordinary phenomena seem to him to be improper. Thus a Frenchman, viewing the undriped statues which bet his native galleries of art, either enjoys them in a purely aesthetic fashion, which is seldom possible save when he is in liquor, or confesses frankly that he doesn't like them at all, whereas the visiting americano is so powerfully shocked and fascinated by them that one finds him the save evening in places where no respectable man ought to go. All art to this fellow must have a certain body-ness, or he cannot abide it. His favorite soprano in the opera house is not the fat and middle-aged lady who can actually sing, but the girl with the bare back and translucent drawers. Con descending to the concert hall, he is bored by the posse of enemy aliens in funeral black, and so demands a vocal soloist, that is, a gaudy creature of such advanced corsetting that she can make him forget Bach for a while, and turns his thoughts pleasantly to amorous intrigue. In all this, of course, there is nothing new. Other and better men have noted the damage that the personal equation does to music, and some of them have even soft ways out. For example, Richard Strauss, his so-called ballet, Yosef's Legend, produced in Paris just before the war, is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the music is in the orchestra. The folks on the stage merely go through a pointless pantomime. Their main function is to entertain the eye with shifting colors. Thus, the romantic sentiments of Yosef are announced, not by some eye-rolling tenor, but by the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth violins. It is a Strauss score, with the incidental aid of the woodwind, the brass, the percussion, and the rest of the strings. And the heroine's reply is made, not by a soprano with a cold, but by an honest man playing a flute. The next step will be the substitution of marionettes for actors. The removal of the orchestra to a sort of trench out of sight of the audience is already an accomplished fact at Munich. The end, perhaps, will be music purged of its current pantomime. In brief, music. 36. Zoos. I often wonder how much sound and nourishing food is fed to the animals in the zoological gardens of America every week, and try to figure out what the public gets in return for the cost thereof. The annual bill must surely run into millions. One is constantly hearing how much beef a lion downs at a meal, and how many tons of hay an elephant dispatches in a month. And to what end? To the end, principally, that a horde of superintendents and keepers may be kept in easy jobs. To the end, secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may have an idiotic show to gate bats on Sunday afternoons, and that the young of the species may be instructed in the methods of amor prevailing among chimpanzees, and become privy to the technique employed by jaguars, hyenas, and polar bears in ridding themselves of lice. So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to all the chief zoos of the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence. One hears constantly true enough, mainly from the gentlemen they support, that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of instruction do they radiate? And what is its value? I have never been able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational than so many firemen's parades or displays of skyrockets, and that all they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary or even to Congress or a state legislature in session is informing, stimulating, and ennobling. Education your grandmother. Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away in its cage, or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible. Not even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way, and the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polkats smell worse than Greek busboys, that the Latin name of the raccoon, who was unheard of by the Romans, is Procyon Latour. For the dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly admitted and effectively taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mocked in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in the laying of eggs. But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again, the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is, to biology, what the late Camille Flammarian was to astronomy, which is to say its court gesture and reductio ad absurdum, when he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge. It commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Baskertsev, the Russian Lady Walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins, or that Pisposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia, where the dam in the grizzly has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose, and remaining ear. Science, of course, has its uses for the lower animals. A diligent study of their livers and lights helps to an understanding of the anatomy and physiology, and particularly of the pathology of man. They are necessary aids in devising and manufacturing many remedial agents, and in testing the virtues of those already devised. Out of the mute agonies of a rabbit or a calf may come relief for a baby with diphtheria, or means for an archdeacon to escape the consequences of his youthful follies. Moreover, something valuable is to be got out of a mere study of their habits, instincts, and ways of mind. Knowledge that, by analogy, may illuminate the parallel doings of the genus Homo, and so enable us to comprehend the primitive mental processes of congressmen, morons, and the revered clergy. But it must be obvious that none of these studies can be made in a zoo. The zoo animals to begin with provide no material for the biologist. He can find out no more about their insides than what he discerns from a safe distance and through the bars. He is not allowed to try his germs and specifics upon them. He is not allowed to divasect them. If he would find out what goes on in the animal body under this condition or that, he must turn from the inhabitants of the zoo to the customary guinea pigs and street dogs, and buy or steal them for himself. Nor