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                17 page printout, page 520 - 536
                          CHAPTER XXXI

                      Do We Need Religion?

         The Fear of the Godly -- Our Personal Morals --
          The Nightmare of Sex -- Religion and Progress

                      THE FEAR OF THE GODLY

     THE criticism of religion seems to be an unpopular job. I am,
as more zealous and self-sacrificing purveyors of skepticism will
assure you, really a timid and innocuous person, yet I have had my
life threatened in Sydney and have been protected by friendly guns
in Denver. I have heard ladies of Minneapolis regret that none had
the courage to shoot me, and British Spiritualist clergymen have
deplored in their journal 'Light,' that I have never yet had the
horsewhipping which I have merited. Friends have rushed before me
in the streets of London to protect me, they imagined, from a
vitriol-thrower, and sailors have been bribed by clergymen of the
southern seas to put my luggage ashore a thousand miles away from
my destination. I have been forced by the pressure of the Catholic
Church on a London publisher to tear up a literary contract worth
at least twenty thousand dollars, and have had my books shamelessly
misrepresented in the press and expelled, under menaces, from
booksellers' shops. Insults, injuries, intrigues, lies, libels,
vituperations, depreciations ....

     But it was all done in the name of religion, so I expect
little sympathy. Ages ago there was a small semi-barbaric people
called the Hebrews who believed that their fate was indissolubly
linked with certain objects mysteriously secreted in a pretty box
which they called the Ark of the Covenant. It now seems probable
that the sacred objects in the Ark were rough stone models of
interesting parts of the masculine anatomy; but mystery was always
more entitled to respect than knowledge, and the Hebrew shuddered
at the prospect of a conqueror robbing him of his precious Ark. Far
away to the north of Judea was the great old city of Troy, and its
fate also was inviolably linked with a mysterious stone on which
none ever gazed: a stone which, we now see, was either a meteorite
or a phallic model. And centuries later even the Romans said that
they hid this sacred "Palladium" of Troy in one of their temples,
and the fate of Rome in turn depended upon its being preserved
secret and inviolate.

     Religion is the Ark of the Covenant, the Palladium, the magic
stone of civilization, and I have dared to lay light hands upon it.
Without it, without an awe-stricken veneration for it in the mass
of the people, we perish. Every oracle of modern times assures you
of that.

     The statesman, who naturally knows best on what tangible and
intangible threads our destinies hang, tells you, in accents which
are vibrant with sincerity, that our people rely upon our devoted
clergy for that which is incomparably higher than bread, and
therefore places of worship shall forever be immune from the sordid
trammels of taxation. Our editors, even if they do at times
politely suggest to the clergy that St. Athanasius has not a very
clear title to rule our intellects, are fervent and irresistible in
their final conclusions that religion must inspire our lives. Our
wise judges command their gravest gravity when they refer to it.

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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               520

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

Our educators and financiers cannot conceive a world without it.
Our professors and literary men are, of course, superior to the
creeds to which statesmen subscribe, but their intellectual
serenity and Olympic survey of life restrain them from ever
disturbing the allegiance of the millions to religion. Only a
superficial writer here and there, a half-educated person like
myself, a mechanical pen-pusher who has not given to the subject of
the truth and value of religion so much profound thought as have
our politicians, policemen, colored preachers, editors, mothers-of-
seven, zoologists, and literary critics, would ever dream of
challenging the vital importance to us of our Palladium.

     Since the days when I began to study for the priesthood,
forty-odd years ago, I must have read many thousands of religious
books -- Hindu, Persian, Chinese, etc., as well as of every
Christian sect and every Christian century -- and tens of thousands
of scientific, historical, philosophical, and sociological works
which illumine religion from one angle or another. How is it that
I have never been able to see the truth which professors grasp in
a few hours spared from bugs, and politicians in a few moments
spared from billiards? It irks me. Let me try again.

     What is religion? Many years ago I had a colleague in the
Ethical Culture movement in England who was a very learned and
profound philosopher, Professor Bosanquet, and presently he quitted
the movement and declared that he had come to the conviction that
men could not be good without religion. One was puzzled because the
Ethical Culture people say that ethical culture is a religion:
indeed, the only religion that really does good. However, I looked
into Bosanquet's religion, and found that it consisted in a
veneration for the Absolute, as set up -- not described, since,
being absolute, it is incomprehensible -- by Professor Hegel (and
promptly knocked down again by every other school of philosophers).
Then there came into the movement a Professor Hoffding, who was
just as learned, and he said that the Absolute was as mythical as
Moses, and that religion consisted in "the conservation of values."
At one meeting of ours George Bernard Shaw was induced to give the
sermon, and after withering the religion of everybody else under
the sun, he explained authoritatively that the only religion on
which we really did depend was the cult of our Vital Principle and
vegetarianism, Then Mr. H.G. Wells spoke up and said ....

     You see the difficulty. A hundred and twenty million people in
the United States are convinced that religion is vitally necessary
-- Seventy millions of these pay much less attention to it than
they do to the color of their socks or stockings, but they seem to
agree with the editors and politicians that it is of overwhelming
importance. Of the remaining fifty millions one-third say that
religion is morally futile except in a sacerdotal and sacramental
form. Its great service is that it gives "grace," without which you
are sure to fail, and only priests can communicate this medicine or
magic. The next third of the fifty millions spit their contempt on
what the first third call the essential service of religion, and
say that the really saving part of religion, the only part that
does real good, is to believe that Christ died for your sins and to
regard the Old Testament as the Word of God. The third third --
Modernists, liberal Episcopalians and Methodists,


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

Congregationalists, and Unitarians -- genially rule out both the
other thirds and say that the only necessary kind of religion is to
believe in the love of a personal God and worship him. And then, at
least four fifths of our most learned men step in and assure us
that there is no personal God.

