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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 8

Sacred History: its Influence on the Conscience

Sacred History: its Influence on the Conscience.

Whatever respect may be professed for the Bible, whether as an authoritatively inspired book, or as a precious monument of the religious archives of humanity, every one must, on reflection, be struck with the strangeness of this anomaly;—that the first social model diligently set before the minds of European children of the nineteenth century, born in a free and Christian country, should be a type of private and public life, borrowed from the most remote historic and pre-historic periods of an oriental people; and, especially, that both the institution and the record of this model should be presented to them as a direct revelation from God! Whether we will it or not, children must and do thence derive many erroneous ideas, which it is always difficult, and often impossible, afterwards to eradicate. We do not mean that erroneous ideas are directly inculcated by teachers; but children will and always do form for themselves from sacred history more than from other lessons, because in general none take such hold of their imagination, wrong ideas which, often without being distinctly formulated, become deeply graven on their minds.

It is precisely these ideas, inevitably formed by a child for himself, and not those which a learned theologian might recommend him to, form, which we do not hesitate to blame as the chief source and cause of the atheism, materialism, thoughtlessness, iniquity, and misery, which unhappily abound in our midst. And we beg those who, from religious, conservative, or professional motives, are inclined to think otherwise, to consider calmly, whether, in fact, they are not obliged, in teaching children, to adopt one or other of the following alternatives:—

You either teach them sacred history according to the texts taken in their literal sense as that has been understood and accepted by Jewish and Christian tradition up to our own days : and then, you are forced, since you cannot contradict the Bible, to approve as facts a multitude of mythical stories, which you cannot yourselves accept as you cause the children to accept them, page 180 to approve the most bloody massacres as willed and commanded by God, to approve as extolled in the Bible, the perfidious atrocity of a Jael or a Deborah, to approve as a divine institution, the unsparing murder of thousands of little children, to approve the Semitic idea of holy war, to approve the interventions of God under forms the most repugnant to common sense and to morality, and to approve a theocratic social state, in which God commands intolerance, tolerates polygamy and slavery, and absolutely interdicts all liberty of investigation, of inquiry, of doubt, and of discussion.

Or else you make for them a sacred history of your own invention, in which you arbitrarily suppress whatever you disapprove, making a selection among the miracles and legends, retaining only what can be reconciled with modern morality, denying or dissembling the idea of absolute predestination without which sacred history ceases to have any meaning, and omitting, curtailing, or falsifying the stories which are too characteristic: and then it is no longer the authentic biblical history, but it is Judaism spiritualised as anything whatever might be: it is an ambiguous and indefinable mixture of history and symbolism, a kind of instruction even more dangerous than the other, because it retains essentially the same spirit and the same general tendencies as the old popular sacred history, while it is deprived of those rude and primitive features, which might sometimes have served to put the children on their guard, and which furnish the best clue by which to escape from the murky labyrinth of superstitious belief.

Both proceedings alike appear to us very far from being in accord with the requirements of modern education. However skilfully it may be attempted, there can never be produced a manual of sacred history, which shall be at the same time sincerely in harmony with the biblical narrative, and with the moral ideas of our time. There is only one consistent course for us to take. It is to teach not sacred history, but Jewish history, in its own chronological place, exactly as other histories are taught, which are commonly called profane, but which are certainly not more so than that which we are discussing.

Until this course shall have been adopted, there must always remain at least one inevitable danger and disadvantage, even supposing that all the others may have been removed by means of skilful editing and curtailment. It is that children are trained and accustomed to have two weights and two measures, to judge of the past by one rule and of the present by another, and to extol there what is detested here. Hence, instead of believing in one single and universal moral law, their faith is divided between the rule and the exception. There are in each of them, as it were, two minds and two consciences: the one stamped with the character of the antediluvian world, or cast in the mould of the Jewish patriarchs and prophets, believing in the witch of Endor, page 181 the speaking ass of Balaam, with an entire phantasmagoria of superstitious images, dug from the oldest and lowest strata of human civilisation; the other, on the contrary, stamped more or less with modern intellectual and scientific culture, utterly opposed to the marvellous, the despotic, and the absurd. Thence it comes that in our days there are still to be seen so many people who will loudly condemn persecution, or tyranny, or the slightest individual or national intolerance in modern times; but who will not dare to say that the same things were wrong in Jewish antiquity. They firmly believe that duty is now the only rule of couduct, that all men ought to be regarded as equal by the law, and that mankind is a brotherhood, all being sons of the same God; but many of them, nevertheless, believe in. some kind of special favours, graces, and privileges, reserved by the decrees of God, for His own elect few.

