Part 56

Holiness!--In a garden of weeds, a hotbed of lies, where hypnotised saints sing psalms and worship ghosts, while dogs and horses are pampered and groomed, and children are left to rot, to hunger, and to sink into crime, or shame, or the grave.

Holiness! For shame. The word is obnoxious. It has stood so long for craven fear, for exotistical inebriation, for selfish retirement from the trials and buffets and dirty work of the world.

What have we to do with such dreamy, self-centred, emotional holiness, here and now in London?

What we want is citizenship, human sympathy, public spirit, daring agitators, stern reformers, drains, houses, schoolmasters, clean water, truth-speaking, soap--and Socialism.

Holiness! The people are being robbed. The people are being cheated. The people are being lied to. The people are being despised and neglected and ruined body and soul.

Yes. And you will find some of the greatest rascals and most impudent liars in the "Synagogues and High Places" of the cities.

Holiness! Give us common sense, and common honesty, and a "steady supply of men and women who can be trusted with small sums."

Your Christians talk of saving sinners. But our duty is not to save sinners; but to prevent their regular manufacture: their systematic manufacture in the interests of holy and respectable and successful and superior persons.

Holiness! Cant, rant, and fustian! The nations are rotten with dirty pride, and dirty greed, and mean lying, and petty ambitions, and sickly sentimentality. Holiness! I should be ashamed to show my face at Heaven's gates and say I came from such a contemptible planet.

Holiness! Your religion does not make it--its ethics are too weak, its theories too unsound, its transcendentalism is too thin.

Take as an example this much-admired passage from St. James:

Pure religion and undefiled is this before God and the Father, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

The widows and the fatherless are our brothers and sisters and our flesh and blood, and should be at home in our hearts and on our hearths. And who that is a man will work to keep himself unspotted from the world if the service of the world needs him to expose his flesh and his soul to risk?

I can fancy a Reverend Gentleman going to Heaven, unspotted from the world, to face the awful eyes of a Heavenly Father whose gaze has been on London.

A good man mixes with the world in the rough-and-tumble, and takes his share of the dangers, and the falls, and the temptations. His duty is to work and to help, and not to shirk and keep his hands white. His business is not to be holy, but to be useful.

In such a world as this, friend Christian, a man has no business reading the Bible, singing hymns, and attending divine worship. He has not time. All the strength and pluck and wit he possesses are needed in the work of real religion, of real salvation. The rest is all "dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight."

There ought to be no such thing as poverty in the world. The earth is bounteous: the ingenuity of man is great. He who defends the claims of the individual, or of a class, against the rights of the human race is a criminal.

A hungry man, an idle man, an ignorant man, a destitute or degraded woman, a beggar or pauper child is a reproach to Society and a witness against existing religion and civilisation.

War is a crime and a horror. No man is doing his duty when he is not trying his best to abolish war.

I have been asked why I "interfered in things beyond my sphere," and why I made "an unprovoked attack" upon religion. I am trying to explain. My position is as follows:

Rightly or wrongly, I am a Democrat. Rightly or wrongly, I am for the rights of the masses as against the privileges of the classes. Rightly or wrongly, I am opposed to Godship, Kingship, Lordship, Priestship. Rightly or wrongly, I am opposed to Imperialism, Militarism, and Conquest. Rightly or wrongly, I am for universal brotherhood and universal freedom. Rightly or wrongly, I am for union against disunion, for collective ownership against private ownership. Rightly or wrongly, I am for reason against dogma, for evolution against revelation; for humanity always; for earth, not Heaven; for the holiest Trinity of all--the Trinity of Man, Woman, and Child.

The greatest curse of humanity is ignorance. The only remedy is knowledge.

Religion, being based on fixed authority, is naturally opposed to knowledge.

A man may have a university education and be ignorant. A man may be a genius, like Plato, or Shakespeare, or Darwin, and lack more knowledge. The humblest of unlettered peasants can teach the highest genius something useful. The greatest scientific and philosophical achievements of the most brilliant age are imperfect, and can be added to and improved by future generations.

There is no such thing as human infallibility. There is no finality in human knowledge and human progress. Fixed authority in matters of knowledge or belief is an insult to humanity.

Christianity degrades and restrains humanity with the shackles of "original sin." Man is not born in sin. There is no such thing as sin. Man is innately more prone to good than to evil; and the path of his destiny is upward.

I should be inclined to call him who denies the innate goodness of mankind an "Infidel."

Heredity breeds different kinds of men. But all are men whom it breeds. And all men are capable of good, and of yet more good. Environment can move mountains. There is a limit to its power for good and for evil, but that power is almost unimaginably great.