     This is the actual situation. I do not in the least caricature
it. We might, with the large-heartedness of a politician, whose
votes are rained upon him by both the just and the unjust, say that
it does not matter which religion we cherish as long as we have
some religion. In fact, that is the common attitude on this
question. Your neighbor tells you with an air of robust and
unanswerable common sense: "They all do good."

     That kind of robust common sense is sheer nonsense. How does
your friend know that they "do good"? Half his neighbors go to
church and half do not. Is there any difference between them? He
has a Catholic chapel near him and sees quite a decent lot of folk
clustering round it. But the religious ideas are just the same in
some poor Irish quarter, some Mexican or European or South American
town, which excite his disgust. In Chicago, it is claimed, one
Million people out of three million are Roman Catholics: in London
only a quarter of a million out of eight or nine millions are Roman
Catholics. Yet crime is, in proportion to population, thirty times
as common in Chicago as in London. The only two countries in the
world today in which the settled principles of political morality
are outraged -- Spain and Italy -- are Roman Catholic, and the
other countries which approach the same condition -- Austria,
Bavaria, Poland, etc. -- are Catholic: and in each case the Pope
warmly supports the usurpers and persecutors. How can you say that
the religion does good?

     Let us try to be reasonable with our neighbors. We do not want
to score points, but to secure agreement. The first condition of
that, however, is that our neighbors must reflect, and not lightly
repeat the shibboleths of the political orator or the editorial.
For we may rule out at once four classes of influential men who
promote the circulation of this fiction that all religions do good
and some religion is necessary.

     The first class is the politicians. We are, surely, under no
illusion here. It is a question of votes, not spirituality. The
clergy can secure for a man or take away from him the margin of
votes which means victory or defeat.

     The second class are the clergy themselves. When they divided
the whole community between them they reviled each other's creed.
Between them they proved that both the Catholic and the Protestant
creeds are at once the only inspiration of life and the most
terrible sources of demoralization. When the bulk of the community
sensibly concluded that neither seemed to be necessary they united
to say that some religion is a vital need, and that at all costs we
must preserve the old attitude of prejudice against rank unbelief.
We quite understand that. Religion is their bread-and-butter. We
rule out their opinion.




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-- I will presently consider another class of them who are sincere
-- are simply afraid of the clergy. Their chairs are threatened, or
their freedom to teach science is threatened, or their comfort is
threatened. Silence about religion is prudent, but a word in its
favor is profitable.

     As to the editors, I am sufficiently intimate with the
journalistic world to understand them. I have heard a famous
journalist, a skeptic, whose graceful professions of Christian
faith were read, whenever they appeared, by nearly two million
people, say airily, when he was challenged (at a dinner party):
"Oh, the people like that sort of thing." Not for a moment do I
suggest that any large proportion of editors are as unscrupulous as
this. Their general attitude is simply one of trade rivalry. If the
Bugle attacks religion or fails to favor it, the clergy will see to
it that the Cornet gets twenty or fifty thousand of its readers.
Skeptical readers never trouble editors, but religious readers have
an organization behind them. The editors themselves are healthily
cynical. When a London journal with seven hundred thousand readers,
the Dally News, made several years ago a very serious and sustained
effort to take a plebiscite of the religious views of its readers,
only fifteen thousand responded, after weeks of intensified
advertisement, and four thousand of those were Agnostics.

     Of the literary gentlemen, who spend their lives studying each
other's style and telling us what to think about it, I would rather
say nothing. Is there anything more cynical than the newspaper
practice of getting these gentlemen occasionally to give them a
symposium on religion? Even H.G. Wells, who has given some


@@@@ most of page 568 is missing!! @@@@


                       OUR PERSONAL MORALS

     Let us try, in our usual way, to conceive exactly the meaning
of our words. Most religious controversies would be admirably
simplified if the disputants first spent an hour brooding upon the
meaning of the fundamental terms of the controversy.

     Religion, we are told, is necessary for personal morality.
Yes, well, what precisely is necessary? We at once split these
confident people into three violently antagonistic groups: the
Catholic group, which refuses to recognize any other religion as
adequate, the blood-of-Christ group, and the Modernist-Unitarian
group. All that they agree upon is a useful phrase, "Religion is
necessary." That is about as profitable as telling a sick man that
medicine is necessary. He wants to know which medicine. These
religious people no more agree in their hearts that any religion
will do than a doctor would say that any medicine will do for a
patient. The medicine of the Catholic is in the Baptist's opinion
moral poison.






                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               523

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     So we not only rule out the great majority of the writers and
orators who urge the necessity of religion, since they are either
insincere or are economically interested, but we encounter a
difficulty at once with the others. They are certainly insincere
when they say that any religion will do. The only formula upon
which they can honestly agree is, "Any religion is better than
none." But if you know these religious folk as well as I do, you
know that they do not put much heart into that formula. Mere belief
in God, without ministers or a divine Christ, will not do, they are
convinced. Thus they rule out for us the second group, the anemic
professors. They have a sneaking contempt for Unitarianism -- a
diet, they would say, of cereals and apricots for dock-laborers --
and as to Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Steinerism,
Keyserlingism ....