We are convinced that the contradictions and inconsistencies of individual opinion and character, which are so very common, proceed in great measure from the still almost universal teaching of sacred history. Suppose you take an opportunity of conversing with a child, who has just been learning sacred history in the school or Bible-class. Ask him what he thinks, for example, of the massacre of the Canaanites, of Samuel hewing a prisoner in pieces, of the aggressive wars in honour of the true God, of the capital punishment inflicted for this or that religious offence, &c. You will see whether he does not approve of them; you will see whether he answers you regarding them with that frank and natural indignation, which would be aroused by the same acts anywhere else than in biblical history. You will see whether he has not, instinctively, become impregnated with ideas at which even his teachers may be surprised, and of which they will say, we have never taught him that. You will see whether, even amidst the purer and juster ideas in which he is otherwise educated, sacred history has not filled his young mind and imagination with strange conceptions of God, as the God of armies, who commands massacres and blesses the murderers—a God of election, predestination and partiality, who governs the universe, not by laws, not according to justice, but by a series of miracles and coups-d' état,—a God, sovereign and supreme, but not always a just God, and still less a God of love,—a terrible and jealous God, who will not have his creatures to say about every thing—is it really true?—how and why is it true?—an all powerful God, who punishes doubt as a crime, and who takes vengeance by eternal torments upon his enemies, that is to say upon all unbelievers and rationalists! Make the experiment, and you will see whether, before any ulterior education, the place has not been taken and filled in the child's mind by these phantoms of a former age! You will see whether sacred history has not, in more than one respect, had the effect of "changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man!"

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Friends of progress, liberals, radicals, reformers, believers or free-thinkers, do you wish to put an end to those anomalies, to those anachronisms, to those incongruities, to all those remains of former ignorance and iniquity, which still continue to disfigure even the most advanced societies? Do you wish, where freedom is already triumphant, to assure for it a future? Do you wish, where it is not yet victorious, to hasten its advent, by suddenly diminishing in a tremendous degree the number and influence of clerical and other obstructives and reactionaries of every shade? Then the most simple and obvious, and assuredly the most urgent of all reforms to be obtained,—from the law on the one hand and from public opinion on the other,—is that there shall no longer be given to your children, by way of their first and social education, the examples which come to us from the remote antiquity of a people, who were doubtless great in their own time and way, but whom humanity has long since outgrown and surpassed.

The advocates of the Bible will point with an air of triumph to the fact, that the nations, which are at present most distinguished for their freedom, prosperity, and enlightenment, are precisely those which, being Protestant, are most penetrated with the influence of the Bible; and will argue thence that its influence cannot but be good.

Tell them not to forget that Protestantism brought to those nations two things, then inseparably united, the Bible and liberty. Bid them remember that the Bible was then, the symbol, the trophy, and almost the synonym of liberty; and that the appeal from the Church to the Book was then the vindication of individual reason, free thought, and private judgment, against dogmatic and traditional authority. Ask them whether, if the Bible with liberty has done much good, the Bible without liberty has not also done much evil. Point also to such facts as that, if martyrs have gone to the scaffold with the Bible in their hands, it was no less with the Bible in his hand that Calvin sent his free-thinking friend Servetus to the stake; and that if some heroic emigrants with the Bible founded the United States, their persecutors also had the same Bible.

If they say that the abolition of the Bible would herald a return to Paganism and the total overthrow of all moral and religious culture; tell them that we have no such prophetic opinion, but that, far from proposing to abolish the Bible, we only desire to have it read, studied, and taught like other ancient books, in a manner worthy alike of Protestantism, and of modern science, with full liberty of conscience, of intellect, and of investigation. Finally, remind them that Abyssinians and Catholics also have the Bible, only they read it under the sanction of, and in submission to a supreme authority; and that Protestants forfeit that name, unless they road it to judge for themselves, without any such submission and with their reason and their conscience perfectly free to examine every part of it upon its own merits, without any prejudice or foregone conclusion.

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Inhabitants of a free and progressive country, you know that there can be no security for progress in society, unless its influence be at work in the school. The school is the nursery of society, the society of the future the heir of that of to-day. Those who have any care for the future of society ought, above all things, to look well to the school; for, even though we may be driving the intolerant and despotic spirit of the past more and more out of our political institutions, it is vain to imagine that any permanent or safe success has been achieved, until the last vestiges of that spirit shall have been banished from our schools. If, then, you have at heart the continuance of progress; if you do not think that the point which we have reached is already so high that we ought now to halt in our course, and to set up the motto "rest and be thankful;" then see to it that your children shall constantly breathe, in the school as well as in the family, the atmosphere of freedom; take care that they learn to speak, and thus to think, much and early about right and duty, about patriotism and philanthropy, about human liberty, equality, and brotherhood. Beware lest the first language to which their ear becomes accustomed, be one in which the ideas of ancient times obscure those of to-day. Guard, most especially, against letting any man teach them to abdicate a portion of their conscience or of their reason under the pretence of purifying it, or under any pretence whatever. It is high time that a new spirit should breathe in our schools, and that teachers and pupils should no longer live there with their eyes fixed behind them upon a small corner of Ancient Syria; but that they should have their minds and their hearts equally open to everything generous, good, and true, from whatever point of the human horizon it may come. Be very suspicious, for your children's sake, of every-thing which forbids or limits investigation, or in any other way restricts the free exercise of reason; of everything which recalls, even indirectly, exclusive privilege or arbitrary despotism in heaven or upon earth, in the past or in the present; of everything like subtle or sophistical distinctions, when employed against simple, direct, and strong convictions, in matters of morality; of everything which prescribes, under any kind of pretext, exceptions or restrictions to the common law of natural justice. And, as the first application of these principles, restore, in the elementary education of your children, the Jewish people to their legitimate rank, which will still be a high one, among other nations in the annals of the past:—abolish Sacred History, and put in its place The History of Humanity.—Mr. Thomas Scott's Series of Papers.