<h2 id="id00429">CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM</h2>
<p id="id00430" style="margin-top: 3em">Christianity as an Asiatic cult is not suitable to European races. To
prove this, let us make a careful comparison between Paganism and
Christianity. There are many foolish things, and many excellent
things, in both the Pagan and the Christian religions. We are not
concerned with particular beliefs and rites; it is Paganism as a
philosophy of life, and Christianity as a philosophy of life, that we
desire to investigate. And at the threshold of our investigation we
must bear in mind that Paganism was born and grew into maturity in
Europe, while Asia was the cradle of Christianity. It would be
superfluous to undertake to prove that in politics, in government, in
literature, in art, in science, in the general culture of the people,
Europe was always in advance of Asia.</p>
<p id="id00431">Do we know of any good reason, when it comes to religion, why Asia
should be incomparably superior to anything Europe has produced in
that line? Unless we believe in miracles, the natural inference would
be that a people who were better educated in every way than the
Asiatics should have also possessed the better religion. I admit that
this is only inferential, or <i>a priori</i> reasoning, and that it still
remains to be shown by the recital of facts, that Europe not only
ought to have produced a better religion than Asia, but that she
did.</p>
<p id="id00432">In my opinion, between the Pagan and Christian view of life there is
the same difference that there is between a European and an Asiatic.
What makes a Roman a Roman, a Greek a Greek, and a Persian a Persian?
That is a very interesting, but also a very difficult question. Why
are not all nations alike? Why is the oak more robust than the spruce?
What are the subtle influences which operate in the womb of nature,
where "the embryos of races are nourished into form and
individuality?" I cannot answer that question satisfactorily, and I am
not going to attempt to answer it at all. We know there is a radical
difference between the European and the Asiatic; we know that Oriental
and Occidental culture are the antitheses of each other, and nowhere
else is this seen more clearly than in their interpretations of the
universe, that is to say, in their religions.</p>
<p id="id00433">In order to understand the Oriental races, we must discover the
standpoint from which they take their observations.</p>
<p id="id00434">But first, it is admitted, of course, that there are Europeans who are
more Asiatic in their habits of life and thought than the Asiatics
themselves, and, conversely, there are Asiatics who in spirit, energy
and progressiveness are abreast of the most advanced representatives
of European culture.</p>
<p id="id00435">Nor has Asia been altogether barren; she has blossomed in many spots,
and she nursed the flame of civilization at a time when Europe was not
yet even cradled.</p>
<p id="id00436">To show the intellectual point of view of the Asiatic, let me quote a
passage from the Book of Job, which certainly is an Oriental
composition, and one of the finest:</p>
<p id="id00437">"How, then, can man be justified with God, or how can he be clean that
is born of a woman? <i>Man that is a worm, and the son of man, which
is a worm</i>."</p>
<p id="id00438">This, then, is the standpoint of the Oriental. He believes he is a
poor little worm. His philosophy must necessarily <i>trail</i> in the dust.
A worm cannot have the thoughts of an eagle; a worm cannot have the
imagination of a <i>Titan</i>; a worm sees the world only as a worm may.
This is the angle of vision of the Asiatic. He calls himself a worm,
and naturally his view of life shrinks to the limits of his
standpoint. To he perfectly fair, however, we must admit there are
passages in all the bibles of the Orient which are as daring as those
found in any European book, but they represent only the strayings of
the Oriental mind, not its normal pulse. The habitual accent of the
Oriental is that man, calling a woman his mother, is a worm. In the
Psalms of David, or whoever wrote the book, we read these words: "<i>I
am a worm, and not a man</i>." What did the Oriental see in the worm,
which induced him to select it out of all things as the original, so
to speak, of man? The worm <i>crawls</i> and <i>creeps</i> and <i>writhes</i>.
Nothing is so distressing as to see its helpless wiggling—and its
home is in the dust; dirt is its daily food. Moreover, it is in danger
of being stamped or trampled into annihilation at any instant. A worm
<i>represents the minimum</i> of worth,—the dregs in the cup of existence;
it is the scum or the froth of life, which one may blow into the air.