     So the best thing to do is to use a little robust language and
tell them all, in the name of humanity, that we want neither gods
nor Christs nor priests nor hells, but we can manage our own
business without any of them. That is the proper and only way to
settle this question.

     We are not even going to say that "we have conducted God to
our frontiers, thanking him for his provisional services." His
disservice has been greater than his service. It is time that
scholars, or any writers, grew ashamed of the crude and
hypocritical practice of picking out a few saints who were inspired
by the love of God (and the promise of a mighty reward in heaven)
or a minority of refined folk who took their guidance from
religion. It is either stupid or hypocritical to urge upon us this
minority and never glance at the vast majority. The thesis that
these people put before us is that religion is necessary precisely
for the great majority, not for the refined or educated or
naturally amiable minority. I have shown that a moral culture, the
Stoic, the Epicurean, the Confucian, or the pure Buddhist, which
entirely ignored gods, always proved at least as effective as any
religion that ever existed. I have minutely, on contemporary,
evidence, examined the morals of Europe in every age since it
became Christian, and I have shown that the idea that any Christian
generation was morally superior to ours, or nearly equal to ours,
is a grotesque historical absurdity. I have just read Jeffery
Farnol's "Beltane the Smith." Farnol is the best historical
novelist of modern times in the sense at least that he is the most
conscientiously historical; and in this novel he depicts life in
the most developed and most esteemed century of the Middle Ages. It
is a bloody mush of coarseness, misery, violence, and un-bridled
license. It is a true picture. And from that day to this the world
has slowly and gradually improved, almost in exact proportion to
the decay of religion. While Christianity made this stinking mess
of Europe, the essentially godless empire of the Moors in Spain was
proving that culture was a real inspiration of honor, justice, and
refinement.

     That is the second mortal weakness of this cry that we need
religion. The first is the insincerity of nine-tenths of the
writers and speakers who keep it in the public mind. The second is
that it is mockingly belied by the whole of history. I have given
this mass of evidence, logically arranged, that the morals of


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Europe sank into anarchy when it became Christian, improved a
little under Moorish and Greek influence, but were still foul when
the great decay of religion began in the nineteenth century. Did
you ever know any clerical writer or any religious historian to
attempt, in the same scientific and orderly manner, to survey the
general state of morals from the fifth to the nineteenth century?
There is no such book. They dare not write it. And then they
unctuously repeat the parrot cry that our morality needs the
support of religion.

     I have many friends in the new movement which claims that we
need religion, but a religion without any doctrines, even a belief
in God. Some of its oracles, like Professor Felix Adler, the leader
of the Ethical Culture movement, are as bigoted and narrow-minded
as orthodox ministers -- significantly, these are Theists -- and
will never have the least influence on the mass of people. Most of
them are men and women of fine character, more or less broadminded
(according to their degree of Puritanism), who sincerely think
ethical culture as a religion is vitally necessary. Many Unitarian
and some Congregationalist bodies hold the same position -- the
good life for its own sake, without any emphasis on God -- and
large numbers of unattached Agnostics and Theists favor the
movement. It is the new white hope of civilization.

     Now religion in this sense is small, but it is going to become
a serious question. The inexorable pressure of culture will in the
course of the twentieth century oust dogmatic Christianity and
dogmatic Theism, and the churches will gradually become Ethical
Culture societies, still claiming that they stand for religion.
Priesthoods do not die. They shrink and evolve. These existing
societies will never make much impression on the world that has
already ceased to attend church, but the societies themselves will
increase in number as churches shed their dogmas and become
societies.

     The psychology of this kind of religion is in part the same as
that which we found for religion in the ordinary sense. The
momentum of the tradition of churchgoing takes some, social
considerations take others, and the activity of organizers or
leaders brings many others. There is also in this world a kind of
vanity of virtue which is, psychologically, just the same as the
vanity which others find in vice or dress or sport. Further there
are numbers who are convinced that it helps them to remain virtuous
if they listen to a man talking to them about virtue for an hour
every Sunday and then stand in rows and sing a hymn about it.

     And the answer to this last group, the serious people of the
new religion, is that most of us get no help whatever from that
kind of performance. It rather tends to make us bilious. A second
and more drastic answer is that this new religion has -- pardon the
expression in so august a connection -- no kick in it. It offers
less motive than a Christian Church does ... It has never made up
its own mind what is the nature of moral law, yet it says that
moral law is the most important thing in life. It has not come to
any agreement as to the nature of moral law because, while men like
Felix Adler have the fantastic philosophic idea of it, most of
their followers know that moral law detached from a divine will is


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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

simply social law, and therefore the virtue of chastity as such
loses its foundation. The only formula on which these people can
agree is, "The good life for its own sake": which either means that
honor and honesty pay in the world, or that we think them very
pretty in themselves -- and that is the very feeblest of all
motives that you could offer to people under temptation."

     So that is where we stand. The majority of religionists urge
that we must at least believe in God; and that is one of the most
disputed and vulnerable beliefs of modern times. The minority say
that moral idealism is so fine that it of itself commands
allegiance; and that is a kind of language which the mass of people
in any modern civilization will greet with smiles.