does he get any chance for profitable inquiry when zoo animals die, usually of lack of exercise or ignorant doctoring, for their carcasses are not handed to him for autopsy, but at once stuffed with gypsum and excelser and placed in some museum. Least of all, the zoos produce any new knowledge about animal behavior. Such knowledge must be got not from animals penned up and tortured, but from animals in a state of nature. A college professor studying the habits of the giraffe, for example, and confining his observations to specimens and zoos, would inevitably come to the conclusion that the giraffe is a sedentary and melancholy beast, standing immovable for hours at a time and employing an Italian to feed him hay and cabbages. As well, proceed to a study of the psychology of a jurist consult by first immersing him in sing-sing or of a juggler by first cutting off his hands. Knowledge so gained is inaccurate and imbecile knowledge. Not even a college professor, if sober, would give it any faith and credit. There remains then the only true utility of a zoo. It is a childish and pointless show for the unintelligent in brief, for children, nursemaids, visiting yokels, and the generality of the defective. Should the taxpayers be forced to sweat millions for such a purpose? I think not. The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion nods tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, and not fostered. He is a public liability and a public menace, and societies should seek to improve him. Instead of that, we spend a lot of money to feed his degrading appetite and further paralyze his mind. It is precisely as if the community provided free champagne for dypsomaniacs, or hired lecturers to convert the army to the doctrines of the Bolsheviki. Of the abominable cruelties practiced in zoos, it is unnecessary to make mention. Even assuming that all the keepers are men of delicate natures and ardent zoo files, which is about as safe as assuming that the keepers of a prison are all sentimentalists and weep for the sorrows of their charges, it must be plain that the work they do involves an endless war upon the native instincts of the animals, and that they must thus inflict the most abominable tortures every day. What could be a sadder sight than a tiger in a cage? Save it be a formous monkey climbing despairingly up a barked stump, or an eagle chained to its roost. How can man be benefited and made better by robbing the seal of its arctic ice, the hippopotamus of its soft wallow, the buffalo of its open range, the lion of its kingship, the birds of their air? I am no sentimentalist, God knows. I am in favor of visit section unrestrained, so long as the vivisectionist knows what he is about. I advocate clubbing a dog that barks unnecessarily, which all dogs do. I enjoy hangings, particularly of converts to the evangelical faiths. The crunch of a cockroach is music to my ears. But when the day comes to turn the prisoners of the zoo out of their cages, if it is only to lead them to the swifter, kinder knife than the Chauchet, I shall be present and rejoicing. And if anyone present thinks to suggest that it would be a good plan to celebrate the day by shooting the whole zoo faculty, I shall have a revolver in my pocket and a sound eye in my head. 37. On hearing Mozart, the only permanent values in the world are truth and beauty. And of these, it is probable that truth is lasting only in so far as it is a function and manifestation of beauty. A projection of feeling in terms of idea. The world is a charnel house of dead religions. Where are all the faiths of the Middle Ages so complex and yet so precise? But all that was essential in the beauty of the Middle Ages still lives. This is the heritage of man, but not of men. The great majority of men are not even aware of it. Their participation in the progress of the world and even in the history of the world is infinitely remote and trivial. They live and die at bottom as animals live and die. The human race as a race is scarcely cognizant of their existence. They have an even definite number. But stand grouped together as X, the quantity unknown, and not worth knowing. 38. The Road to Doubt The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fill its devotee with wonder at the marvels of God. This explains why the pursuit of science, so long as it remains superficial, is not incompatible with the most naïve sort of religious faith. But the moment the student of the sciences passes this stage of childlike amazement and begins to investigate the inner workings of natural phenomena, he begins to see how ineptly many of them are managed. And so he tends to pass from awe of the Creator to criticism of the Creator. And once he has crossed that bridge he has ceased to be a believer. One finds plenty of neighborhood physicians, amateur botanists, high school physics teachers, and other such quasi-scientists in the pews on Sunday. But one never sees a Huxley there, or a Darwin, or an Erlich. 39. A New Use For Churches The argument by design it may be granted, establishes a reasonable ground for accepting the existence of God. It makes belief at all events, quite as intelligible as unbelief. But when the theologians take their step from the existence of God to the goodness of God, they tread upon much less firm earth. How can one see any proof of that goodness in the senseless and intolerable sufferings of man? His helplessness, the brief and troubled span of his life, the inexplicable disproportion between his deserts and his rewards, the tragedy of his soaring aspirations, the worst tragedy of his dumb questioning, granting the existence of God, a house dedicated to him naturally follows. He is all important. It is fit that man should take some notice of him. But why praise and flatter him for his unspeakable cruelties? Why forget so supinely his failures to remedy the easily-remediable? Why indeed devote the churches exclusively to worship? Why not give them over now and then to justifiable indignation meetings? Perhaps men will incline to this idea later on. It is not inconceivable indeed that religion will one day cease to be a pultrionish acquiescence and