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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 55

The Daily Telegraph, — The Chief Justice on Freethought. — To the Editor Of the Daily Telegraph

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The Daily Telegraph,

The Chief Justice on Freethought.

To the Editor Of the Daily Telegraph.

Sir,—In a paragraph briefly commenting on Sir James Martin's address in defence of Christianity, delivered the previous evening, you say it is "pretty sure to provoke a salutary controversy." I presume, therefore, you will not object to concede me space in your columns to reply to some of the assertions and arguments of the Chief Justice, especially as I shall carefully avoid imitating the learned Judge's example and resorting to abuse when argument fails. To speak of the "amazing and presumptuous intolerance" of those who only demand to exercise the right of free speech which Sir James Martin claims and exercises furnishes a new illustration of the profound truth embodied in Æsop's Fable of the "Wolf and the Lamb." To denounce as "insolent vanity" the contention of men who simply seek to be allowed to shape their public words and actions in accordance with their convictions, and to term those who, like John Bright and Sir George Grey, strive to abolish compulsory oath-taking, "men of weak intellect," is to invite a form of rejoinder which I, for one, decline to indulge in.

The main argument on which Sir James relies to enforce upon unwilling minds an acceptance of Christian dogmas, "opposed to reason," is that the universe contains many mysteries "equally beyond the scope of intelligence." In other words, because we are ignorant in certain directions where we truthfully confess our ignorance; therefore in other directions where we are equally ignorant we are dogmatically to assert knowledge. We know nothing of the mystery impelling the visible universe, and we say so. We know nothing of the profounder mystery of God, but we are, at the bidding of ancient Jewish and Christian writers, to shroud our ignorance in an affectation of knowledge. The argument is futile. Protestants generally admit as much when combatting the assumptions of Rome. To the assertion of the Roman priest who affirms the sudden and miraculous transformation of the bread and wine in the sacrament, the Protestant answer is based on reason; and the priest who adduces the mysteries of the visible universe in support of his assumption is laughed at. But human reason declines to bow down before Protestant dogmas more than before Roman Catholic ones. Some seven years ago I was called upon to visit in friendly fraternal fashion the bedside of a dying freethinker, in the Dunedin hospital. He was looking forward to death as a happy release from pain and suffering, and the only thing of which he complained was the pertinacious pesterings of certain fanatical visitors to the hospital, who strove to make him think as they thought. He was a German, and told me that his freethinking originated in the advice tendered him years before by an eminent and deservedly respected minister, the head of the Presbyterian community, Dr. Stewart. There was no Lutheran Church in Dunedin, and Dr. Stewart had pressed him to attend Knox Church, arguing that there was no important distinction between Lutheranism and Calvinism. The German urged that he had been taught to believe in the doctrine of the Real Presence at the Sacrament. "Oh, man," was the good doctor's answer; "why don't you use your reason?" The question set him thinking. He used his reason, and before long the doctrine of the Incarnation appeared no more reasonable than that of transubstantiation.

Sir James Martin, while strongly and even offensively upholding his own views in the realm of theology, insinuates a complaint against other judges who have advanced views differing from his. Some of the most notable opponents of Christian orthodoxy of late years have belonged to the judicial bench. Judge Strange, of the High Court of Madras; Chief Justice Hansom, of South Australia; and Judges Higinbotham and Williams, of Victoria, are familiar names. Chief Justice Martin talks of "the Supreme Court of a Christian community," and evidently disapproves of judges touching theology with other than orthodox pens and tongues. But to what "Christian community" does his Honor refer? A Christian community involves a Christian religion supported from a general Christian fund. The colonies are not Christian communities, but communities where Christians constitute the majority; and all officials in such communities are justified in giving free expression to their honest sentiments whenever they may deem it useful to do so. Christianity has been propped up long enough by State persecution. If it be true, it has no occasion to silence any opponent by force or penalty. It may, in very deed, concede that freedom of opinion which Sir James erroneously alleges it has already granted, but which those who have recently emerged from English page break prisons on account of their opinions—those who are still subjected to persecution and disability for their heresy, can too emphatically deny.

Sir James condemns "some men of science" who, he alleges, have led the assaults upon Christianity. Science has always been charged with occupying an antichristian position. Bacon, Newton and Locke, who are now amusingly put forward as shining lights of Christianity, were in their lifetime denounced in terms far more abusive than any which have been hurled at Darwin-Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer or Hæckel. What is the reason of this? Simply that science is perpetually bringing to light new facts relative to the universe, and these disagree with and hence cause lack of faith in old assumptions. The religious sentiment—the sentiment of reverence for the highest and noblest we can know or imagine—remains; but the dogmas of theology find themselves endangered. Truth cannot be endangered; but dogmas which have postured as truth may be and are. The present president of the Royal Society in one of his lay sermons says :—"The myths of Paganism are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval imaginations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as the authoritative standard of fact. The cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities—whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism."

Professor Tyndall, another veritable spokes-man on behalf of science, intimates very clearly wherein the contest between it and religion consists. In one of his articles on "Evolution," originally published in the Nineteenth Century, he states the case thus :—" Feeling appeared in the world before knowledge; and thoughts, conceptions and creeds, founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, taken root in man . . . It is against this objective rendering of the emotions—this thrusting into the region of fact and positive knowledge of conceptions essentially ideal and poetic—that science, consciously or unconsciously, wages war. Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on its subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain. But when, manipulated by the constructive imagination, mixed with imperfect or inaccurate historical data, and moulded by misapplied logic, this feeling traverses our knowledge of nature, science, as in duty bound, stands as a hostile power in its path. It is against the mythologic scenery, if I may use the term, rather than against the life and substance of religion, that science enters her protest. Sooner or later among thinking people that scenery will be taken for what it is worth, as an effort on the part of man-to bring the mystery of life and nature within the range of his capacities; as a temporary and essentially fluxional rendering in terras of knowledge of that which transcends all knowledge and admits only of ideal approach." It is against those ancient guesses of our race being longer regarded as divine revelation that the much-abused Freethought movement of the day is directed. All the good secular work of the world, by whatever sectarian name it may term itself—Hindoo, Buddhist, Mahomedan, Hebrew or Christian—is most acceptable to it. Freethinkers look to see that work increased a hundred-fold when labor on behalf of humanity shall become the first, and not a secondary, thought of religious philosophy—when humanity and not Christianity shall be proclaimed as the shibboleth of brotherhood. Sir James Martin terms these innovators "apostles of disorder." He is linking them to an honorable ancestry. Does he remember, in a past age of transition, when the world was emerging from outworn superstitions, who was denounced as an " apostle or disorder "? "For we have found this man a pestilent fellow, and a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes, who also hath gone about to profane the Temple." The judges and priests of the day got the upper hand of that "apostle of disorder," and crushed him. But m so far as he strove for freedom from the incubus of Jewish ritualism he was mightier than they, and, the centuries reaped the gain of his conflict. Commingling like all human teachings, truth and error, his truth remains ours, while his error is gradually fading away. May the work of the "apostles of disorder" of the present day share a similar fate.—Yours, &c..

Charles Bright.

Redmyre,