     There is not the least need for either one or the other.
Suppose you appointed a committee of scientific men to work out
this problem on the methods of a practical scientific inquiry. What
would they do? They would at once establish two facts: first, that
somehow through the ages moral conduct has not varied with changes
of religion, and secondly that there has been a very considerable
moral advance in the last hundred years. They would then ascertain
the causes of the modern advance, and would at once rule out
religion. It is plain as an arc lamp that religion has not had more
influence on this and the last generation than it formerly had. It
has lost enormously in influence. The millions who do not go to
church or read the Bible may or may not have some sort of belief in
God, but you know them, and you know what a feeble and unpractical
thing it is. General education is the principal cause of the
advance. Better and wiser education will mean further advance. The
next chief influence is the evolution of higher standards of
character by a minority of lay writers and thinkers, and most of
these either bad no religion or thought out human problems
independently of it.

     The other great problem of this practical and scientific
committee would be to ascertain why "immoral" people are immoral.
The clergy have the most stupid ideas on this point. They do not
realize the revolutionary change in the nature of what they call
immorality. People do not now so much transgress a recognized law
as question whether there is a law. The fiction that the law is
universally recognized is as hollow as the fiction that it needs
the support of religion. Anybody who now asserts this is lamentably
ignorant of the facts of life, and he takes an utterly superficial
view of the facts of life. The august and eternal moral law of
Emerson or Eucken or Adler has no more existence than the Olympic
family. What exists is a moral tradition, handed from generation to
generation; and this generation of ours is asking if it really has
a more solid foundation than the tradition of royalty or
bishophood.

     The confusion is made worse by the common habit, especially of
religious and ethical people, of insisting that the traditional
code of conduct is an indivisible thing of equal authority in every
line. Some parts of it are clearly disputable, and the effect of
this insistence upon taking it as a whole is that many people
reject it as a whole and get confused.



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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     It is, in fact, an open question whether the time has not come
to drop the word "morality" as well as the word "religion." its
associations are hopelessly sentimental, antiquated, and
antagonizing. It is like the syrupy drinks of our childhood. I
doubt if we shall be more successful in giving the word a new and
palatable meaning than the ultra-Modernists have been in giving a
new meaning to "religion." I should not be surprised if the
scientific committee I have imagined would not recommend this
course. People will be more moral when they do not know it.

     Let us talk plain English. There are a few paradoxical people
who say that it will be just as bad to talk about honesty,
truthfulness, kindliness, generosity, justice, and self-control.
Apart from the love of speaking or writing paradoxes, which is
supposed to be an imitation of Nietzsche -- it generally reminds
one of children trying to talk to each other in Shakespearean
language -- these people must mean one of two things. Either they
want to find other people honest, truthful, just, etc., in their
relations with them, or they don't. If they choose the former, they
lay down the law: they recognize that it is desirable that we
should all cultivate those qualities. But if they are determined to
be "unprejudiced," as they would say -- there is much vanity and
pose in it -- and reply airily that they ask no virtues of others,
they obviously mean that they rely on their cunning or strength or
the law to hold their own. That ends the argument. We may leave a
few young folk the luxury of feeling superior to prejudices in this
way. The disease will not spread. Most of us do not contemplate a
social order in which our relations with each other will be a
series of lies and counter-lies, frauds and counter-frauds, without
an atom of mutual respect or attachment. It is not the odor of
virtue that attracts us: it is the stink of disorder that repels
us.

     The quarrel is one of those verbal and hollow quarrels which
arise in every age that writes and disputes much. It is not worth
discussing further. I am arguing against the religious man, not the
Nietzschean (or pseudo-Nietzschean). The religious man entirely
agrees with me ... What? Yes, of course you do, my friend. You
picture to yourself this world in which there would be no
recognized standard of conduct but only a battle of cunning and
spite and cupidity, and you shudder with horror. You agree that it
is a social matter. But you needn't shudder. Men have too much
common sense to drift into such a state of things. We don't want
the good life (in these respects) for its own sake. We want it, we
will have it, and we are getting it in more abundance every decade,
for its value. That is precisely why you hope to slip in a word for
your antiquated religion. You are offering us crutches. Thank you,
we know the need to get along, but we discover that we have legs.
If a well-ordered society or a manly and reliable character is so
very desirable -- you agree, don't you? -- why such a roundabout
way of getting it? It is medieval nonsense. This is a business age.

                      THE NIGHTMARE OF SEX

     Moralists have been in the habit of distinguishing between
social virtues and self-regarding virtues: habits (justice,
honesty, veracity, etc.) which are useful because it would be to
the profit of all of us if they were generally cultivated, and

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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

habits which affect no one but oneself. Any quarrel about the
future of the social virtues is negligible. The police will look
after grosser breaches -- if we look well after the police, which
religion never does. And education, public opinion, and the
experience of life will secure what does not concern the police.

     Once upon a time -- and it is not many centuries ago -- no one
had a pocket handkerchief, even amongst the gentry and nobles, and
men made rude noises whenever and wherever they would. Without the
slightest assistance from God and his ministers we have altered all
that so drastically that a breach of the new laws is almost
unthinkable amongst educated people. It is nonsense to say that we
cannot socially enforce laws or standards of conduct.

     And we shall have the help of other changes which are
occurring. A vast amount of sourness of character, hypocrisy,
secret cheating, even crime, has been caused by indissoluble
marriage or inadequate arrangements for the relief of the unhappily
married. When we shift the hand of the clergy finally from these
matters and regulate them solely on social principles, we shall
make more progress. The increase and better distribution of wealth
also help to reduce crime. In most civilizations the workers and
the small middle-class are four times as well off as they were a
century ago, and this economic improvement will continue, to say
nothing of other possible changes.