become a vigorous and insistent criticism. If God can hear a petition, what ground is there for holding that he would not hear a complaint? It might indeed please him to find his creatures grown so self-reliant and reflective. More it might even help him to get through his infinitely complex and difficult work. Theology has already moved towards such notions. It has abandoned the primitive doctrine of God's arbitrariness and indifference and substituted the doctrine that he is willing and even eager to hear the desires of his creatures. That is their private notions born of experience as to what would be best for them. Why assume that those notions would be any the less worth hearing and heen if they were cast in the form of criticism and even of denunciation? Why hold that the God who can understand and forgive even treason could not understand and forgive remonstrance? Forty. The root of religion. The idea of literal truth crept into religion relatively late. It is the invention of lawyers, priests and cheese-mongers. The idea of mystery long preceded it. And at the heart of that idea of mystery was an idea of beauty. That is an idea that this or that view of the celestial and infernal processes presented a satisfying picture of form, rhythm and organization. Once this view was adopted as satisfying, its professional interpreters and their dupes sought to reinforce it by declaring it true. The same flow of reasoning is familiar on lower planes. The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true. He thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it. End of Part 4. Part 5 of Damn, a Book of Calumny. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Damn, a Book of Calumny by H. L. Minkin. Part 5. Forty-one. Free will. Free will, it appears, is still a Christian dogma. Without it, the cruelties of God would strain faith to the breaking point. But outside the fold it is gradually falling into decay. Such men of science as George W. Creil and Jacques Loeb have dealt its staggering blows and among laymen of acquiring mind, it seems to be giving way to an apologetic sort of determinism. A determinism one may say tempered by defective observation. The late Mark Twain and his secret heart was such a determinist. In his what is man, he will find him at his farewells to libertarianism. The vast majority of our acts, he argues, are determined. But there remains a residuum of free choices. Here we stand free of compulsion and face a pair or more of alternatives than are free to go this way or that. A pillow for free will to fall upon. But one loaded with disconcerting brickbats. Where the occupants of this last trench of libertarianism air is in their assumption that the poles of their antagonistic impulses are exactly equal. That the individual is absolutely free to choose which one he will yield to. Such freedom in practice is never encountered. When an individual confronts alternatives, it is not alone his volition that chooses between them, but also his environment, his inherited prejudices, his race, his color, his condition of servitude. I may kiss a girl or I may not kiss her. But surely it would be absurd to say that I am in any true sense a free agent in the matter. The world has even put my helplessness into a proverb. It says that my decision and act depend upon the time, the place, and even to some extent upon the girl. Examples might be multiplied ad infinitum. I can scarcely remember performing a wholly voluntary act. My whole life as I look back upon it seems to be a long series of inexplicable accidents. Not only quite unavoidable, but even quite unintelligible. Its history is the history of the reactions of my personality to my environment, of my behavior before external stimuli. I have been no more responsible for that personality than I have been for that environment. To say that I can change the former by a voluntary effort is as ridiculous as to say that I can modify the curvature of the lenses of my eyes. I know because I have often tried to change it and always failed. Nevertheless, it has changed. I am not the same man I was in the last century. But the gratifying improvements so plainly visible are surely not to be credited to me. All of them came from without, or from unplumbable and uncontrollable depths within. The more the matter is examined, the more the residuum of free will shrinks and shrinks, until in the end it is almost impossible to find it. Quite many men of course, looking at themselves, see it as something very large. They slap their chests and call themselves free agents and demand that God reward them for their virtue. But these fellows are simply idiotic ecoists, devoid of a critical sense. They mistake the acts of God for their own acts. Of such sort are the coxcombs who boast about wooing and winning their wives. Others to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run. The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the ground that it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such pious objections of course are foreign to logic. But nevertheless, it may be well to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacious hypothesis that the determinist escapes or hopes to escape the consequences of his acts. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if they be voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to some unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one. I will go to the same jail. Conscripts and war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who are tracked down and shanghied by their wives have just as hard a time of it as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing. Even on the ghostly side, determinism does not do much damage to theology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be damned for his involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for his voluntary acts. For even the supposition that he is wholly free does not dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is and that God could have made him a saint if he had so desired. To deny this is to flout omnipotence. A crime at which, as I have often said, I ball. But here, I begin to fear that I wade too far into the hot waters of the sacred sciences and that I had better retire before I lose my hide. This prudent retirement is purely deterministic. I do not ascribe it to my own sagacity. I ascribe it wholly to that singular kindness which fate always shows me. If I were free, I'd probably keep on and then regret it afterward. 