It is impossible to descend lower than this in self-abasement.</p>
<p id="id00439">When the Oriental, therefore, says that man is a worm or "I am a
worm," he is just as much <i>obeying the cumulative</i> pressure of his
Asiatic ancestry, and voicing the inherited submission of the Oriental
mind, as Prometheus, with the vulture at his breast, and shaking his
hand in the face of the gods, expresses the revolt of the European
mind. The normal state for the Asiatic is submission; for the European
it is independence. Slavery has a fascination for the children of the
east. The air of independence is too sharp for them. They crave a
master, a Sultan or a Czar, who shall own them body and soul. Through
long practice, they have acquired the art of servility and flattery,
of salaams and prostrations—an art in which they have become so
efficient that it would be to them like throwing away so much capital
to abandon its practice. They expect to go to Heaven on their knees.
This is not said to hurt the feelings of the races of the Orient. We
are explaining the influence of absolutism upon the products and
tendencies of the human mind. The religion of the Orient, then,
notwithstanding its many beautiful features like its politics, is a
<i>product of the suppressed</i> mind, which finds in the creeping worm of
the dust the measure of its own worth. How different is the European
from the Asiatic in this respect! The latter crawls upon the stage of
this magnificent universe with the timidity, hesitancy and tremblings
of a worm. True to his bringing up, he falls prostrate, overwhelmed by
the marvelous immensities opening before him and the abysses yawning
at his feet. He contracts and dwindles in size, imploring with
outstretched hands to be spared because he is a poor worm. It is a
part of his religion or philosophy that if he admits he is nothing but
a worm, the dread powers will not consider him a rival or a rebel, but
will look upon him as a confirmed subject, and permit him to live.
This is his art, the strategy by which he hopes to secure his
salvation.</p>
<p id="id00440">There has never been a republic in Asia, which is another way of
saying that the Asiatic mind has never asserted its independence.
Hence its thought smacks of slavery. In politics, as in religion, the
Asiatic has always been passive. He has never been an actor, but only
a spectator. It is his to nod the head, fold the arms and bend the
knee. On earth he must have a king and a pope, and in heaven an Allah
or a Jehovah. He has not been created for himself, but for the glory
of his earthly and heavenly Lords. This radical difference between
European self-appreciation and Asiatic self-depreciation furnishes the
key to the problem under discussion.</p>
<p id="id00441">Paganism is the religion of a self-governing race. Buddhism, Judaism,
Mohammedanism, and Christianity are religions born on a soil where man
is owned by another. It will be impossible to imagine Marcus Aurelius,
for instance, crawling upon his knees before any being, or calling
himself a worm. One must have in his blood the taint of a thousand
years of slavery, before he can stoop so low. Marcus Aurelius was a
gentleman. The European conception of a gentleman implies self-respect
and independence; the Oriental conception of a gentleman implies self-
abasement and acquiescence. The Oriental gentleman is a man who serves
his king as though he were his slave.</p>
<p id="id00442">But observe now how the Oriental proceeds to pull down his mind to the
level of his body, which he has likened to a worm. When I was still a
Presbyterian minister, I was invited to address a Sunday-school camp-
meeting at Asbury Park in New Jersey. There were other speakers
besides myself; one of them, known as a Sunday-school leader, had
brought with him a chart of the human heart, which, when he arose to
address the children, he spread on a blackboard before them: "This is
a picture of your heart before you have accepted Jesus. What do you
think of it?" he asked the school. "It is all black," was the answer;
and it was. He had drawn a totally black picture to represent the
heart of the child before conversion.</p>
<p id="id00443">In all the literature of Pagandom, there is not the least intimation
of so fearful an idea as the total depravity of human nature. The
Pagans never thought, spoke, or heard of such a thing. It was
inconceivable to them; they would have recoiled from it as from a
species of barbarism. How radically different, then, must European
culture have been from the Asiatic. There is a gulf well-nigh