     All these influences make for a better type of character, by
which I mean an habitually just, honest, honorable, generous, firm,
truthful, self-controlled character. I do not mean the stained-
glass-angel business. How much a man smokes, drinks, or dances,
what sort of shows or books he enjoys, and so on, is not the
business of the moralist. It has never been considered a "sin" for
a man to make a fool of himself, and excess in these things is
rather a matter of folly. If we can get more honesty in business
and politics. more truthfulness and geniality in social life, more
justice in industrial and all other relations, the rest is far less
important. The principle, at all events, is clear. When a man's
conduct becomes socially Mischievous, society will sit on him. It
will be done more promptly when we no longer leave it to God.

     One of the funniest things about these people who fear, they
say, that society will never be able to enforce its laws of conduct
is that they are actually making a most tyrannical use of the power
of society. They are dreaming of a whole series of prohibitions,
and in the name, not of religion, but of morals. These
interferences with personal liberty are more provocative of moral
rebellion than anything else in the world. Our young folk are
beginning to loathe the word "morals," and I do not blame them. It
is moralists who are making it necessary to abandon the word
morality.

     When we get behind words and know exactly what we mean, there
is little dispute. Qualities or modes of conduct and character
which are highly desirable in order to maintain and increase the
amenities of life can obviously be cultivated without any talk
about eternal laws and gods and devils. Let children be taught in
school the real reason why conduct necessarily has limitations in


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a social group, and it will be found far more profitable than
telling them about the flora of Tierra del Fuego or the dates of
battles in the Civil War.

     There is only one real controversy: sex. Drunkenness is not a
moral problem. In countries which are dealing with it on sensible
lines it is decreasing every decade. A hundred years ago, when
certainly the majority of men who could afford it got drunk
habitually, the clergy had very little to say about it. In Catholic
moral theology drunkenness is a "venial" (light) offense unless a
man quite loses the use of reason "in a bestial manner"; and even
this principle has never been taken strictly. All the fuss about
drink, which would have astounded even priests when all the world
was Christian, has originated, like so many other asceticisms, in
our skeptical age.

     But, as I said, the actual experience of countries which
discourage drunkenness without interfering with the liberty of
sensible men is that drunkards decrease in number every decade, and
are now relatively few. We are concerned with general laws. The man
who merely exceeds occasionally, with no damage to anybody except
his own head and stomach, may very well tell the moralist to mind
his own business. I know Roman Catholics of distinction who have
these occasional "binges" and stoutly maintain that neither church
nor state has anything to do with the matter. The people who are
shocked had better learn a little common sense.

     The thing that warps the entire moral controversy of our time
is sex. Clergymen are the worst, the crudest, moralists in the
world. They do not even know what morality is. Bat they set the
standard, and nearly the whole of our press and periodical
literature whoops after them. During a stay in Christchurch (New
Zealand) I once found an editorial in a leading paper bluntly
telling the local clergy, who were goading the women to a purity
campaign, to mind their own business. Such frankness is rare. The
whole precious aroma of morals is usually concentrated in the words
purity and chastity. The novelist gets his thrill by making the
hero reserve his last cartridge to protect the heroine from "the
thing that is worse than death." The films win the permission of
the police and clergy to exhibit the vamp in all her skin-tight
loveliness, or the wicked man just sinking over the languorous
heroine on the couch as the picture fades out, by crowding blushes
into the titles and subtitles. The papers revel in sex, and groan
over it. The British clergy, to the dismay of Fleet Street, have
lately got a law passed prohibiting the publication of reports of
the evidence in divorce cases (which in England always include
adultery), and no politician dared to make a stand against the
puerility.

     The gods, if there are gods, must rock with laughter at the
stupendous spectacle of hypocrisy, stupidity, lying, sneaking into
dark places, mutual deceit and mutual fooling. And this is the
moral situation in which the clergy take the greatest pride. Your
sound education, they would say to me, may reduce crime, and secure
more honor and honesty, but it will never either maintain or
protect -- here the voice sinks to a low vibrant note -- the purity
of our women.


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     I have many Agnostic friends who in this respect use the same
language as the clergy, yet I repeat that the situation is
grotesque. This for two reasons. First, the Christian Era, before
our un-Christian days, reeks with sex-license from the fifth
century to the nineteenth. I could fill a volume of a hundred
thousand words with explicit testimony to this by Christian writers
in every age. A large number of the Popes themselves were
notoriously immoral (some for unnatural vice), and the license of
prelates, priests monks, and nuns has been colossal. The notion
that Christianity has been a special guardian of purity of women is
not a theme for discussion. It is a joke.

     The second reason is that just as notoriously the cult of
chastity is the greatest swindle, the most widespread hypocrisy of
modern times. In England and the United States, the two shrines of
modern Puritanism, there are -- I reflect and calculate before I
put this down -- more professional ministers of love than
professional ministers of religion. Half the married men seek
variety abroad and are acrid with jealousy at home. Three-fourths
of our films and novels turn on immorality, and this is merely
because the overwhelming mass of the public will have them so. The
producer who purveyed only pictures of chastity would face ruin.
Catholic films even have to be allusive at times. The best story is
always the sexual story. The most popular novelist is almost always
the one who refuses to recognize the law of chastity.