42. Quiddest veritas. All great religions, in order to escape assertity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African Bush or the American Gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, asked Paul of the Romans. How unsearchable are his judgment and his ways past finding out. It is the glory of God set Solomon to conceal a thing, clouds and darkness that David are around him. No man, said the preacher, can find out the work of God. The difference between religions is a difference in their relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know it all. 43. The doubter's reward. Despite the common delusion to the contrary, the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst penalty of the man of hope. He is never disappointed and hence, never indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they do not enrage him. Or, I may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all the dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically impregnable. Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does not hate his opponents. He sympathizes with them. In the end, he may even come to sympathize. In the end, he may even come to sympathize with God. The old idea of fatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God too is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of him thus? Well, is it any the less disconcerting to think of him as able to ease an answer not only at failing, but he that doubteth, damnotus est. At once the penalty of doubt and its proof, excuse and genesis. 44. Before the altar. A salient objection to the prevailing religious ceremonial lies in the attitudes of a basement that it enforces upon the faithful. A man would be thought a slimy and navish fellow if he approached any human judge or potentiate in the manner provided for approaching the Lord God. It is an etiquette that involves loss of self-respect, and hence it cannot be pleasing to its object. For one cannot think of the Lord God as sacrificing decent feelings to mere vanity. This notion of a basement, like most of the other ideas that are general in the world, is obviously the invention of small and ignoble men. It is the pollution of theology by the Sclav Moral. 45. The Mask. Ritual is to religion what the music of an opera is to the libretto. Ostensibly a means of interpretation, but actually a means of concealment. The Presbyterians made the mistake of keeping the doctrine of infant damnation in plain words. As enlightenment grew in the world, intelligence and prudery revolted against it, and so it had to be abandoned. Had it been set to music, it would have survived. Uncomprehended, unsuspected, and unchallenged. 46. Pia Veneziani Pole Christiani. I have spoken of the possibility that God too may suffer from a finite intelligence, and so know the bitter sting of disappointment and defeat. Here I yielded something to politeness. The thing is not only possible but obvious. Like man, God is deceived by appearances and probabilities. He makes calculations that do not work out. He falls into specious assumptions. For example, he assumed that Adam and Eve would obey the law in the garden. Again, he assumed that the appalling lesson of the flood would make men better. Yet again, he assumed that men would always put religion in first place among their concerns. That it would be eternally possible to reach and influence them through it. His last assumption was the most erroneous of them all. The truth is that the generality of men have long since seized take religion seriously. When we encounter one who still does so, he seems eccentric, almost feeble-minded. Or more commonly, a rogue who has been deluded by his own hypocrisy. Even men who are professionally religious and who thus have far more incentive to stick to religion than the rest of us. Nearly always throw it overboard at the first serious temptation. During the past four years, for example, Christianity has been in combat with patriotism all over Christendom. Which has prevailed? How many gentlemen of God having to choose between Christ and patrie a have actually chosen Christ? 47 Off again, on again. The ostensible object of the Reformation, which lately reached its fourth centenary, was to purge the church of imbecilities. That object was accomplished. The church shook them off. But imbecilities make an irresistible appeal to man. He inevitably tries to preserve them by cloaking them with religious sanctions. The result is Protestantism. 48 Theology The notion that theology is a dull subject is one of the strangest illusions of a stupid and uncritical age. The truth is that some of the most engrossing books ever written in the world are full of it. For example, the Gospel according to St. Luke. For example, Nietzsche's Durante Christ. For example, Mark Twain's What Is Man. St. Augustine's Confessions. Hickles the Riddle of the Universe. And Huxley's Essays. How indeed could a thing be dull that has sent hundreds of thousands of men. The very best and the very worst of the race. To the gallows and the stake. And made and broken dynasties. And inspired the greatest of human hopes and enterprises. And embroiled whole continents in war. No. Theology is not a soporific. The reason it so often seems so is that its public exposition has chiefly fallen in these later days into the hands of a sect of intellectual castrati. Who begin by mistaking it for a sub-department of etiquette. And then proceed to anoint it with butter, rose water and talcum powder. Whenever a first-rate intellect tackles it. As in the case of Huxley. Or in that of Leo XIII. It at once takes on all the sinister fascination it had in Luther's day. 49. Exempli Gratia. Do I let the poor suffer and consign them as old Friedrich used to say? To statistics and the devil? Well? So does God. End of part five.