impassible between the thought of a free-born citizen and that of the
oppressed and enslaved Oriental.</p>
<p id="id00444">But let us continue. Not satisfied with thinking of himself as a worm,
and of his intellectual and moral nature as totally degraded, the
Oriental strikes with the same paralyzing stroke, at <i>the world in
which he lives</i>, until it, too, withers and becomes an ugly and
heinous thing. He calls the world a "vale of tears," ruled by the
powers of darkness, and groaning under a primeval curse. "The world,
the flesh and the devil" become a trio of iniquity and sin. Some of
you in your earlier days must have sung that Methodist hymn which
represents the world as a snare and a delusion:</p>
<p id="id00445"> "The world is a fleeting show<br/>
For man's illusion given."<br/></p>
<p id="id00446">Given! Think of believing that the world has been purposely given us
to lead us astray. The thought staggers the mind. It suggests a
terrible conspiracy against man. For his ruin, sun, moon and stars co-
operate with the devil. Help! we cry, as we realize our inability to
cope with the tremendous powers hurling themselves against us like
billows of the raging sea, and taking our breath away. It suggests
that we are placed in a world which has been made purposely beautiful,
in order to tempt us into sin. Think of such a belief! It is that of a
slave. It is Asiatic; it is not European. Neither you nor I, in all
our readings, have ever come across any such attitude toward nature in
Pagan literature. The Greeks and the Romans loved nature and made
lovely gods out of. every running brook, caressing zephyr, dancing
wave, glistening dew, sailing cloud, beaming star, beautiful woman, or
brave man. The Oriental suspects nature and regards her smiles—the
shining of the sun, the perfume of the meadows, the swell of the sea,
the fluttering of the branches tipped with blossoms, the emerald
grass, the sapphire sky—looks upon all these as the seductive
advances of a prostitute in whose embrace lurks death!</p>
<p id="id00447">But, once more; not satisfied with dragging the world down to the
plane of his totally depraved nature, and that again to the level of
the worm, the Asiatic projects his fatal thought into the next world
and, crossing the grave, that silent and painless home of a tired
race, he crowds the beyond with a thousand thousand pains and aches
and horrors and fires—with sulphur and brimstone and burning hells.
His frightened imagination invokes dark and infernal beings without
number, fanning with their dark wings the very air he breathes. This
is too revolting to think of. Poor slave! Inured to suffering,—to the
lash, to oppression's crushing heel,—he dare not dream of a painless
future, of a quiet, peaceful sleep at life's end, nor has he the
divine audacity to invent a new world wherein the misery and slavery
of his present existence will be impossible,—where all his tyrants
will be dead, where he shall taste of sweet freedom and become himself
a god. In his timidity and shrinking submission, with the spring of
his heart broken, his spirit crushed, all independence strangled in
his soul,—he puts in the biggest corner of his heaven even,—a
<i>hell</i>!</p>
<p id="id00448">Nor does he pause there, but, stinging his slave imagination once
more, he declares that this future of torture and hell-fire is
<i>everlasting</i>. He cannot improve upon that. Deeper in degradation
he cannot descend. That is the darkest thought he can have, and,
strange to say, he hugs it to his bosom as a mother would her child.
The doctrine of hell is the thought of a slave and of a coward. No
free-horn man, no brave soul could ever have invented so abhorrent an
idea. Only under a regime of absolutism, only under an Oriental Sultan
whose caprice is law, whose vengeance is terrible, whose favors are
fickle, whose power is crushing, whose greed is insatiable, whose
torture instruments are without number, and whose dark dungeons always
resound with the rattling of chains and the groans of martyrs—only
under such a regime could man have invented an unending hell. But we
were mistaken when we said that hell was the darkest that the Asiatic
was capable of. He has grafted upon the European mind a belief which
is darker still.</p>
<p id="id00449">Is there anything more precious in human life than children? The
sternest heart melts, the fiercest features relax, at the sight of an
innocent, sweet, laughing, frolicking babe in its mother's arms. Look
at its glorious eyes, so full of surprises, so deep, so appealing!