     The world reeks with rebellion against sex-restrictions and
then, with the exception of a few outspoken writers, agrees that
our ideal of purity is our noblest possession and religion its
essential guardian. I have made no specific research into this, but
I think I can appeal to my reader. How often do not the clergy
figure in your daily paper in connection with sex-offenses? Do you
find professors, doctors, or lawyers in the same position as
frequently as you find clergymen? Surely not. I should say that if
some person with plenty of leisure cared to compile the lists of
cases, he would find that these clerical guardians of our chastity
figure in the daily press for sex-irregularities three times as
frequently as any other correspondingly large body of professional
men. I have three further sources of information. I was once a
priest: I have a large acquaintance with medical men: and I have
considerable knowledge of the experiences of domestic servants. The
clergy are far more immoral than teachers, doctors, or lawyers, and
Catholic priests are, naturally, more immoral than Protestant
clergymen.

     If it were not for this tyrannical obsession of chastity, this
cowardly lip-homage, this almost universal cozening of each other,
we should settle the matter on sensible and decent lines in a
generation. The confusion itself points plainly to one fact: half
of us at least are no longer Christians, yet we are pretending that
we are under the obligation of Christian law and, knowing that we
are not, we secretly ignore it.

     Here very many people who are not Christians will demur. I
have in mind a distinguished American, one of many men of high
character and culture whom I know, and he is as stern on the law of
chastity as any saint. He once almost turned me out of his house


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for defending a certain brilliant writer of amorous habits. My
friend is an Agnostic. This chapter, if he ever reads it, will
disgust him; as it will disgust great numbers of Agnostic
Unitarians and Ethical Culture people. The law of chastity, they
say warmly, is not a distinctively Christian law. It is -- cosmic
-- it is --

     Well, what the devil is it? I defy them to say in plain
English. What Kant or Emerson or Eucken says about it is not plain
English. We have got beyond verbiage of that sort. There is a law
of justice, of veracity, and so on. We quite understand it. The
foundation of it is solid social requirement. But where is the
foundation of your law of chastity? It is either in God, in Christ,
or in the clouds. John Stuart Mill, the first Ethical Culture
philosopher, "the saint of Rationalism," saw that clearly. He gave
it up. But he never said so. It is from private letters of his,
first published by me in my "Life and Letters of G.J. Holyoake,"
that I learned it. In 1848 Mill wrote to Holyoake, who was strictly
Puritanical:

          The root of my difference with you is that you appear to
     accept the present constitution of the family and the whole of
     the priestly morality founded on and connected with it --
     which morality, in my opinion, thoroughly deserves the
     epithets "intolerant, slavish and selfish."

In the same year Holyoake took the unusual course of returning
several of Mill's letters to him, fearing "they might fall into the
hands of the authorities." As Mill had not the least sympathy with
Socialism -- he was the leader of the Individualists -- the
sentiments of the letters which scared Holyoake are such as I have
just quoted. Amongst his papers, in fact, besides the letter I have
quoted, I found half a letter which also escaped his notice. Mill
says in it:

          The use of the word "morality" is likely to give an idea
     of much greater agreement with the ordinary moral notions,
     emanating from and grounded on religion, than I should suppose
     you intend.

     Well, I am content to agree with the man of whom Lord Morley,
comparing him with Gladstone, once wrote (in a letter which he
forbade me to publish): "He was as much Gladstone's superior in
character as he was in intellect." Mill was in practice and taste
a Puritan, but he was inexorable in logic. The law of chastity is
"priestly morality" and "emanates from religion." European-American
civilization bows to it (in theory) only because Christ endorsed
it. He did not, of course, invent it. Every moralist of those
centuries, from Pythagoras to Marcus Aurelius, urged it. Three
thousand years earlier Egyptians had protested in their prayers to
Osiris, "I am pure, I am pure, I am pure."

     The real evolution of the idea has never been traced -- it is
one of those literary tasks I have had in mind for years, but have
now no hope of realizing -- but it will, when accomplished, make a
volume of rare attraction. The first root of it is probably the
monogamous tradition of the earliest men which, the practice of the


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apes suggests, goes back to animal days. Moralists make the silly
mistake of saying that modern tendencies portend a reversion to
"primitive promiscuity." On the contrary, all the evidence suggests
that quite primitive man was for millions of years monogamous, and
it is the moralist's ideal which is primitive. Originally it meant
that the sexes were equal in numbers (there was no war), that a man
with sheer animal impulses and nerves did not feel the monotony,
and that he kept his wife "virtuous" by means of his club and he
himself was kept virtuous by his neighbor's club. Then, in time,
the mysteries of woman's processes began to intrigue the savage
mind, and tabus began to grow. Then the cult of a goddess of love
suggested sacrifices ....

     But it is useless to attempt to trace the evolution here.
Civilization took over the law of chastity from barbarism six
thousand years ago, and religion adopted it. In its earlier form it
was simply -- for Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, etc. -- "Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife"; it did not forbid concubines
and harlots. In the first millennium before Christ, however,
priestly and philosophical ascetics arose everywhere, and
"chastity" was evolved. The more philosophers glorified the spirit,
the more the flesh was depreciated. The Essenes of Palestine got
these ideas from the Persians, and Jesus got them from the Essenes;
and two thousand years later this marvelous scientific civilization
of ours, this generation which cuts off the heads of kings and
boasts of its independence, bows down to the commands of a dreamy
and hallucinated young carpenter who spoke at street-corners in
ancient Galilee.

     One of the next and most piquant stages in the evolution of
chastity, will be when Modernists have the courage of their
convictions. If Jesus was not divine, be may have blundered on this
point as he did in regard to the end of the world and a hundred
other things. There is therefore no law. The Old Testament
authoritatively forbids only adultery; and we agree that married
folk should keep their contract as long as they hold each other to
it. The belief in a God has in itself nothing to do with the
matter. It is rather funny, in fact, to imagine the Almighty, if
there is one, taking any interest in the copulations of mortals.
The religious person does not see the humor of this because he
curtly says that God is "holy" and must disapprove of such things.
He forgets that he has to prove that sexual intercourse has
anything to do with holiness. It is precisely the question at
issue.

     The future, at all events, is clear. The law of chastity, in
so far as it is a law for modern civilization, is based entirely on
the Old and New Testaments: and nearly the whole of modern
scholarship regards them as pious fiction. Even if they do give the
words of Jesus, which is hardly credible, his authority has gone.
We are working out the clear formulation of social law without the
entanglement of laws "emanating from and grounded on religion."
Christians ought, I suppose, to observe their own law -- though
most of them never did, and half of them do not now and never will
-- but non-Christians may justly request them to mind their own
business. When they try to make it their business by invoking "the



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voice of conscience" and "the universal moral sense," they talk
psychological rubbish. There is no such thing. A man's feeling of
obligation is the plain product of education and environment and
faithfully reflects them.

     And when religious people go further and speak about social
consequences, they do but prepare a rod for their own backs. To
talk, as some of them do, of an approaching time when women may
find the streets unsafe is too silly to be discussed seriously. As
to other consequences to women, any injury to them at once falls
under social law. The kind of brute who brings grave trouble on a
girl and runs away will be hunted down; but women are developing
the sense of self-possession, and conception is now easy to avoid.

     On the other hand, within ten years writers will turn
truculently on the moralists and preachers and ask them to count
up, if they can, all the misery and suffering their law of chastity
has caused and causes all over the world today, all the joy that
mortals might have had in their brief lives and the clergy have
persuaded them to sacrifice for an illusory heaven, all the dreary
waiting and anemia and nervous disease, all the sourness of
disappointment and the feverish anxiety to secure a mate. I never
see a trainload of maids returning from their work but I reflect on
the ghastly havoc that lies behind all this hollow rhetoric about
"the Christian purity of our women." Yes, I admit that religion
alone can sustain the law of chastity. The only thing that
superstition can sustain is superstition.

                      RELIGION AND PROGRESS

     I do not propose to deal here with the vaguest, and therefore
most valuable, of the claims of the religious apologist; namely,
that religion, the Christian religion in particular, is the
progressive principle or ferment of modern civilization, that the
Bible is the source of England's (or America's or Germany's)
greatness, and so on.

     Does any neighbor urge you to see that it is the Christian
nations of the earth that have been progressive, while the Chinese
and Japanese were stagnant, and other races not even civilized? You
have the answer. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century
the Chinese civilization was superior in every respect to the
Christian, and the Christian -- to be accurate, a few out of the
score of Christian civilizations -- only began to make rapid
progress and surpass China at the time when they began to discard
their Christianity. Does he insist that at all events there was a
progressive principle in Europe and America, and China lacked this
entirely until Christian nations communicated it? You have the
reply. China's geographical isolation was the cause of its
stagnation -- the old Greek Christian Empire was just as stagnant
when it was isolated -- while the close contact of the varying
cultures of the score of Christian nations was bound to make for
progress; and what has happened in China is not the communication
of any Christian element but the extension of this secular
principle of clash of cultures to it.




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     Whatever form this argument takes, I have given you the answer
to it. Historically it is an absurdity to couple together the words
Christianity and progress; and if you seek patiently what elements
there are in pure primitive Christianity which ought to make for
social progress, or might conceivably make for progress, you
perceive at once how incongruous such a claim must be. The general
argument is based crudely on two facts: the material or economic
progress of Christian nations since the fifteenth century which
quite obviously has nothing to do with any religion, and the
social, moral, and intellectual progress of the last sixty or
seventy years, which coincides with, not a revival, but a decay, of
religion.

     In connection with all such questions, all historical claims
of the beneficent action of the Christian religion or any religion,
let me urge the reader who wishes to be in a position to answer
these fallacies to keep steadily in mind four periods of history.
These are: Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Rome in
the first and second (and even fourth) centuries of the present
era, Arabian and Moorish civilization from the tenth to the
fifteenth century, and the modern period from about 1850 onward.
These non-Christian periods were brilliant and progressive. In
comparison with these essentially irreligious periods (as regards
their inspiration) the record of Christendom is ugly and barren. It
was these other idealisms, of Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Moors,
that counteracted the benumbing influence of Christ's teaching in
Europe and led the world back to the paths of progress.

     We have seen all that. I am concerned here only to show how I
was, even in the study of long dead periods and cultures, preparing
the reader to understand the reply to claims that are made from
every pulpit in America today. The question might be approached
along a different line. We might ignore the past and, in a purely
scientific and sociological manner, analyze the amazing progress of
the last fifty years, dissect out its impulses and inspirations,
and study these in themselves. This also, however, we have already
done. The advance of science is the chief factor, both in its
immense multiplication of our resources and in its stimulation of
the imagination of the race; and with that advance religion has had
nothing whatever to do. Education is the second great factor; and
we saw that it was initiated chiefly by non-Christians, largely
opposed by the Churches, and only successful when the secular
States undertook it. Not even in our moral and social progress, our
new idealisms and philanthropies, is it possible to trace religious
influence. Humanitarianism was the impulse; and the roots of this
go back through the French Revolution and the Deists to the
Renaissance and the Moors, while the sap of it is the blood in the
heart of man.