Look at the soft round hands, the little feet, the exquisite mouth,
opening like a bud! Hear its prattle, which is nothing but the mind
beginning to stir! Watch its gestures, the first language of the
child! See it with its tiny arms about its mother's neck. Mark its joy
when it is kissed. What else in our human world is more beautiful,
more divine? And yet, and yet, the slave creed of Asia has drawn into
its burning net of damnation even the cradle. John Burroughs describes
how in a Catholic cemetery near where he lives he was shown a
neglected, unkept corner, used for the burial of unbaptized children.
Consecrated ground is denied to them, and so their poor bodies are
huddled together in this profane plot, unblessed and unsaved. I do not
wish to live in a world where such absurdities are not only
countenanced, but where they are exalted even to the dignity of a
religion!</p>
<p id="id00450">O holy children! O sweet children! huddled together in unconsecrated
ground, and thus exposed to the cruelty of indescribable demons! Can
you hear me? I am a man of compassion. I can forgive the murderer. I
can pardon and pity the meanest wretch and take him into my arms, but
I confess that even if I had a heart as big as the ocean, I could not,
I would not, forgive the creed that can be guilty of such inhumanity
against you,—dear, innocent ones, who were born to breathe but for a
moment the harsh air of this world! When such gloom overpowers me and
wrings from my lips such hard words, I find some little respite in
contemplating the old Pagan world in its best days. I hasten for
consolation to my Pagan friends, and in their sanity find healing for
my bruised heart.</p>
<p id="id00451">In one of his letters, the Greek Plutarch says this about children,
which I want you to compare with what St. Augustine, the
representative of the Asiatic creed, says on the same subject. "It is
irreligious," writes Plutarch, "to lament for those pure souls (the
children) who have passed into a better life and a happier dwelling
place." [Footnote: Plutarch Ad Uxorem. Comp. Lecky's History of
European Morals. Vol. I.] Compare this Pagan tenderness for children
with the Asiatic doctrine of infant damnation but recently thrown out
of the Presbyterian creed. Yet, if St. Augustine is to be believed, it
is a heresy to reject the damnation of unbaptized infants: "Whosoever
shall tell," writes this Father of the church, "that infants shall be
quickened in Christ who died without partaking in his sacrament, does
both contradict the apostles' teaching and condemn the whole church."
[Footnote: St. Augustine Epist. 166.] It is infinitely more religious
to disagree with the apostles and the church, if that is their
teaching. The Pagan view of children is the holier view. The doctrine
of the damnation of children could only find lodgment in the brain of
a slave or a madman. It is Asiatic and altogether foreign to the
culture of Europe.</p>
<p id="id00452">All that we have advanced thus far may be summed up in one phrase:
Asia invented the idea that man is a <i>fallen</i> being. This idea, which
is the <i>dors espinal</i>,—the backbone—of Christianity, never for once
entered the mind of the European. We have already quoted from Job and
the Psalms; the following is from the book of Jeremiah: "The heart is
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." This is one of the
texts upon which the doctrine of the fall of man is based. We repeat
that only under a religion of slavery, where one slave vies with
another to abase himself before his lords and masters, could such an
idea have been invented. There is not a man in all our sacred
scriptures who could stand before the deity erect and unabashed, or
who could speak in the accents of a Cicero who said, "We boast justly
of our own virtue, which we could not do if we derived it from the
deity and not from ourselves," or this from Epictetus, "It is
characteristic of a wise man that he looks for all his good and evil
from himself." Such independence was foreign to a race that believed
itself <i>fallen</i>.</p>
<p id="id00453">In further confirmation of our position, it may be said that the
models which the Pagans set up for emulation were men like themselves,
only nobler. The models which the Orientals set up for imitation, on
the other hand, were supernatural beings, or men who were supposed to
possess supernatural powers. The great men for the Oriental are men
who can work miracles, who possess magical powers, who possess secrets