     But let us have done with popular apologetics. It is based
upon a mass of grotesque historical untruths, fragments of
generally antiquated and always ill-understood science, and
psychological and philosophical arguments which were abandoned
decades ago by psychology and philosophy. At the Fundamentalist
level it is -- pardon the expression: I can't help it -- tripe. At
the Roman Catholic level, even in the works of Zahm, etc., it is
little better and even less honest. But at what one may call the


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comparatively respectable and well-meaning apologetic of the higher
level -- congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodists (who are
better in America than in England), etc. -- it is very bad; grossly
inaccurate and reckless in its statements of fact, and scandalously
willing to be content with verbiage. At the highest level of all in
the Christian world, the Modernist, the weakness for mere verbiage
is at its worst. The more these religious apologists know, the less
disposed they are to use plain English.

     Many of my readers will think that I ought to ignore all these
extravagances and consider patiently the claims of a more
thoughtful and conscientious minority. This thoughtful minority,
which is very apt to be supercilious when one notices the lower
apologetic, has little influence and never will have much
influence. Its writers are merely silly when they tell me that I am
"flogging a dead horse." I am perfectly willing -- always striving
to be as courteous and obliging as I can -- to flog them also, but
they ought to know quite well that in examining the claims of
popular religious writers and preachers I am not flogging a dead
horse, but a very live and sturdy ass. I have too much esteem for
this refined religious minority to care a cent about their
religion. It won't do much harm. It is the millions who concern me.

     However, let us hear what the intellectual aristocracy of the
religious world have to say on this subject. It is at once apparent
that on the question of the need of religion they say much the same
as what they would call their less enlightened Christian brethren.
Most of them know that character has really greatly improved, not
deteriorated, in the last fifty years of skepticism. They are aware
that everywhere outside America crime has been steadily and very
materially reduced, and that political corruption, paralyzing the
action of the police, is mainly responsible for the unfortunate
position in America. They therefore fasten with particular fervor
on the question of chastity and the family and I have shown that
any social anxiety they profess in this regard is baseless. To
their fear that the words of Christ may not receive due attention
I am quite indifferent. For me, and the modern world generally, he
died a very long time ago.

     Let us try again. These people say that our "utilitarian"
theory of morals may, when it is properly embodied in education,
make people generally just, honest, truthful, and so on, but that
there are finer shades or graces of character which religion alone
will sustain. Let me point out first that these good people look
out of the wrong window because they insist on calling the social
theory of conduct the "utilitarian" theory. Yes, I know. Some of
the early Rationalists themselves accepted the name. But if you
want to repeat it after them, you must ascertain what they meant by
utility. It was something very much broader than you mean. Social
morality is the better word. The real utilitarian theory of morals
is the Christian. It says that virtue pays in another world a
dividend of ten thousand percent, with good security.

     The social or utilitarian theory of morals simply means that
any qualities of character or modes of behavior or reaction which
are desirable which promote the general comfort amenity,
pleasantness or welfare generally -- are obviously worth


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cultivating on that account. Hence our "graces" and refinements of
character are either not desirable or "useful," or we will retain
them because we like them. I am almost inclined to say that these
are the easiest things for public opinion to enforce.

     There is here another readjustment of ideas which is made
necessary by the change in fundamental beliefs. The sensual man was
never a good Christian. I know as well as any how fond of good
cheer, and even good liquor, Christians can be. Bryan was a
notorious glutton. But it is very far away from the ideal of Jesus
and Paul, the oracles of Fundamentalism. The reason is that a man
who indulged his senses was more apt to be tempted and to "sin."
The new ideas mean a readjustment. A man can be frankly sensual,
yet perfectly refined and of high character. Sensuality -- I
naturally do not mean gluttony or any excess -- is neither coarse
nor vulgar. It is consistent, as every artist knows, with perfect
refinement. Temperately cultivated, it adds materially to the
happiness and geniality of life, and has no injurious effect
whatever on intellect or character. This a great many of our
generation have still to learn. A woman can be quite frank in
regard to sensual enjoyment, yet delicate in taste and sentiment
and sweet in character. Against the average Fundamentalist, layman
or preacher, who eats all he can and uses to the limit of her
health (and often beyond) his religious license to exploit his
wife's body, it is unnecessary to say these things. Not sensuality,
but refinement is what we need to recommend to them. I make my
point rather against more liberal-minded believers and Agnostics
who think some shade of asceticism highly respectable and, in some
strange way, conducive to wisdom.

     On this side the irreligious future is going to make progress
precisely in some ways which these people call reactionary. The art
of living is to be one of the great lessons of the humanist creed:
how to obtain as much happiness as one can during the few decades
of sunshine, consistently with the happiness of others -- how to
find, as the Greeks and Moors found, the just balance of
intellectual, emotional, and sensual life.

     The plea that this will promote selfishness and thus relax the
face of general progress is belied by our whole experience. There
never was in the world before such a volume of unselfish service of
the less fortunate; and I, a Britisher, have pleasure in
acknowledging that in this even when we take account of its
superior resources, the United States leads the world. Such lists
as I have seen of American educational, philanthropic, helpful
organizations are a new thing under the sun. Not out of the
decaying creeds has this zeal emerged, but out of that feeling of
brotherhood, of sympathy, of humanitarianism which conquers new
realms every decade. Drop rhetoric. Forget theories. Study coldly
the actual trend of our skeptical civilization since the twentieth
century opened, and you will be compelled to acknowledge that it
looks as if a far kinder and more wonderful age were now dawning
upon the dead creeds and half-empty temples.






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