and can know how to influence the deity,—Moses, Joshua, David,
Joseph, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul,—all demi-divinities. The Pagans, on the
other hand, selected natural men, men like themselves, who had earned
the admiration of their fellows. Let me quote to you Plutarch's
eloquent sentence relative to this subject: "Whenever we begin an
enterprise or take possession of a charge, or experience a calamity,
we place before our eyes the examples of the greatest men of our own
or of bygone ages, and we ask ourselves how Plato, or Epaminondas, or
Lycurgus, or Agesilaus, would have acted. Looking into these
personages, as into a faithful mirror, we can remedy our defects in
word or deed."</p>
<p id="id00454">The Westminster Catechism, which in its essentials is a resume of our
Asiatic religion, emphasizes the doctrine of the fall of man, of which
the Pagan world knew nothing, and refused to believe it until priests
succeeded in dominating the mind of Europe: "The catechism following
the Scripture teaches that…we are not only a disinherited family,
but we are personally depraved and demoralized." [Footnote:
Westminster Catechism, Comments.] Goodness! the Oriental imagination,
abused by slavery, cannot rid itself of the idea of being
disinherited, turned out into the cold, orphaned and smitten with
moral sores from head to foot. To the Pagan, such a description of man
would have been the acme of absurdity. Again: "It (the fall) affirms
that he (man) is all wrong, in all things and all the time."
[Footnote: Westminster Catechism, Comments.] If this was comforting
news to the Asiatic, the Pagan world would have rejected the idea as
unworthy of men in their senses. Once more: "All mankind by their fall
lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made
liable to all miseries in this life and to the pains of hell forever."
[Footnote: Westminster Catechism, Comments.] And this is the Gospel we
have imported from Asia!</p>
<p id="id00455">Is it not pathetic? Could slavery ever strike a deeper bottom than
that? Standing before his owner, the Asiatic, of his own choice, hands
himself over to be degraded, to be placed in chains and delivered up
to the torments of hell forever. I despair of man. I would cry my
heart out if I permitted myself to dwell upon the folly and stupidity
and slavery of which man voluntarily makes himself the victim. Think
of it! A man and a woman, nobody knows where or when, are supposed to
have tasted of the fruit of a tree; the Oriental mind, with its
crouching imagination, pounces upon this flimsy, fanciful tale with
the appetite of a carrion crow, and exalts it to the dignity of an
excuse for the eternal damnation of a whole world. I am dazed! I can
say no more!</p>
<p id="id00456">Let us recapitulate. The Oriental distrust of the natural man, born of
self-depreciation, which is the fruit of prolonged slavery, develops
into a sort of mental canker spreading at a raging pace until the
whole universe, with its glorious sun and stars, becomes an object of
horror and loathing. Not satisfied with thinking of himself as a worm,
of his intellectual and moral nature as totally depraved, he
communicates his disease to the world in which he lives until it, too,
shrinks and wastes away. Then the disease, finding no more on this
side of the grave to feed upon, leaps over the grave and converts the
beyond, the virgin worlds, into an <i>inferno</i> with which to satiate its
fear. Indeed frightful are the thoughts of a slave people!</p>
<p id="id00457">Let me now, in conclusion, call your attention to another difference
between the Occidental and the Oriental mind. When the body is feeble
or ill-nourished, it is less liable to resist disease; likewise when the
mind is alarmed, cowed, or pinched with fear, it becomes more exposed
to superstition. Superstition is the disease of the mind. It will keep
away from robust minds, as physical disease from a body in health. Now,
the Asiatic mind, scared into silence and subjection,—starved to a
mere shadow of what it should be, falls an easy prey to all the maladies
that mind is heir to. The European mind, on the other hand, with room
and air to move and grow in, develops a vitality which offers resistance
to all attacks of mental disease. That explains why superstition thrives
with ignorance and slavery, and expires when science and liberty gain
the ascendency. Sanitary precautions prevent physical disease; knowledge
and liberty constitute the therapeutics of the mind. Why is the Oriental
so prone or partial to miracle and mystery? His mind is sick. To believe
is easier to him than to reason. He follows the line of the least
resistance: he has invented faith that he may not have to think. The
mental cells in his brain are so starved, so devitalized, that they have
to be whipped into movement. Only the bizarre, the monstrous, the
supernatural,—demons, ghosts, dream worlds, miracles and mysteries,—can
hold his attention. Not science, but metaphysics, barren speculation,—is
the product of the Oriental mind. The philosopher Bacon describes the
Asiatic when he speaks of men who "have hitherto dwelt but little, or
rather only slightly touched upon experience, whilst they have wasted
much time on theories and fictions of the imagination."</p>
<p id="id00458">Again: I sometimes think that if it be true that monotheism, the idea
of one God, was first discovered in Asia, it must have been suggested
to them by the regime of Absolutism, under which they lived. Unlike
Asia, democratic Europe believed in a republic of gods. Polytheism is
more consonant with the republican idea, than monotheism. If we would
let the American President rule the land without the aid of the two
houses of congress or his cabinet ministers, his power would be
infinitely more than it is now, but his gain would be the people's
loss. His increased power would only represent so much more power
taken away from the people. One God means not only more slaves, but
more abject, more helpless ones. One God is a centralization which
reduces man's liberty to a minimum. With more gods, and gods at times
disagreeing among themselves, and all bidding for man's support, man
would count for more. The Greeks could not tolerate a Jehovah, or an
Allah, before whom the Oriental rabble bent the knee. "Allah knows,"
exclaims the Moslem; that is why the Mohammedans continue in
ignorance. "Allah is great," cries again the Turk. That is why he
himself is small. The more powerful the sovereign, the smaller the
subject.</p>
<p id="id00459">Now this leads us to a final reflection upon the difference between
the mind brought up under restraint,—in slavery,—and the mind of the
free. "The Pagan," to quote Lecky, "believed that to become acceptable
to the deity, one must be virtuous;" the Asiatic doctrine, on the
contrary, taught that "the most heroic efforts of human virtue are
insufficient to avert a sentence of eternal condemnation, unless
united with an implicit belief" in the dogmas of religion. In other
words, the noblest of men cannot be saved by his own merits of
character alone, for even when we have done our best, we are but
"unprofitable slaves," quoting a Bible text. Only by the merits of
Christ, or by the grace of God, can any man be saved. Have you ever
paused to think of the purport of this piece of Orientalism? It wipes
out every imaginable claim or right of man. Even when he is just and
great and good, he has no rights, he is as vile as the vilest. Only
the favor of the king can save,—only the grace of God, who can save
the thief on the cross if he so pleases. Is he not absolute? If he
extends his scepter, you live; if he smiles you are spared; if he
patronizes you, you are fortunate. He says, live! you live. He says,
die! you die. This is the apotheosis of despotism exalted into a
revelation.</p>
<p id="id00460">What, then, is our creed, but the thoughts of an eastern slave
population, cringing before the throne of a Sultan, and one by one
signing away their liberties? "The foundation of all real grandeur is
a spirit of proud and lofty independence," says Buckle; but that is
not the spirit of Asia, or of its religion. It is, and we ought to try
to keep it, the spirit of the Western world.</p>
<p id="id00461">I cannot imagine how we in this country, born of sturdy parents, born
of the freedom-loving Pagans of Rome and Greece, born of men who shook
their hands in the face of heaven, and pulled the gods off their
thrones when they violated the rights of man,—I cannot understand how
we have thrown overboard the proud, lofty spirit of independence of
the Pagans,—our forefathers, and taken upon our necks the strangling
yoke of the slave-thought of Asia!</p>
<p id="id00462" style="margin-top: 4em">[Illustration: Christ, Half Woman, at Baptism in Jordan. Cathedral of<br/>
Chartres, France.]<br/></p>
<h1 id="id00463" style="margin-top: 5em">PART III.</h1>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />