[i]

[ii]

[iii]

TOLERANCE

By
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON

NEW YORK
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1925

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[v]

TO THE MEMORY OF
JOHN W. T. NICHOLS

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[9]

Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.

To the north, to the south, to the west and to the east stretched the ridges of the Hills Everlasting.

A little stream of Knowledge trickled slowly through a deep worn gully.

It came out of the Mountains of the Past.

It lost itself in the Marshes of the Future.

It was not much, as rivers go. But it was enough for the humble needs of the villagers.

In the evening, when they had watered their cattle and had filled their casks, they were content to sit down to enjoy life.

The Old Men Who Knew were brought forth from the shady corners where they had spent their day, pondering over the mysterious pages of an old book.

They mumbled strange words to their grandchildren, who would have preferred to play with the pretty pebbles, brought down from distant lands.

Often these words were not very clear.

But they were writ a thousand years ago by a forgotten race. Hence they were holy.

For in the Valley of Ignorance, whatever was old was venerable. And those who dared to gainsay the wisdom of the fathers were shunned by all decent people.

And so they kept their peace.

Fear was ever with them. What if they should be refused the common share of the products of the garden?

[12]

Vague stories there were, whispered at night among the narrow streets of the little town, vague stories of men and women who had dared to ask questions.

They had gone forth, and never again had they been seen.

A few had tried to scale the high walls of the rocky range that hid the sun.

Their whitened bones lay at the foot of the cliffs.

The years came and the years went by.

Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance.

Out of the darkness crept a man.

The nails of his hands were torn.

His feet were covered with rags, red with the blood of long marches.

He stumbled to the door of the nearest hut and knocked.

Then he fainted. By the light of a frightened candle, he was carried to a cot.

In the morning throughout the village it was known: “He has come back.”

The neighbors stood around and shook their heads. They had always known that this was to be the end.

Defeat and surrender awaited those who dared to stroll away from the foot of the mountains.

And in one corner of the village the Old Men shook their heads and whispered burning words.

They did not mean to be cruel, but the Law was the Law. Bitterly this man had sinned against the wishes of Those Who Knew.

As soon as his wounds were healed he must be brought to trial.

They meant to be lenient.

[13]

They remembered the strange, burning eyes of his mother. They recalled the tragedy of his father, lost in the desert these thirty years ago.

The Law, however, was the Law; and the Law must be obeyed.

The Men Who Knew would see to that.

They carried the wanderer to the Market Place, and the people stood around in respectful silence.

He was still weak from hunger and thirst and the Elders bade him sit down.

He refused.

They ordered him to be silent.

But he spoke.

Upon the Old Men he turned his back and his eyes sought those who but a short time before had been his comrades.

“Listen to me,” he implored. “Listen to me and be rejoiced. I have come back from beyond the mountains. My feet have trod a fresh soil. My hands have felt the touch of other races. My eyes have seen wondrous sights.

“When I was a child, my world was the garden of my father.

“To the west and to the east, to the south and to the north lay the ranges from the Beginning of Time.

“When I asked what they were hiding, there was a hush and a hasty shaking of heads. When I insisted, I was taken to the rocks and shown the bleached bones of those who had dared to defy the Gods.

“When I cried out and said, ‘It is a lie! The Gods love those who are brave!’ the Men Who Knew came and read to me from their sacred books. The Law, they explained, had ordained all things of Heaven and Earth. The Valley was[14] ours to have and to hold. The animals and the flowers, the fruit and the fishes were ours, to do our bidding. But the mountains were of the Gods. What lay beyond was to remain unknown until the End of Time.

“So they spoke, and they lied. They lied to me, even as they have lied to you.

“There are pastures in those hills. Meadows too, as rich as any. And men and women of our own flesh and blood. And cities resplendent with the glories of a thousand years of labor.

“I have found the road to a better home. I have seen the promise of a happier life. Follow me and I shall lead you thither. For the smile of the Gods is the same there as here and everywhere.”

He stopped and there went up a great cry of horror.

“Blasphemy!” cried the Old Men. “Blasphemy and sacrilege! A fit punishment for his crime! He has lost his reason. He dares to scoff at the Law as it was written down a thousand years ago. He deserves to die!”

And they took up heavy stones.

And they killed him.

And his body they threw at the foot of the cliffs, that it might lie there as a warning to all who questioned the wisdom of the ancestors.

Then it happened a short time later that there was a great drought. The little Brook of Knowledge ran dry. The cattle died of thirst. The harvest perished in the fields, and there was hunger in the Valley of Ignorance.

The Old Men Who Knew, however, were not disheartened.[15] Everything would all come right in the end, they prophesied, for so it was writ in their most Holy Chapters.

Besides, they themselves needed but little food. They were so very old.

Winter came.

The village was deserted.

More than half of the populace died from sheer want.

The only hope for those who survived lay beyond the mountains.

But the Law said “No!”

And the Law must be obeyed.

One night there was a rebellion.

Despair gave courage to those whom fear had forced into silence.

Feebly the Old Men protested.

They were pushed aside. They complained of their lot. They bewailed the ingratitude of their children, but when the last wagon pulled out of the village, they stopped the driver and forced him to take them along.

The flight into the unknown had begun.

It was many years since the Wanderer had returned. It was no easy task to discover the road he had mapped out.

Thousands fell a victim to hunger and thirst before the first cairn was found.

From there on the trip was less difficult.

The careful pioneer had blazed a clear trail through the woods and amidst the endless wilderness of rock.

By easy stages it led to the green pastures of the new land.

[16]

Silently the people looked at each other.

“He was right after all,” they said. “He was right, and the Old Men were wrong....

“He spoke the truth, and the Old Men lied....

“His bones lie rotting at the foot of the cliffs, but the Old Men sit in our carts and chant their ancient lays....

“He saved us, and we slew him....

“We are sorry that it happened, but of course, if we could have known at the time....”

Then they unharnessed their horses and their oxen and they drove their cows and their goats into the pastures and they built themselves houses and laid out their fields and they lived happily for a long time afterwards.

A few years later an attempt was made to bury the brave pioneer in the fine new edifice which had been erected as a home for the Wise Old Men.

A solemn procession went back to the now deserted valley, but when the spot was reached where his body ought to have been, it was no longer there.

A hungry jackal had dragged it to his lair.

A small stone was then placed at the foot of the trail (now a magnificent highway). It gave the name of the man who had first defied the dark terror of the unknown, that his people might be guided into a new freedom.

And it stated that it had been erected by a grateful posterity.

As it was in the beginning—as it is now—and as some day (so we hope) it shall no longer be.

In the year 527 Flavius Anicius Justinianus became ruler of the eastern half of the Roman Empire.

This Serbian peasant (he came from Uskub, the much disputed railroad junction of the late war) had no use for “book-learnin’.” It was by his orders that the ancient Athenian school of philosophy was finally suppressed. And it was he who closed the doors of the only Egyptian temple that had continued to do business centuries after the valley of the Nile had been invaded by the monks of the new Christian faith.

This temple stood on a little island called Philae, not far from the first great waterfall of the Nile. Ever since men could remember, the spot had been dedicated to the worship of Isis and for some curious reason, the Goddess had survived where all her African and Greek and Roman rivals had miserably perished. Until finally, in the sixth century, the island was the only spot where the old and most holy art of picture writing was still understood and where a small number of priests continued to practice a trade which had been forgotten in every other part of the land of Cheops.

And now, by order of an illiterate farmhand, known as His Imperial Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were declared state property, the statues and images were sent to the museum of Constantinople and the priests and the writing-masters were thrown into jail. And when the last of[18] them had died from hunger and neglect, the age-old trade of making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.

All this was a great pity.

If Justinian (a plague upon his head!) had been a little less thorough and had saved just a few of those old picture experts in a sort of literary Noah’s Ark, he would have made the task of the historian a great deal easier. For while (owing to the genius of Champollion) we can once more spell out the strange Egyptian words, it remains exceedingly difficult for us to understand the inner meaning of their message to posterity.

And the same holds true for all other nations of the ancient world.

What did those strangely bearded Babylonians, who left us whole brickyards full of religious tracts, have in mind when they exclaimed piously, “Who shall ever be able to understand the counsel of the Gods in Heaven?” How did they feel towards those divine spirits which they invoked so continually, whose laws they endeavored to interpret, whose commands they engraved upon the granite shafts of their most holy city? Why were they at once the most tolerant of men, encouraging their priests to study the high heavens, and to explore the land and the sea, and at the same time the most cruel of executioners, inflicting hideous punishments upon those of their neighbors who had committed some breach of divine etiquette which today would pass unnoticed?

Until recently we did not know.

We sent expeditions to Nineveh, we dug holes in the sand of Sinai and deciphered miles of cuneiform tablets. And everywhere in Mesopotamia and Egypt we did our best to find the key that should unlock the front door of this mysterious store-house of wisdom.

And then, suddenly and almost by accident, we discovered[19] that the back door had been wide open all the time and that we could enter the premises at will.

But that convenient little gate was not situated in the neighborhood of Akkad or Memphis.

It stood in the very heart of the jungle.

And it was almost hidden by the wooden pillars of a pagan temple.

Our ancestors, in search of easy plunder, had come in contact with what they were pleased to call “wild men” or “savages.”

The meeting had not been a pleasant one.

The poor heathen, misunderstanding the intentions of the white men, had welcomed them with a salvo of spears and arrows.

The visitors had retaliated with their blunderbusses.

After that there had been little chance for a quiet and unprejudiced exchange of ideas.

The savage was invariably depicted as a dirty, lazy, good-for-nothing loafer who worshiped crocodiles and dead trees and deserved all that was coming to him.

Then came the reaction of the eighteenth century. Jean Jacques Rousseau began to contemplate the world through a haze of sentimental tears. His contemporaries, much impressed by his ideas, pulled out their handkerchiefs and joined in the weeping.

The benighted heathen was one of their most favorite subjects. In their hands (although they had never seen one) he became the unfortunate victim of circumstances and the true representative of all those manifold virtues of which the human race had been deprived by three thousand years of a corrupt system of civilization.

[20]

Today, at least in this particular field of investigation, we know better.

We study primitive man as we study the higher domesticated animals, from which as a rule he is not so very far removed.

In most instances we are fully repaid for our trouble. The savage, but for the grace of God, is our own self under much less favorable conditions. By examining him carefully we begin to understand the early society of the valley of the Nile and of the peninsula of Mesopotamia and by knowing him thoroughly we get a glimpse of many of those strange hidden instincts which lie buried deep down beneath the thin crust of manners and customs which our own species of mammal has acquired during the last five thousand years.

This encounter is not always flattering to our pride. On the other hand a realization of the conditions from which we have escaped, together with an appreciation of the many things that have actually been accomplished, can only tend to give us new courage for the work in hand and if anything it will make us a little more tolerant towards those among our distant cousins who have failed to keep up the pace.

This is not a handbook of anthropology.

It is a volume dedicated to the subject of tolerance.

But tolerance is a very broad theme.

The temptation to wander will be great. And once we leave the beaten track, Heaven alone knows where we will land.

I therefore suggest that I be given half a page to state exactly and specifically what I mean by tolerance.

Language is one of the most deceptive inventions of the human race and all definitions are bound to be arbitrary. It therefore behooves an humble student to go to that authority[21] which is accepted as final by the largest number of those who speak the language in which this book is written.

I refer to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

There on page 1052 of volume XXVI stands written: “Tolerance (from Latin tolerare—to endure):—The allowance of freedom of action or judgment to other people, the patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from one’s own or the generally received course or view.”

There may be other definitions but for the purpose of this book I shall let myself be guided by the words of the Britannica.

And having committed myself (for better or worse) to a definite policy, I shall return to my savages and tell you what I have been able to discover about tolerance in the earliest forms of society of which we have any record.

It is still generally believed that primitive society was very simple, that primitive language consisted of a few simple grunts and that primitive man possessed a degree of liberty which was lost only when the world became “complex.”

The investigations of the last fifty years made by explorers and missionaries and doctors among the aborigines of central Africa and the Polar regions and Polynesia show the exact opposite. Primitive society was exceedingly complicated, primitive language had more forms and tenses and declensions than Russian or Arabic, and primitive man was a slave not only to the present, but also to the past and to the future; in short, an abject and miserable creature who lived in fear and died in terror.

This may seem far removed from the popular picture of brave red-skins merrily roaming the prairies in search of buffaloes and scalps, but it is a little nearer to the truth.

[22]

And how could it have been otherwise?

I have read the stories of many miracles.

But one of them was lacking; the miracle of the survival of man.

How and in what manner and why the most defenseless of all mammals should have been able to maintain himself against microbes and mastodons and ice and heat and eventually become master of all creation, is something I shall not try to solve in the present chapter.

One thing, however, is certain. He never could have accomplished all this alone.

In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality in the composite character of the tribe.

Primitive society therefore was dominated by a single idea, an all-overpowering desire to survive.

This was very difficult.

And as a result all other considerations were sacrificed to the one supreme demand—to live.

The individual counted for nothing, the community at large counted for everything, and the tribe became a roaming fortress which lived by itself and for itself and of itself and found safety only in exclusiveness.

But the problem was even more complicated than at first appears. What I have just said held good only for the visible world, and the visible world in those early times was a negligible quantity compared to the realm of the invisible.

In order to understand this fully we must remember that primitive people are different from ourselves. They are not familiar with the law of cause and effect.

If I sit me down among the poison ivy, I curse my negligence, send for the doctor and tell my young son to get rid[23] of the stuff as soon as he can. My ability to recognize cause and effect tells me that the poison ivy has caused the rash, that the doctor will be able to give me something that will make the itch stop and that the removal of the vine will prevent a repetition of this painful experience.

The true savage would act quite differently. He would not connect the rash with the poison ivy at all. He lives in a world in which past, present and future are inextricably interwoven. All his dead leaders survive as Gods and his dead neighbors survive as spirits and they all continue to be invisible members of the clan and they accompany each individual member wherever he goes. They eat with him and sleep with him and they stand watch over his door. It is his business to keep them at arm’s length or gain their friendship. If ever he fail to do this he will be immediately punished and as he cannot possibly know how to please all those spirits all the time, he is in constant fear of that misfortune which comes as the revenge of the Gods.

He therefore reduces every event that is at all out of the ordinary not to a primary cause but to interference on the part of an invisible spirit and when he notices a rash on his arms he does not say, “Damn that poison ivy!” but he mumbles, “I have offended a God. The God has punished me,” and he runs to the medicine-man, not however to get a lotion to counteract the poison of the ivy but to get a “charm” that shall prove stronger than the charm which the irate God (and not the ivy) has thrown upon him.

As for the ivy, the primary cause of all his suffering, he lets it grow right there where it has always grown. And if perchance the white man comes with a can of kerosene and burns the shrub down, he will curse him for his trouble.

It follows that a society in which everything happens as[24] the result of the direct personal interference on the part of an invisible being must depend for its continued existence upon a strict obedience of such laws as seem to appease the wrath of the Gods.

Such a law, according to the opinion of a savage, existed. His ancestors had devised it and had bestowed it upon him and it was his most sacred duty to keep that law intact and hand it over in its present and perfect form to his own children.

This, of course, seems absurd to us. We firmly believe in progress, in growth, in constant and uninterrupted improvement.

But “progress” is an expression that was coined only year before last, and it is typical of all low forms of society that the people see no possible reason why they should improve what (to them) is the best of all possible worlds because they never knew any other.

Granted that all this be true, then how does one prevent a change in the laws and in the established forms of society?

The answer is simple.

By the immediate punishment of those who refuse to regard common police regulations as an expression of the divine will, or in plain language, by a rigid system of intolerance.

If I hereby state that the savage was the most intolerant of human beings, I do not mean to insult him, for I hasten to add that given the circumstances under which he lived, it was his duty to be intolerant. Had he allowed any one to[25] interfere with the thousand and one rules upon which his tribe depended for its continued safety and peace of mind, the life of the tribe would have been put in jeopardy and that would have been the greatest of all possible crimes.

But (and the question is worth asking) how could a group of people, relatively limited in number, protect a most complex system of verbal regulations when we in our own day with millions of soldiers and thousands of policemen find it difficult to enforce a few plain laws?

Again the answer is simple.

The savage was a great deal cleverer than we are. He accomplished by shrewd calculation what he could not do by force.

He invented the idea of “taboo.”

Perhaps the word “invented” is not the right expression. Such things are rarely the product of a sudden inspiration. They are the result of long years of growth and experiment. Let that be as it may, the wild men of Africa and Polynesia devised the taboo, and thereby saved themselves a great deal of trouble.

The word taboo is of Australian origin. We all know more or less what it means. Our own world is full of taboos, things we simply must not do or say, like mentioning our latest operation at the dinner table, or leaving our spoon in our cup of coffee. But our taboos are never of a very serious nature. They are part of the handbook of etiquette and rarely interfere with our own personal happiness.

To primitive man, on the other hand, the taboo was of the utmost importance.

It meant that certain persons or inanimate objects had been “set apart” from the rest of the world, that they (to use the Hebrew equivalent) were “holy” and must not be[26] discussed or touched on pain of instant death and everlasting torture. A fairly large order but woe unto him or her who dared to disobey the will of the spirit-ancestors.

Whether the taboo was an invention of the priests or the priesthood was created to maintain the taboo is a problem which had not yet been solved. As tradition is much older than religion, it seems more than likely that taboos existed long before the world had heard of sorcerers and witch-doctors. But as soon as the latter had made their appearance, they became the staunch supporters of the idea of taboo and used it with such great virtuosity that the taboo became the “verboten” sign of prehistoric ages.

When first we hear the names of Babylon and Egypt, those countries were still in a state of development in which the taboo counted for a great deal. Not a taboo in the crude and primitive form as it was afterwards found in New Zealand, but solemnly transformed into negative rules of conduct, the sort of “thou-shalt-not” decrees with which we are all familiar through six of our Ten Commandments.

Needless to add that the idea of tolerance was entirely unknown in those lands at that early age.

What we sometimes mistake for tolerance was merely indifference caused by ignorance.

But we can find no trace of any willingness (however vague) on the part of either kings or priests to allow others to exercise that “freedom of action or judgment” or of that “patient and unprejudiced endurance of dissent from the generally received cause or view” which has become the ideal of our modern age.

[27]

Therefore, except in a very negative way, this book is not interested in prehistoric history or what is commonly called “ancient history.”

The struggle for tolerance did not begin until after the discovery of the individual.

And the credit for this, the greatest of all modern revelations, belongs to the Greeks.

How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during his career, has tried to give an answer.

Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call “the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings.

I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them. But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal.

[29]

It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist’s book, offer the following historical axiom.

According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life (animate existence as differentiated from inanimate existence) began when for once all physical and chemical elements were present in the ideal proportion necessary for the creation of the first living cell.

Translate this into terms of history and you get this:

“A sudden and apparently spontaneous outbreak of a very high form of civilization is only possible when all the racial, climatic, economic and political conditions are present in an ideal proportion or in as nearly an ideal condition and proportion as they can be in this imperfect world.”

Let me elaborate this statement by a few negative observations.

A race with the brain development of a cave-man would not prosper, even in Paradise.

Rembrandt would not have painted pictures, Bach would not have composed fugues, Praxiteles would not have made statues if they had been born in an igloo near Upernivik and had been obliged to spend most of their waking hours watching a seal-hole in an ice-field.

Darwin would not have made his contributions to biology if he had been obliged to gain his livelihood in a cotton mill in Lancashire. And Alexander Graham Bell would not have invented the telephone if he had been a conscripted serf and had lived in a remote village of the Romanow domains.

In Egypt, where the first high form of civilization was found, the climate was excellent, but the original inhabitants were not very robust or enterprising, and political and economic conditions were decidedly bad. The same held true of Babylonia and Assyria. The Semitic races which afterwards[30] moved into the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates were strong and vigorous people. There was nothing the matter with the climate. But the political and economic environment remained far from good.

In Palestine the climate was nothing to boast of. Agriculture was backward and there was little commerce outside of the caravan route which passed through the country from Africa to Asia and vice versa. Furthermore, in Palestine politics were entirely dominated by the priests of the temple of Jerusalem and this of course did not encourage the development of any sort of individual enterprise.

In Phoenicia, the climate was of little consequence. The race was strong and trade conditions were good. The country, however, suffered from a badly balanced economic system. A small class of ship owners had been able to get hold of all the wealth and had established a rigid commercial monopoly. Hence the government in Tyre and Sidon had at an early date fallen into the hands of the very rich. The poor, deprived of all excuse for the practice of a reasonable amount of industry, grew callous and indifferent and Phoenicia eventually shared the fate of Carthage and went to ruin through the short-sighted selfishness of her rulers.

In short, in every one of the early centers of civilization, certain of the necessary elements for success were always lacking.

When the miracle of a perfect balance finally did occur, in Greece in the fifth century before our era, it lasted only a very short time, and strange to say, even then it did not take place in the mother country but in the colonies across the Aegean Sea.

In another book I have given a description of those famous island-bridges which connected the mainland of Asia with[31] Europe and across which the traders from Egypt and Babylonia and Crete since time immemorial had traveled to Europe. The main point of embarkation, both for merchandise and ideas bound from Asia to Europe, was to be found on the western coast of Asia Minor in a strip of land known as Ionia.

A few hundred years before the Trojan war, this narrow bit of mountainous territory, ninety miles long and only a few miles wide, had been conquered by Greek tribes from the mainland who there had founded a number of colonial towns of which Ephesus, Phocaea, Erythrae and Miletus were the best known, and it was along those cities that at last the conditions of success were present in such perfect proportion that civilization reached a point which has sometimes been equaled but never has been surpassed.

In the first place, these colonies were inhabited by the most active and enterprising elements from among a dozen different nations.

In the second place, there was a great deal of general wealth derived from the carrying trade between the old and the new world, between Europe and Asia.

In the third place, the form of government under which the colonists lived gave the majority of the freemen a chance to develop their talents to the very best of their ability.

If I do not mention the climate, the reason is this; that in countries devoted exclusively to commerce, the climate does not matter much. Ships can be built and goods can be unloaded, rain or shine. Provided it does not get so cold that the harbors freeze or so wet that the towns are flooded, the inhabitants will take very little interest in the daily weather reports.

But aside from this, the weather of Ionia was distinctly[32] favorable to the development of an intellectual class. Before the existence of books and libraries, learning was handed down from man to man by word of mouth and the town-pump was the earliest of all social centers and the oldest of universities.

In Miletus it was possible to sit around the town-pump for 350 out of every 365 days. And the early Ionian professors made such excellent use of their climatic advantages that they became the pioneers of all future scientific development.

The first of whom we have any report, the real founder of modern science, was a person of doubtful origin. Not in the sense that he had robbed a bank or murdered his family and had fled to Miletus from parts unknown. But no one knew much about his antecedents. Was he a Boeotian or a Phoenician, a Nordic (to speak in the jargon of our learned racial experts) or a Semite?

It shows what an international center this little old city at the mouth of the Meander was in those days. Its population (like that of New York today) consisted of so many different elements that people accepted their neighbors at their face value and did not look too closely into the family antecedents.

Since this is not a history of mathematics or a handbook of philosophy, the speculations of Thales do not properly belong in these pages, except in so far as they tend to show the tolerance towards new ideas which prevailed among the Ionians at a time when Rome was a small market-town on a muddy river somewhere in a distant and unknown region, when the Jews were still captives in the land of Assyria and when northern and western Europe were naught but a howling wilderness.

In order that we may understand how such a development[33] was possible, we must know something about the changes which had taken place since the days when Greek chieftains sailed across the Aegean Sea, intent upon the plunder of the rich fortress of Troy. Those far-famed heroes were still the product of an exceedingly primitive form of civilization. They were over-grown children who regarded life as one long, glorified rough-house, full of excitement and wrestling matches and running races and all the many things which we ourselves would dearly love to do if we were not forced to stick to the routine jobs which provide us with bread and bananas.

The relationship between these boisterous paladins and their Gods was as direct and as simple as their attitude towards the serious problems of every-day existence. For the inhabitants of high Olympus, who ruled the world of the Hellenes in the tenth century before our era, were of this earth earthy, and not very far removed from ordinary mortals. Exactly where and when and how man and his Gods had parted company was a more or less hazy point, never clearly established. Even then the friendship which those who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no way been interrupted and it had remained flavored with those personal and intimate touches which gave the religion of the Greeks its own peculiar charm.

Of course, all good little Greek boys were duly taught that Zeus was a very powerful and mighty potentate with a long beard who upon occasion would juggle so violently with his flashes of lightning and his thunderbolts that it seemed that the world was coming to an end. But as soon as they were a little older and were able to read the ancient sagas for themselves, they began to appreciate the limitations of those terrible personages of whom they had heard so much in their[34] nursery and who now appeared in the light of a merry family-party—everlastingly playing practical jokes upon each other and taking such bitter sides in the political disputes of their mortal friends that every quarrel in Greece was immediately followed by a corresponding row among the denizens of the aether.

Of course in spite of all these very human short-comings, Zeus remained a very great God, the mightiest of all rulers and a personage whom it was not safe to displease. But he was “reasonable” in that sense of the word which is so well understood among the lobbyists of Washington. He was reasonable. He could be approached if one knew the proper way. And best of all, he had a sense of humor and did not take either himself or his world too seriously.

This was, perhaps, not the most sublime conception of a divine figure, but it offered certain very distinct advantages. Among the ancient Greeks there never was a hard and fast rule as to what people must hold true and what they must disregard as false. And because there was no “creed” in the modern sense of the word, with adamantine dogmas and a class of professional priests, ready to enforce them with the help of the secular gallows, the people in different parts of the country were able to reshape their religious ideas and ethical conceptions as best suited their own individual tastes.

The Thessalians, who lived within hailing distance of Mount Olympus, showed of course much less respect for their august neighbors than did the Asopians who dwelled in a distant village on the Laconian Gulf. The Athenians, feeling themselves under the direct protection of their own patron saint, Pallas Athene, felt that they could take great liberties with the lady’s father, while the Arcadians, whose valleys were far removed from the main trade routes, clung[35] tenaciously to a simpler faith and frowned upon all levity in the serious matter of religion, and as for the inhabitants of Phocis, who made a living from the pilgrims bound for the village of Delphi, they were firmly convinced that Apollo (who was worshiped at that profitable shrine) was the greatest of all divine spirits and deserved the special homage of those who came from afar and still had a couple of drachmas in their pocket.

The belief in only one God which soon afterwards was to set the Jews apart from all other nations, would never have been possible if the life of Judaea had not centered around a single city which was strong enough to destroy all rival places of pilgrimage and was able to maintain an exclusive religious monopoly for almost ten consecutive centuries.

In Greece such a condition did not prevail. Neither Athens nor Sparta ever succeeded in establishing itself as the recognized capital of a united Greek fatherland. Their efforts in this direction only led to long years of unprofitable civil war.

No wonder that a race composed of such sublime individualists offered great scope for the development of a very independent spirit of thought.

The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes been called the Bible of the Greeks. They were nothing of the sort. They were just books. They were never united into “The Book.” They told the adventures of certain wonderful heroes who were fondly believed to be the direct ancestors of the generation then living. Incidentally they contained a certain amount of religious information because the Gods, without exception, had taken sides in the quarrel and had neglected all other business for the joy of watching the rarest prize-fight that had ever been staged within their domain.

The idea, however, that the works of Homer might either[36] directly or indirectly have been inspired by Zeus or Minerva or Apollo never even dawned upon the Greek mind. These were a fine piece of literature and made excellent reading during the long winter evenings. Furthermore they caused children to feel proud of their own race.

And that was all.

In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and contented populace, Thales was born. In such a city he worked and taught and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average Miletian may have heard the name of Thales, just as the average New Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is, and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper.

That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries, is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the conflict which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of gravity.

The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-546 B.C.), the founder of modern science.” And we can almost see the[37] headlines in the “Miletus Gazette” saying, “Local graduate discovers secret of true science.”

But just how and where and when Thales left the beaten track and struck out for himself, I could not possibly tell you. This much is certain, that he did not live in an intellectual vacuum, nor did he develop his wisdom out of his inner consciousness. In the seventh century before Christ, a great deal of the pioneer work in the realm of science had already been done and there was quite a large body of mathematical and physical and astronomical information at the disposal of those intelligent enough to make use of it.

Babylonian star-gazers had searched the heavens.

Egyptian architects had done considerable figuring before they dared to dump a couple of million tons of granite on top of a little burial chamber in the heart of a pyramid.

The mathematicians of the Nile Valley had seriously studied the behavior of the sun that they might predict the wet and dry seasons and give the peasants a calendar by which they could regulate their work on the farms.

All these problems, however, had been solved by people who still regarded the forces of nature as the direct and personal expression of the will of certain invisible Gods who administered the seasons and the course of the planets and the tides of the ocean as the members of the President’s cabinet manage the department of agriculture or the post-office or the treasury.

Thales rejected this point of view. But like most well educated people of his day, he did not bother to discuss it in public. If the fruit vendors along the water front wanted to fall upon their faces whenever there was an eclipse of the sun and invoke the name of Zeus in fear of this unusual sight, that was their business and Thales would have been the last man to try to convince them that any schoolboy with an[38] elementary knowledge of the behavior of heavenly bodies would have foretold that on the 25th of May of the year 585 B.C., at such and such an hour, the moon would find herself between the earth and the sun and that therefore the town of Miletus would experience a few minutes of comparative darkness.

Even when it appeared (as it did appear) that the Persians and the Lydians had been engaged in battle on the afternoon of this famous eclipse and had been obliged to cease killing each other for lack of sufficient light, he refused to believe that the Lydian deities (following a famous precedent established a few years previously during a certain battle in the valley of Ajalon) had performed a miracle, and had suddenly turned off the light of Heaven that the victory might go to those whom they favored.

For Thales had reached the point (and that was his great merit) where he dared to regard all nature as the manifestation of one Eternal Will, subject to one Eternal Law and entirely beyond the personal influence of those divine spirits which man was forever creating after his own image. And the eclipse, so he felt, would have taken place just the same if there had been no more important engagement that particular afternoon than a dog fight in the streets of Ephesus or a wedding feast in Halicarnassus.

Drawing the logical conclusions from his own scientific observations, he laid down one general and inevitable law for all creation and guessed (and to a certain extent guessed correctly) that the beginning of all things was to be found in the water which apparently surrounded the world on all sides and which had probably existed from the very beginning of time.

Unfortunately we do not possess anything that Thales himself wrote. It is possible that he may have put his ideas[39] into concrete form (for the Greeks had already learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians) but not a page which can be directly attributed to him survives today. For our knowledge of himself and his ideas we depend upon the scanty bits of information found in the books of some of his contemporaries. From these, however, we have learned that Thales in private life was a merchant with wide connections in all parts of the Mediterranean. That, by the way, was typical of most of the early philosophers. They were “lovers of wisdom.” But they never closed their eyes to the fact that the secret of life is found among the living and that “wisdom for the sake of wisdom” is quite as dangerous as “art for art’s sake” or a dinner for the sake of the food.

To them, man with all his human qualities, good and bad and indifferent, was the supreme measure of all things. Wherefore they spent their leisure time patiently studying this strange creature as he was and not as they thought that he ought to be.

This made it possible for them to remain on the most amicable terms with their fellow citizens and allowed them to wield a much greater power than if they had undertaken to show their neighbors a short cut to the Millennium.

They rarely laid down a hard and fast rule of conduct.

But by their own example they managed to show how a true understanding of the forces of nature must inevitably lead to that inner peace of the soul upon which all true happiness depends and having in this way gained the good-will of their community they were given full liberty to study and explore and investigate and were even permitted to venture within those domains which were popularly believed to be the exclusive property of the Gods. And as one of the[40] pioneers of this new gospel did Thales spend the long years of his useful career.

Although he had pulled the entire world of the Greeks apart, although he had examined each little piece separately, and had openly questioned all sorts of things which the majority of the people since the beginning of time had held to be established facts, he was allowed to die peacefully in his own bed, and if any one ever called him to account for his heresies, we fail to have a record of the fact.

And once he had shown the way, there were many others eager to follow.

There was, for example, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who left Asia Minor for Athens at the age of thirty-six and spent the following years as a “sophist” or private tutor in different Greek cities. He specialized in astronomy and among other things he taught that the sun was not a heavenly chariot, driven by a God, as was generally believed, but a red-hot ball of fire, thousands and thousands of times larger than the whole of Greece.

When nothing happened to him, when no bolt from Heaven killed him for his audacity, he went a little further in his theories and stated boldly that the moon was covered with mountains and valleys and finally he even hinted at a certain “original matter” which was the beginning and the end of all things and which had existed from the very beginning of time.

But here, as many other scientists after him were to discover, he trod upon dangerous ground, for he discussed something with which people were familiar. The sun and the moon were distant orbs. The average Greek did not care what names the philosopher wished to call them. But when the professor began to argue that all things had gradually grown and developed out of a vague substance called[41] “original matter”—then he went decidedly too far. Such an assertion was in flat contradiction with the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who after the great flood had re-populated the world by turning bits of stone into men and women. To deny the truth of a most solemn tale which all little Greek boys and girls had been taught in their early childhood was most dangerous to the safety of established society. It would make the children doubt the wisdom of their elders and that would never do. Hence Anaxagoras was made the subject of a formidable attack on the part of the Athenian Parents’ League.

During the monarchy and the early days of the republic, the rulers of the city would have been more than able to protect a teacher of unpopular doctrines from the foolish hostility of the illiterate Attic peasants. But Athens by this time had become a full-fledged democracy and the freedom of the individual was no longer what it used to be. Furthermore, Pericles, just then in disgrace with the majority of the people, was himself a favorite pupil of the great astronomer, and the legal prosecution of Anaxagoras was welcomed as an excellent political move against the city’s old dictator.

A priest by the name of Diopheites, who also was a ward-leader in one of the most densely populated suburbs, got a law passed which demanded “the immediate prosecution of all those who disbelieved in the established religion or held theories of their own about certain divine things.” Under this law, Anaxagoras was actually thrown into prison. Finally, however, the better elements in the city prevailed. Anaxagoras was allowed to go free after the payment of a small fine and move to Lampsacus in Asia Minor where he died, full of years and honor, in the year 428 B.C.

His case shows how little is ever accomplished by the official[42] suppression of scientific theories. For although Anaxagoras was forced to leave Athens, his ideas remained behind and two centuries later they came to the notice of one Aristotle, who in turn used them as a basis for many of his own scientific speculations. Reaching merrily across a thousand years of darkness, he handed them on to one Abul-Walid Muhammad ibn-Ahmad (commonly known as Averroës), the great Arab physician who in turn popularized them among the students of the Moorish universities of southern Spain. Then, together with his own observations, he wrote them down in a number of books. These were duly carried across the Pyrenees until they reached the universities of Paris and Boulogne. There they were translated into Latin and French and English and so thoroughly were they accepted by the people of western and northern Europe that today they have become an integral part of every primer of science and are considered as harmless as the tables of multiplication.

But to return to Anaxagoras. For almost an entire generation after his trial, Greek scientists were allowed to teach doctrines which were at variance with popular belief. And then, during the last years of the fifth century, a second case took place.

The victim this time was a certain Protagoras, a wandering teacher who hailed from the village of Abdera, an Ionian colony in northern Greece. This spot already enjoyed a doubtful reputation as the birthplace of Democritus, the original “laughing philosopher,” who had laid down the law that “only that society is worth while which offers to the largest number of people the greatest amount of happiness obtainable with the smallest amount of pain,” and who therefore was regarded as a good deal of a radical and a fellow who should be under constant police supervision.

[43]

Protagoras, deeply impressed by this doctrine, went to Athens and there, after many years of study, proclaimed that man was the measure of all things, that life was too short to waste valuable time upon an inquiry into the doubtful existence of any Gods, and that all energies ought to be used for the purpose of making existence more beautiful and more thoroughly enjoyable.

This statement, of course, went to the very root of the matter and it was bound to shock the faithful more than anything that had ever been written or said. Furthermore it was made during a very serious crisis in the war between Athens and Sparta and the people, after a long series of defeats and pestilence, were in a state of utter despair. Most evidently it was not the right moment to incur the wrath of the Gods by an inquiry into the scope of their supernatural powers. Protagoras was accused of atheism, of “godlessness,” and was told to submit his doctrines to the courts.

Pericles, who could have protected him, was dead and Protagoras, although a scientist, felt little taste for martyrdom.

He fled.

Unfortunately, on the way to Sicily, his ship was wrecked, and it seems that he was drowned, for we never hear of him again.

As for Diagoras, another victim of Athenian malevolence, he was really not a philosopher at all but a young writer who harbored a personal grudge against the Gods because they had once failed to give him their support in a law-suit. He brooded so long upon his supposed grievance that finally his mind became affected and he went about saying all sorts of blasphemous things about the Holy Mysteries which just then enjoyed great popularity among the people of northern[44] Hellas. For this unseemly conduct he was condemned to death. But ere the sentence was executed, the poor devil was given the opportunity to escape. He went to Corinth, continued to revile his Olympian enemies, and peacefully died of his own bad temper.

And this brings us at last to the most notorious and the most famous case of Greek intolerance of which we possess any record, the judicial murder of Socrates.

When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece in the fifth century before our era.

For Socrates, at a time when the common people still firmly believed in a large number of divine beings, made himself the prophet of an only God. And although the Athenians may not always have known what he meant when he spoke of his “daemon” (that inner voice of divine inspiration which told him what to do and say), they were fully aware of his very unorthodox attitude towards those ideals which most of his neighbors continued to hold in holy veneration and his utter lack of respect for the established order of things. In the end, however, politics killed the old man and theology (although dragged in for the benefit of the crowd) had really very little to do with the outcome of the trial.

Socrates was the son of a stone-cutter who had many children and little money. The boy therefore had never been[45] able to pay for a regular college course, for most of the philosophers were practical fellows and often charged as much as two thousand dollars for a single course of instruction. Besides, the pursuit of pure knowledge and the study of useless scientific facts seemed to young Socrates a mere waste of time and energy. Provided a person cultivated his conscience, so he reasoned, he could well do without geometry and a knowledge of the true nature of comets and planets was not necessary for the salvation of the soul.

All the same, the homely little fellow with the broken nose and the shabby cloak, who spent his days arguing with the loafers on the corner of the street and his nights listening to the harangues of his wife (who was obliged to provide for a large family by taking in washing, as her husband regarded the gaining of a livelihood as an entirely negligible detail of existence), this honorable veteran of many wars and expeditions and ex-member of the Athenian senate was chosen among all the many teachers of his day to suffer for his opinions.

In order to understand how this happened, we must know something about the politics of Athens in the days when Socrates rendered his painful but highly useful service to the cause of human intelligence and progress.

All his life long (and he was past seventy when he was executed) Socrates tried to show his neighbors that they were wasting their opportunities; that they were living hollow and shallow lives; that they devoted entirely too much time to empty pleasures and vain triumphs and almost invariably squandered the divine gifts with which a great and mysterious God had endowed them for the sake of a few hours of futile glory and self-satisfaction. And so thoroughly convinced was he of man’s high destiny that he broke through the bounds of all old philosophies and went even[46] farther than Protagoras. For whereas the latter had taught that “man is the measure of all things,” Socrates preached that “man’s invisible conscience is (or ought to be) the ultimate measure of all things and that it is not the Gods but we ourselves who shape our destiny.”

The speech which Socrates made before the judges who were to decide his fate (there were five hundred of them to be precise and they had been so carefully chosen by his political enemies that some of them could actually read and write) was one of the most delightful bits of commonsense ever addressed to any audience, sympathetic or otherwise.

“No person on earth,” so the philosopher argued, “has the right to tell another man what he should believe or to deprive him of the right to think as he pleases,” and further, “Provided that man remain on good terms with his own conscience, he can well do without the approbation of his friends, without money, without a family or even a home. But as no one can possibly reach the right conclusions without a thorough examination of all the pros and cons of every problem, people must be given a chance to discuss all questions with complete freedom and without interference on the part of the authorities.”

Unfortunately for the accused, this was exactly the wrong statement at the wrong moment. Ever since the Peloponnesian war there had been a bitter struggle in Athens between the rich and the poor, between capital and labor. Socrates was a “moderate”—a liberal who saw good and evil in both systems of government and who tried to find a compromise which should satisfy all reasonable people. This, of course, had made him thoroughly unpopular with both sides but thus far they had been too evenly balanced to take action against him.

[47]

When at last in the year 403 B.C. the one-hundred-percent Democrats gained complete control of the state and expelled the aristocrats, Socrates was a doomed man.

His friends knew this. They suggested that he leave the city before it was too late and this would have been a very wise thing to do.

For Socrates had quite as many enemies as friends. During the greater part of a century he had been a sort of vocal “columnist,” a terribly clever busy-body who had made it his hobby to expose the shams and the intellectual swindles of those who regarded themselves as the pillars of Athenian society. As a result, every one had come to know him. His name had become a household word throughout eastern Greece. When he said something funny in the morning, by night the whole town had heard about it. Plays had been written about him and when he was finally arrested and taken to prison there was not a citizen in the whole of Attica who was not thoroughly familiar with all the details of his career.

Those who took the leading part in the actual trial (like that honorable grain merchant who could neither read nor write but who knew all about the will of the Gods and therefore was loudest in his accusations) were undoubtedly convinced that they were rendering a great service to the community by ridding the city of a highly dangerous member of the so-called “intelligentsia,” a man whose teaching could only lead to laziness and crime and discontent among the slaves.

It is rather amusing to remember that even under those circumstances, Socrates pleaded his case with such tremendous virtuosity that a majority of the jury was all for letting him go free and suggested that he might be pardoned if only he would give up this terrible habit of arguing, of debating,[48] of wrangling and moralizing, in short, if only he would leave his neighbors and their pet prejudices in peace and not bother them with his eternal doubts.

But Socrates would not hear of it.

“By no means,” he exclaimed. “As long as my conscience, as long as the still small voice within me, bids me go forth and show men the true road to reason, I shall continue to buttonhole whomsoever I happen to meet and I shall say what is on my mind, regardless of consequences.”

After that, there was no other course but to condemn the prisoner to death.

Socrates was given a respite of thirty days. The holy ship which made an annual pilgrimage to Delos had not yet returned from its voyage and until then, the Athenian law did not allow any executions. The whole of this month the old man spent quietly in his cell, trying to improve his system of logic. Although he was repeatedly given the opportunity to escape, he refused to go. He had lived his life and had done his duty. He was tired and ready to depart. Until the hour of his execution he continued to talk with his friends, trying to educate them in what he held to be right and true, asking them to turn their minds upon the things of the spirit rather than those of the material world.

Then he drank the beaker of hemlock, laid himself upon his couch and settled all further argument by sleep everlasting.

For a short time, his disciples, rather terrified by this terrible outburst of popular wrath, thought it wise to remove themselves from the scene of their former activities.

But when nothing happened, they returned and resumed their former occupation as public teachers, and within a dozen years after the death of the old philosopher, his ideas were more popular than ever.

[49]

The city meanwhile had gone through a very difficult period. It was five years since the struggle for the leadership of the Greek peninsula had ended with the defeat of Athens and the ultimate victory of the Spartans. This had been a complete triumph of brawn over brain. Needless to say that it did not last very long. The Spartans, who never wrote a line worth remembering or contributed a single idea to the sum total of human knowledge (with the exception of certain military tactics which survive in our modern game of football) thought that they had accomplished their task when the walls of their rival had been pulled down and the Athenian fleet had been reduced to a dozen ships. But the Athenian mind had lost none of its shrewd brilliancy. A decade after the end of the Peloponnesian war, the old harbor of the Piraeus was once more filled with ships from all parts of the world and Athenian admirals were again fighting at the head of the allied Greek navies.

Furthermore, the labor of Pericles, although not appreciated by his own contemporaries, had made the city the intellectual capital of the world—the Paris of the fourth century before the birth of Christ. Whosoever in Rome or Spain or Africa was rich enough to give his sons a fashionable education, felt flattered if the boys were allowed to visit a school situated within the shadow of the Acropolis.

For this ancient world, which we modern people find so difficult to understand properly, took the problem of existence seriously.

Under the influence of the early Christian enemies of pagan civilization, the impression has gained ground that the average Roman or Greek was a highly immoral person who paid a shallow homage to certain nebulous Gods and for the rest spent his waking hours eating enormous dinners, drinking vast bumpers of Salernian wine and listening to the[50] pretty prattle of Egyptian dancing girls, unless for a change he went to war and slaughtered innocent Germans and Franks and Dacians for the pure sport of shedding blood.

Of course, both in Greece and even more so in Rome, there were a great many merchants and war contractors who had accumulated their millions without much regard for those ethical principles which Socrates had so well defined before his judges. Because these people were very wealthy, they had to be put up with. This, however, did not mean that they enjoyed the respect of the community or were regarded as commendable representatives of the civilization of their day.

We dig up the villa of Epaphroditus, who amassed millions as one of the gang who helped Nero plunder Rome and her colonies. We look at the ruins of the forty room palace which the old profiteer built out of his ill-gotten gains. And we shake our heads and say, “What depravity!”

Then we sit down and read the works of Epictetus, who was one of the house slaves of the old scoundrel, and we find ourselves in the company of a spirit as lofty and as exalted as ever lived.

I know that the making of generalizations about our neighbors and about other nations is one of the most popular of indoor sports, but let us not forget that Epictetus, the philosopher, was quite as truly a representative of the time in which he lived as Epaphroditus, the imperial flunkey, and that the desire for holiness was as great twenty centuries ago as it is today.

Undoubtedly it was a very different sort of holiness from that which is practiced today. It was the product of an essentially European brain and had nothing to do with the Orient. But the “barbarians” who established it as their[51] ideal of what they held to be most noble and desirable were our own ancestors, and they were slowly developing a philosophy of life which was highly successful if we agree that a clear conscience and a simple, straightforward life, together with good health and a moderate but sufficient income, are the best guarantee for general happiness and contentment. The future of the soul did not interest these people overmuch. They accepted the fact that they were a special sort of mammal which by reason of its intellectual application had risen high above the other creatures which crawled upon this earth. If they frequently referred to the Gods, they used the word as we use “atoms” or “electrons” or “aether.” The beginning of things has got to have a name, but Zeus in the mouth of Epictetus was as problematical a value as x or y in the problems of Euclid and meant just as much or as little.

Life it was which interested those men and next to living, art.

Life, therefore, in all its endless varieties, they studied and following the method of reasoning which Socrates had originated and made popular, they achieved some very remarkable results.

That sometimes in their zeal for a perfect spiritual world they went to absurd extremes was regrettable, but no more than human. But Plato is the only one among all the teachers of antiquity who from sheer love for a perfect world ever came to preach a doctrine of intolerance.

This young Athenian, as is well known, was the beloved disciple of Socrates and became his literary executor.

In this capacity he immediately gathered all that Socrates had ever said or thought into a series of dialogues which might be truthfully called the Socratian Gospels.

When this had been done, he began to elaborate certain[52] of the more obscure points in his master’s doctrines and explained them in a series of brilliant essays. And finally he conducted a number of lecture courses which spread the Athenian ideas of justice and righteousness far beyond the confines of Attica.

In all these activities he showed such whole-hearted and unselfish devotion that we might almost compare him to St. Paul. But whereas St. Paul had led a most adventurous and dangerous existence, ever traveling from north to south and from west to east that he might bring the Good Tidings to all parts of the Mediterranean world, Plato never budged from his comfortable garden chair and allowed the world to come to him.

Certain advantages of birth and the possession of independent wealth allowed him to do this.

In the first place he was an Athenian citizen and through his mother could trace his descent to no one less than Solon. Then as soon as he came of age he inherited a fortune more than sufficient for his simple needs.

And finally, his eloquence was such that people willingly traveled to the Aegean Sea if only they were allowed to follow a few of the lectures in the Platonic University.

For the rest, Plato was very much like the other young men of his time. He served in the army, but without any particular interest in military affairs. He went in for outdoor sports, became a good wrestler, a fairly good runner, but never achieved any particular fame in the stadium. Again, like most young men of his time, he spent a great deal of his time in foreign travel and crossed the Aegean Sea and paid a short visit to northern Egypt, as his famous grandfather Solon had done before him. After that, however, he returned home for good and during fifty consecutive years he quietly taught his doctrines in the shadowy corners of a[53] pleasure garden which was situated on the banks of the river Cephissus in the suburbs of Athens and was called the Academy.

He had begun his career as a mathematician, but gradually he switched over to politics and in this field he laid the foundations for our modern school of government. He was at heart a confirmed optimist and believed in a steady process of human evolution. The life of man, so he taught, rises slowly from a lower plane to a higher one. From beautiful bodies, the world proceeds to beautiful institutions and from beautiful institutions to beautiful ideas.

This sounded well on parchment, but when Plato tried to lay down certain definite principles upon which his perfect state was to be founded, his zeal for righteousness and his desire for justice were so great that they made him deaf and blind to all other considerations. His Republic, which has ever since been regarded as the last word in human perfection by the manufacturers of paper Utopias, was a very strange commonwealth and reflected and continues to reflect with great nicety the prejudices of those retired colonels who have always enjoyed the comforts of a private income, who like to move in polite circles and who have a profound distrust of the lower classes, lest they forget “their place” and want to have a share of those special privileges which by right should go to the members of the “upper class.”

Unfortunately the books of Plato enjoyed great respect among the medieval scholars of western Europe and in their hands the famous Republic became a most formidable weapon in their warfare upon tolerance.

For these learned doctors were apt to forget that Plato had reached his conclusions from very different premises than those which were popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

[54]

For instance, Plato had been anything but a pious man in the Christian sense of the word. The Gods of his ancestors he had always regarded with deep contempt as ill-mannered rustics from distant Macedonia. He had been deeply mortified by their scandalous behavior as related in the chronicles of the Trojan War. But as he grew older and sat and sat and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land, and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state of rampant anarchy. He therefore insisted that the legislative body of his model community should establish a definite rule of conduct for all citizens and should force both freemen and slaves to obey these regulations on pain of death or exile or imprisonment. This sounded like an absolute negation of that broad spirit of tolerance and of that liberty of conscience for which Socrates had so valiantly fought only a short time before, and that is exactly what it was meant to be.

The reason for this change in attitude is not hard to find. Whereas Socrates had been a man among men, Plato was afraid of life and escaped from an unpleasant and ugly world into the realm of his own day dreams. He knew of course that there was not the slightest chance of his ideas ever being realized. The day of the little independent city-states, whether imaginary or real, was over. The era of centralization had begun and soon the entire Greek peninsula was to be incorporated into that vast Macedonian Empire which stretched from the shores of the Maritsa to the banks of the Indus River.

But ere the heavy hand of the conqueror descended upon[55] the unruly democracies of the old peninsula, the country had produced the greatest of those many benefactors who have put the rest of the world under eternal obligation to the now defunct race of the Greeks.

I refer of course to Aristotle, the wonder-child from Stagira, the man who in his day and age knew everything that was to be known and added so much to the sum total of human knowledge that his books became an intellectual quarry from which fifty successive generations of Europeans and Asiatics were able to steal to their hearts’ content without exhausting that rich vein of pure learning.

At the age of eighteen, Aristotle had left his native village in Macedonia to go to Athens and follow the lectures in Plato’s university. After his graduation he lectured in a number of places until the year 336 when he returned to Athens and opened a school of his own in a garden near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, which became known as the Lyceum and soon attracted pupils from all over the world.

Strangely enough, the Athenians were not at all in favor of increasing the number of academies within their walls. The town was at last beginning to lose its old commercial importance and all of her more energetic citizens were moving to Alexandria and to Marseilles and other cities of the south and the west. Those who remained behind were either too poor or too indolent to escape. They were the hide-bound remnant of those old, turbulent masses of free citizens, who had been at once the glory and the ruin of the long-suffering Republic. They had regarded the “goings on” in Plato’s orchard with small favor. When a dozen years after his death, his most notorious pupil came back and openly taught still more outrageous doctrines about the beginning of the world and the limited ability of the Gods, the old fogies shook their solemn heads and[56] mumbled dark threats against the man who was making their city a by-word for free thinking and unbelief.

If they had had their own way, they would have forced him to leave their country. But they wisely kept these opinions to themselves. For this short-sighted, stoutish gentleman, famous for his good taste in books and in clothes, was no negligible quantity in the political life of that day, no obscure little professor who could be driven out of town by a couple of hired toughs. He was no one less than the son of a Macedonian court-physician and he had been brought up with the royal princes. And furthermore, as soon as he had finished his studies, he had been appointed tutor to the crown prince and for eight years he had been the daily companion of young Alexander. Hence he enjoyed the friendship and the protection of the most powerful ruler the world had ever seen and the regent who administered the Greek provinces during the monarch’s absence on the Indian front watched carefully lest harm should befall one who had been the boon companion of his imperial master.

No sooner, however, had news of Alexander’s death reached Athens than Aristotle’s life was in peril. He remembered what had happened to Socrates and felt no desire to suffer a similar fate. Like Plato, he had carefully avoided mixing philosophy with practical politics. But his distaste for the democratic form of government and his lack of belief in the sovereign abilities of the common people were known to all. And when the Athenians, in a sudden outburst of fury, expelled the Macedonian garrison, Aristotle moved across the Euboean Sound and went to live in Calchis, where he died a few months before Athens was reconquered by the Macedonians and was duly punished for her disobedience.

At this far distance it is not easy to discover upon what[57] positive grounds Aristotle was accused of impiety. But as usual in that nation of amateur orators, his case was inextricably mixed up with politics and his unpopularity was due to his disregard of the prejudices of a few local ward-bosses, rather than to the expression of any startlingly new heresies, which might have exposed Athens to the vengeance of Zeus.

Nor does it matter very much.

The days of the small independent republics were numbered.

Soon afterwards, the Romans fell heir to the European heritage of Alexander and Greece became one of their many provinces.

Then there was an end to all further bickering, for the Romans in most matters were even more tolerant than the Greeks of the Golden Age had been and they permitted their subjects to think as they pleased, provided they did not question certain principles of political expediency upon which the peace and prosperity of the Roman state had, since time immemorial, been safely builded.

All the same there existed a subtle difference between the ideals which animated the contemporaries of Cicero and those which had been held sacred by the followers of such a man as Pericles. The old leaders of Greek thought had based their tolerance upon certain definite conclusions which they had reached after centuries of careful experiment and meditation. The Romans felt that they could do without the preliminary study. They were merely indifferent, and were proud of the fact. They were interested in practical things. They were men of action and had a deep-seated contempt for words.

If other people wished to spend their afternoons underneath an old olive tree, discussing the theoretical aspects of[58] government or the influence of the moon upon the tides, they were more than welcome to do so.

If furthermore their knowledge could be turned to some practical use, then it was worthy of further attention. Otherwise, together with singing and dancing and cooking, sculpture and science, this business of philosophizing had better be left to the Greeks and to the other foreigners whom Jupiter in his mercy had created to provide the world with those things which were unworthy of a true Roman’s attention.

Meanwhile they themselves would devote their attention to the administration of their ever increasing domains; they would drill the necessary companies of foreign infantry and cavalry to protect their outlying provinces; they would survey the roads that were to connect Spain with Bulgaria; and generally they would devote their energies to the keeping of the peace between half a thousand different tribes and nations.

Let us give honor where honor is due.

The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected a structure which under one form or another has survived until our own time, and that in itself is no mean accomplishment. As long as the necessary taxes were paid and a certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes enjoyed a very large degree of liberty. They could believe or disbelieve whatever they pleased. They could worship one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples full of Gods. It made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling empire were forever reminded that the “pax Romana” depended for its success upon a liberal application of the principle of “live and let live.” They must under[59] no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or with the strangers within their gates. And if perchance they thought that their Gods had been insulted, they must not rush to the magistrate for relief. “For,” as the Emperor Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if the Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely take care of themselves.”

And with such scant words of consolation, all similar cases were instantly dismissed and people were requested to keep their private opinions out of the courts.

If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle down among the Colossians, they had a right to bring their own Gods with them and erect a temple of their own in the town of Colossae. But if the Colossians should for similar reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they must be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal freedom of worship.

It has often been argued that the Romans could permit themselves the luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude because they felt an equal contempt for both the Colossians and the Cappadocians and all the other savage tribes who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been true. I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand years, a form of almost complete religious tolerance was strictly maintained within the greater part of civilized and semi-civilized Europe, Asia and Africa and that the Romans developed a technique of statecraft which produced a maximum of practical results together with a minimum of friction.

To many people it seemed that the millennium had been achieved and that this condition of mutual forbearance would last forever.

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But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built upon force.

Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had destroyed herself.

The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand battlefields.

For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.

At last the reaction set in.

Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted by the impossible task of a single city ruling an entire world.

And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people grew tired of life and lost the zest for living.

They had come to own all the country-houses, all the town-houses, all the yachts and all the stage-coaches they could ever hope to use.

They found themselves possessed of all the slaves in the world.

They had eaten everything, they had seen everything, they had heard everything.

They had tried the taste of every drink, they had been everywhere, they had made love to all the women from Barcelona to Thebes. All the books that had ever been written were in their libraries. The best pictures that had ever been painted hung on their walls. The cleverest musicians of the entire world had entertained them at their meals. And, as children, they had been instructed by the best professors and pedagogues who had taught them everything there was to be taught. As a result, all food and drink had lost its taste, all books had grown dull, all women had become uninteresting, and existence itself had developed[61] into a burden which a good many people were willing to drop at the first respectable opportunity.

There remained only one consolation, the contemplation of the Unknown and the Invisible.

The old Gods, however, had died years before. No intelligent Roman any longer took stock in the silly nursery rhymes about Jupiter and Minerva.

There were the philosophic systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics and the Cynics, all of whom preached charity and self-denial and the virtues of an unselfish and useful life.

But they were so empty. They sounded well enough in the books of Zeno and Epicurus and Epictetus and Plutarch, which were to be found in every cornerstore library.

But in the long run, this diet of pure reason was found to lack the necessary nourishing qualities. The Romans began to clamor for a certain amount of “emotion” with their spiritual meals.

Hence the purely philosophical “religions” (for such they really were, if we associate the idea of religion with a desire to lead useful and noble lives) could only appeal to a very small number of people, and almost all of those belonged to the upper classes who had enjoyed the advantages of private instruction at the hands of competent Greek teachers.

To the mass of the people, these finely-spun philosophies meant less than nothing at all. They too had reached a point of development at which a good deal of the ancient mythology seemed the childish invention of rude and credulous ancestors. But they could not possibly go as far as their so-called intellectual superiors and deny the existence of any and all personal Gods.

Wherefore they did what all half-educated people do under such circumstances. They paid a formal and outward[62] tribute of respect to the official Gods of the Republic and then betook themselves for real comfort and happiness to one of the many mystery religions which during the last two centuries had found a most cordial welcome in the ancient city on the banks of the Tiber.

The word “mystery” which I have used before was of Greek origin. It originally meant a gathering of “initiated people”—of men and women whose “mouth had been shut” against the betrayal of those most holy secrets which only the true members of the mystery were supposed to know and which bound them together like the hocus pocus of a college fraternity or the cabalistic incantations of the Independent Order of Sea-Mice.

During the first century of our era, however, a mystery was nothing more nor less than a special form of worship, a denomination, a church. If a Greek or a Roman (if you will pardon a little juggling with time) had left the Presbyterian church for the Christian Science church, he would have told his neighbors that he had gone to “another mystery.” For the word “church,” the “kirk,” the “house of the Lord,” is of comparatively recent origin and was not known in those days.

If you happen to be especially interested in the subject and wish to understand what was happening in Rome, buy a New York paper next Saturday. Almost any paper will do. Therein you will find four or five columns of announcements about new creeds, about new mysteries, imported from India and Persia and Sweden and China and a dozen other countries and all of them offering special promises of health and riches and salvation everlasting.

Rome, which so closely resembled our own metropolis, was just as full of imported and domestic religions. The international nature of the city had made this unavoidable.[63] From the vine-covered mountain slopes of northern Asia Minor had come the cult of Cybele, whom the Phrygians revered as the mother of the Gods and whose worship was connected with such unseemly outbreaks of emotional hilarity that the Roman police had repeatedly been forced to close the Cybelian temples and had at last passed very drastic laws against the further propaganda of a faith which encouraged public drunkenness and many other things that were even worse.

Egypt, the old land of paradox and secrecy, had contributed half a dozen strange divinities and the names of Osiris, Serapis and Isis had become as familiar to Roman ears as those of Apollo, Demeter and Hermes.

As for the Greeks, who centuries before had given unto the world a primary system of abstract truth and a practical code of conduct, based upon virtue, they now supplied the people of foreign lands who insisted upon images and incense with the far-famed “mysteries” of Attis and Dionysus and Orpheus and Adonis, none of them entirely above suspicion as far as public morals were concerned, but nevertheless enjoying immense popularity.

The Phoenician traders, who for a thousand years had frequented the shores of Italy, had made the Romans familiar with their great God Baal (the arch-enemy of Jehovah) and with Astarte his wife, that strange creature to whom Solomon in his old age and to the great horror of all his faithful subjects had built a “high place” in the very heart of Jerusalem; the terrible Goddess who had been recognized as the official protector of the city of Carthage during her long struggle for the supremacy of the Mediterranean and who finally after the destruction of all her temples in Asia and Africa was to return to Europe in the shape of a most respectable and demure Christian saint.

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But the most important of all, because highly popular among the soldiers of the army, was a deity whose broken images can still be found underneath every rubbish pile that marks the Roman frontier from the mouth of the Rhine to the source of the Tigris.

This was the great God Mithras.

Mithras, as far as we know, was the old Asiatic God of Light and Air and Truth, and he had been worshiped in the plains of the Caspian lowlands when our first ancestors took possession of those wonderful grazing fields and made ready to settle those valleys and hills which afterwards became known as Europe. To them he had been the giver of all good things and they believed that the rulers of this earth exercised their power only by the grace of his mighty will. Hence, as a token of his divine favor, he sometimes bestowed upon those called to high offices a bit of that celestial fire by which he himself was forever surrounded, and although he is gone and his name has been forgotten, the kindly saints of the Middle Ages, with their halo of light, remind us of an ancient tradition which was started thousands of years before the Church was ever dreamed of.

But although he was held in great reverence for an incredibly long time, it has been very difficult to reconstruct his life with any degree of accuracy. There was a good reason for this. The early Christian missionaries abhorred the Mithras myth with a hatred infinitely more bitter than that reserved for the common, every day mysteries. In their heart of hearts they knew that the Indian God was their most serious rival. Hence they tried as hard as possible to remove everything that might possibly remind people of his existence. In this task they succeeded so well that all Mithras temples have disappeared and that not a scrap of written evidence remains about a religion which for more[65] than half a thousand years was as popular in Rome as Methodism or Presbyterianism is in the United States of today.

However with the help of a few Asiatic sources and by a careful perusal of certain ruins which could not be entirely destroyed in the days before the invention of dynamite, we have been able to overcome this initial handicap and now possess a fairly accurate idea about this interesting God and the things for which he stood.

Ages and ages ago, so the story ran, Mithras was mysteriously born of a rock. As soon as he lay in his cradle, several nearby shepherds came to worship him and make him happy with their gifts.

As a boy, Mithras had met with all sorts of strange adventures. Many of these remind us closely of the deeds which had made Hercules such a popular hero with the children of the Greeks. But whereas Hercules was often very cruel, Mithras was forever doing good. Once he had engaged in a wrestling match with the sun and had beaten him. But he was so generous in his victory, that the sun and he had become like brothers, and were often mistaken for each other.

When the God of all evil had sent a drought which threatened to kill the race of man, Mithras had struck a rock with his arrow, and behold! plentiful water had gushed forth upon the parched fields. When Ahriman (for that was the name of the arch-enemy) had thereupon tried to achieve his wicked purpose by a terrible flood, Mithras had heard of it, had warned one man, had told him to build a big boat and load it with his relatives and his flocks and in this way had saved the human race from destruction. Until finally, having done all he could to save the world from the[66] consequences of its own follies, he had been taken to Heaven to rule the just and righteous for all time.

Those who wished to join the Mithras cult were obliged to go through an elaborate form of initiation and were forced to eat a ceremonious meal of bread and wine in memory of the famous supper eaten by Mithras and his friend the Sun. Furthermore, they were obliged to accept baptism in a font of water and do many other things which have no special interest to us, as that form of religion was completely exterminated more than fifteen hundred years ago.

Once inside the fold, the faithful were all treated upon a footing of absolute equality. Together they prayed before the same candle-lit altars. Together they chanted the same holy hymns and together they took part in the festivities which were held each year on the twenty-fifth of December to celebrate the birth of Mithras. Furthermore they abstained from all work on the first day of the week, which even today is called Sun-day in honor of the great God. And finally when they died, they were laid away in patient rows to await the day of resurrection when the good should enter into their just reward and the wicked should be cast into the fire everlasting.

The success of these different mysteries, the widespread influence of Mithraism among the Roman soldiers, points to a condition far removed from religious indifference. Indeed the early centuries of the empire were a period of restless search after something that should satisfy the emotional needs of the masses.

But early in the year 47 of our own era something happened. A small vessel left Phoenicia for the city of Perga, the starting point for the overland route to Europe. Among[67] the passengers were two men not overburdened with luggage.

Their names were Paul and Barnabas.

They were Jews, but one of them carried a Roman passport and was well versed in the wisdom of the Gentile world.

It was the beginning of a memorable voyage.

Christianity had set out to conquer the world.

The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.

Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere along the bay of Naples.

But they were only part of the story.

Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.

There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore[69] had been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very real and tangible. Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had died hundreds and thousands of years ago and what people knew about them they only knew by hearsay from other people who had also died hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Joshua of Nazareth, on the other hand, the Christ, the anointed, as the Greek missionaries called him, had been on this earth only a short time ago. Many a man then alive might have known him, might have listened to him, if by chance he had visited southern Syria during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.

And there were others, the baker on the corner, the fruit peddler from the next street, who in a little dark garden on the Appian Way had spoken with a certain Peter, a fisherman from the village of Capernaum, who had actually been near the mountain of Golgotha on that terrible afternoon when the Prophet had been nailed to the cross by the soldiers of the Roman governor.

We should remember this when we try to understand the sudden popular appeal of this new faith.

It was that personal touch, that direct and personal feeling of intimacy and near-by-ness which gave Christianity such a tremendous advantage over all other creeds. That and the love which Jesus had so incessantly expressed for the submerged and disinherited among all nations and which radiated from everything he had said. Whether he had put it into the exact terms used by his followers was of very slight importance. The slaves had ears to hear and they understood. And trembling before the high promise of a glorious future, they for the first time in their lives beheld the rays of a new hope.

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At last the words had been spoken that were to set them free.

No longer were they poor and despised, an evil thing in the sight of the great of this world.

On the contrary, they were the predilected children of a loving Father.

They were to inherit the earth and the fullness thereof.

They were to partake of joys withheld from many of those proud masters who even then dwelled behind the high walls of their Samnian villas.

For that constituted the strength of the new faith. Christianity was the first concrete religious system which gave the average man a chance.

Of course I am now talking of Christianity as an experience of the soul—as a mode of living and thinking—and I have tried to explain how, in a world full of the dry-rot of slavery, the good tidings must spread with the speed and fury of an emotional prairie fire. But history, except upon rare occasions, does not concern itself with the spiritual adventures of private citizens, be they free or in bondage. When these humble creatures have been neatly organized into nations, guilds, churches, armies, brotherhoods and federations; when they have begun to obey a single directing head; when they have accumulated sufficient wealth to pay taxes and can be forced into armies for the purpose of national conquest, then at last they begin to attract the attention of our chroniclers and are given serious attention. Hence we know a great deal about the early Church, but exceedingly little about the people who were the true founders of that institution. That is rather a pity, for the early development of Christianity is one of the most interesting episodes in all history.

The Church which finally was built upon the ruins of the[71] ancient empire was really a combination of two conflicting interests. On the one side it stood forth as the champion of those all-embracing ideals of love and charity which the Master himself had taught. But on the other side it found itself ineradicably bound up with that arid spirit of provincialism which since the beginning of time had set the compatriots of Jesus apart from the rest of the world.

In plain language, it combined Roman efficiency with Judaean intolerance and as a result it established a reign of terror over the minds of men which was as efficient as it was illogical.

To understand how this could have happened, we must go back once more to the days of Paul and to the first fifty years after the death of Christ, and we must firmly grasp the fact that Christianity had begun as a reform movement within the bosom of the Jewish church and had been a purely nationalistic movement which in the beginning had threatened the rulers of the Jewish state and no one else.

The Pharisees who had happened to be in power when Jesus lived had understood this only too clearly. Quite naturally they had feared the ultimate consequences of an agitation which boldly threatened to question a spiritual monopoly which was based upon nothing more substantial than brute force. To save themselves from being wiped out they had been forced to act in a spirit of panic and had sent their enemy to the gallows before the Roman authorities had had time to intervene and deprive them of their victim.

What Jesus would have done had he lived it is impossible to say. He was killed long before he was able to organize his disciples into a special sect nor did he leave a single word of writing from which his followers could conclude what he wanted them to do.

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In the end, however, this had proved to be a blessing in disguise.

The absence of a written set of rules, of a definite collection of ordinances and regulations, had left the disciples free to follow the spirit of their master’s words rather than the letter of his law. Had they been bound by a book, they would very likely have devoted all their energies to a theological discussion upon the ever enticing subject of commas and semi-colons.

In that case, of course, no one outside of a few professional scholars could have possibly shown the slightest interest in the new faith and Christianity would have gone the way of so many other sects which begin with elaborate written programs and end when the police are called upon to throw the haggling theologians into the street.

At the distance of almost twenty centuries, when we realize what tremendous damage Christianity did to the Roman Empire, it is a matter of surprise that the authorities took practically no steps to quell a movement which was fully as dangerous to the safety of the state as an invasion by Huns or Goths. They knew of course that the fate of this eastern prophet had caused great excitement among their house slaves, that the women were forever telling each other about the imminent reappearance of the King of Heaven, and that quite a number of old men had solemnly predicted the impending destruction of this world by a ball of fire.

But it was not the first time that the poorer classes had gone into hysterics about some new religious hero. Most likely it would not be the last time, either. Meanwhile the police would see to it that these poor, frenzied fanatics did not disturb the peace of the realm.

And that was that.

The police did watch out, but found little occasion to act.[73] The followers of the new mystery went about their business in a most exemplary fashion. They did not try to overthrow the government. At first, several slaves had expected that the common fatherhood of God and the common brotherhood of man would imply a cessation of the old relation between master and servant. The apostle Paul, however, had hastened to explain that the Kingdom of which he spoke was an invisible and intangible kingdom of the soul and that people on this earth had better take things as they found them, in expectation of the final reward which awaited them in Heaven.

Similarly, a good many wives, chafing at the bondage of matrimony as established by the harsh laws of Rome, had rushed to the conclusion that Christianity was synonymous with emancipation and full equality of rights between men and women. But again Paul had stepped forward and in a number of tactful letters had implored his beloved sisters to refrain from all those extremes which would make their church suspect in the eyes of the more conservative pagans and had persuaded them to continue in that state of semi-slavery which had been woman’s share ever since Adam and Eve had been driven out of Paradise. All this showed a most commendable respect for the law and as far as the authorities were concerned, the Christian missionaries could therefore come and go at will and preach as best suited their own individual tastes and preferences.

But as has happened so often in history, the masses had shown themselves less tolerant than their rulers. Just because people are poor it does not necessarily follow that they are high-minded citizens who could be prosperous and happy if their conscience would only permit them to make those compromises which are held to be necessary for the accumulation of wealth.

[74]

And the Roman proletariat, since centuries debauched by free meals and free prize-fights, was no exception to this rule. At first it derived a great deal of rough pleasure from those sober-faced groups of men and women who with rapt attention listened to the weird stories about a God who had ignominiously died on a cross, like any other common criminal, and who made it their business to utter loud prayers for the hoodlums who pelted their gatherings with stones and dirt.

The Roman priests, however, were not able to take such a detached view of this new development.

The religion of the empire was a state religion. It consisted of certain solemn sacrifices made upon certain specified occasions and paid for in cash. This money went toward the support of the church officers. When thousands of people began to desert the old shrines and went to another church which did not charge them anything at all, the priests were faced by a very serious reduction in their salary. This of course did not please them at all, and soon they were loud in their abuse of the godless heretics who turned their backs upon the Gods of their fathers and burned incense to the memory of a foreign prophet.

But there was another class of people in the city who had even better reason to hate the Christians. Those were the fakirs, who as Indian Yogis and Pooughies and hierophants of the great and only mysteries of Isis and Ishtar and Baal and Cybele and Attis had for years made a fat and easy living at the expense of the credulous Roman middle classes. If the Christians had set up a rival establishment and had charged a handsome price for their own particular revelations, the guild of spook-doctors and palmists and necromancers would have had no reason for complaint. Business was business and the soothsaying fraternity did not[75] mind if a bit of their trade went elsewhere. But these Christians—a plague upon their silly notions!—refused to take any reward. Yea, they even gave away what they had, fed the hungry and shared their own roof with the homeless. And all that for nothing! Surely that was going too far and they never could have done this unless they were possessed of certain hidden sources of revenue, the origin of which no one thus far had been able to discover.

Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers. It was the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited peasants from all parts of the empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious laws that rule the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay for one is a fine neighbor and a good fellow. But the man who holds himself aloof and refuses to go to the wild-animal show in the Coliseum, who does not cheer when batches of prisoners of war are being dragged through the streets of the Capitoline Hill, is a spoil-sport and an enemy of the community at large.

When in the year 64 a great conflagration destroyed that part of Rome inhabited by the poorer classes, the scene was set for the first organized attacks upon the Christians.

At first it was rumored that the Emperor Nero, in a fit of drunken conceit, had ordered his capital to be set on fire that he might get rid of the slums and rebuild the city according to his own plans. The crowd, however, knew better. It was the fault of those Jews and Christians who were forever telling each other about the happy day when large balls of fire would descend from Heaven and the homes of the wicked would go up in flames.

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Once this story had been successfully started, others followed in rapid succession. One old woman had heard the Christians talk with the dead. Another knew that they stole little children and cut their throats and smeared their blood upon the altar of their outlandish God. Of course, no one had ever been able to detect them at any of these scandalous practices, but that was only because they were so terribly clever and had bribed the police. But now at last they had been caught red-handed and they would be made to suffer for their vile deeds.

Of the number of faithful who were lynched upon this occasion, we know nothing. Paul and Peter, so it seems, were among the victims for thereafter their names are never heard again.

That this terrible outbreak of popular folly accomplished nothing, it is needless to state. The noble dignity with which the martyrs accepted their fate was the best possible propaganda for the new ideas and for every Christian who perished, there were a dozen pagans, ready and eager to take his place. As soon as Nero had committed the only decent act of his short and useless life (he killed himself in the year 68), the Christians returned to their old haunts and everything was as it had been before.

By this time the Roman authorities were making a great discovery. They began to suspect that a Christian was not exactly the same thing as a Jew.

We can hardly blame them for having committed this error. The historical researches of the last hundred years have made it increasingly clear that the Synagogue was the clearing-house through which the new faith was passed on to the rest of the world.

Remember that Jesus himself was a Jew and that he had always been most careful in observing the ancient laws of his[77] fathers and that he had addressed himself almost exclusively to Jewish audiences. Once, and then only for a short time, had he left his native country, but the task which he had set himself he had accomplished with and by and for his fellow-Jews. Nor was there anything in what he had ever said which could have given the average Roman the impression that there was a deliberate difference between Christianity and Judaism.

What Jesus had actually tried to do was this. He had clearly seen the terrible abuses which had entered the church of his fathers. He had loudly and sometimes successfully protested against them. But he had fought his battles for reform from within. Never apparently had it dawned upon him that he might be the founder of a new religion. If some one had mentioned the possibility of such a thing to him, he would have rejected the idea as preposterous. But like many a reformer before his day and after, he had gradually been forced into a position where compromise was no longer possible. His untimely death alone had saved him from a fate like that of Luther and so many other advocates of reform, who were deeply perplexed when they suddenly found themselves at the head of a brand new party “outside” the organization to which they belonged, whereas they were merely trying to do some good from the “inside.”

For many years after the death of Jesus, Christianity (to use the name long before it had been coined) was the religion of a small Jewish sect which had a few adherents in Jerusalem and in the villages of Judaea and Galilee and which had never been heard of outside of the province of Syria.

It was Gaius Julius Paulus, a full-fledged Roman citizen of Jewish descent, who had first recognized the possibilities of the new doctrine as a religion for all the world. The[78] story of his suffering tells us how bitterly the Jewish Christians had been opposed to the idea of a universal religion instead of a purely national denomination, membership to which should only be open to people of their own race. They had hated the man who dared preach salvation to Jews and Gentiles alike so bitterly that on his last visit to Jerusalem Paul would undoubtedly have suffered the fate of Jesus if his Roman passport had not saved him from the fury of his enraged compatriots.

But it had been necessary for half a battalion of Roman soldiers to protect him and conduct him safely to the coastal town from where he could be shipped to Rome for that famous trial which never took place.

A few years after his death, that which he had so often feared during his lifetime and which he had repeatedly foretold actually occurred.

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. On the place of the temple of Jehovah a new temple was erected in honor of Jupiter. The name of the city was changed to Aelia Capitolina and Judaea itself had become part of the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. As for the inhabitants, they were either killed or driven into exile and no one was allowed to live within several miles of the ruins on pain of death.

It was the final destruction of their holy city which had been so disastrous to the Jewish-Christians. During several centuries afterwards, in the little villages of the Judaean hinterland colonies might have been found of strange people who called themselves “poor men” and who waited with great patience and amidst everlasting prayers for the end of the world which was at hand. They were the remnants of the old Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem. From time to time we hear them mentioned in books written during the fifth and sixth centuries. Far away from civilization, they[79] developed certain strange doctrines of their own in which hatred for the apostle Paul took a prominent place. After the seventh century however we no longer find any trace of these so-called Nazarenes and Ebionites. The victorious Mohammedans had killed them all. And, anyway, if they had managed to exist a few hundred years longer, they would not have been able to avert the inevitable.

Rome, by bringing east and west and north and south into one large political union, had made the world ready for the idea of a universal religion. Christianity, because it was both simple and practical and full of a direct appeal, was predestined to succeed where Judaism and Mithraism and all of the other competing creeds were predestined to fail. But, unfortunately, the new faith never quite rid itself of certain rather unpleasant characteristics which only too clearly betrayed its origin.

The little ship which had brought Paul and Barnabas from Asia to Europe had carried a message of hope and mercy.

But a third passenger had smuggled himself on board.

He wore a mask of holiness and virtue.

But the face beneath bore the stamp of cruelty and hatred.

And his name was Religious Intolerance.

The early church was a very simple organization. As soon as it became apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the last judgment and that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of government.

Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews) had come together in the synagogue. When the rift had occurred between the Jews and the Gentiles, the latter had betaken themselves to a room in some one’s house and if none could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone quarry.

At first these gatherings had taken place on the Sabbath, but when bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians increased, the latter began to drop the habit of keeping the Sabbath-day and preferred to meet on Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had taken place.

These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to the popular as well as to the emotional character of the entire movement. There were no set speeches or sermons. There were no preachers. Both men and women, whenever they felt themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in meeting to give evidence of the faith that was in them. Sometimes, if we are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout[81] brethren, “speaking with tongues,” had filled the heart of the great apostle with apprehension for the future. For most of them were simple folk without much education. No one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations but very often they got so excited that they raved like maniacs and while a church may survive persecution, it is helpless against ridicule. Hence the efforts of Paul and Peter and their successors to bring some semblance of order into this chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.

At first these efforts met with little success. A regular program seemed in direct contradiction to the democratic nature of the Christian faith. In the end, however, practical considerations supervened and the meetings became subject to a definite ritual.

They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to placate the Jewish Christians who might be present). Then the congregation united in a song of praise of more recent composition for the benefit of the Roman and the Greek worshipers.

The only prescribed form of oration was the famous prayer in which Jesus had summed up his entire philosophy of life. The preaching, however, for several centuries remained entirely spontaneous and the sermons were delivered only by those who felt that they had something to say.

But when the number of those gatherings increased, when the police, forever on the guard against secret societies, began to make inquiries, it was necessary that certain men be elected to represent the Christians in their dealings with the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken highly of the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny vessels which were tossed upon a turbulent sea and were[82] very much in need of a clever pilot if they were to survive the fury of the angry ocean.

And so the faithful came together once more and elected deacons and deaconesses, pious men and women who were the “servants” of the community, who took care of the sick and the poor (an object of great concern to the early Christians) and who looked after the property of the community and took care of all the small daily chores.

Still later when the church continued to grow in membership and the business of administration had become too intricate for mere amateurs, it was entrusted to a small group of “elders.” These were known by their Greek name of Presbyters and hence our word “priest.”

After a number of years, when every village or city possessed a Christian church of its own, the need was felt for a common policy. Then an “overseer” (an Episkopos or Bishop) was elected to superintend an entire district and direct its dealings with the Roman government.

Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the empire, and those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem and Carthage and Rome and Alexandria and Athens were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who were almost as important as the civil and military governors of their provinces.

In the beginning of course the bishop who presided over that part of the world where Jesus had lived and suffered and died enjoyed the greatest respect. But after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the generation which had expected the end of the world and the triumph of Zion had disappeared from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop in his ruined palace saw himself deprived of his former prestige.

And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was taken by the “overseer” who lived in the capital of the[83] civilized world and who guarded the sites where Peter and Paul, the great apostles of the west, had suffered their martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.

This bishop, like all others, was known as Father or Papa, the common expression of love and respect bestowed upon members of the clergy. In the course of centuries, the title of Papa however became almost exclusively associated in people’s minds with the particular “Father” who was the head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of Rome, and not by any chance the Bishop of Constantinople or the Bishop of Carthage. This was an entirely normal development. When we read in our newspaper about “the President” it is not necessary to add “of the United States.” We know that the head of our government is meant and not the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad or the President of Harvard University or the President of the League of Nations.

The first time the name occurred officially in a document was in the year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital of a highly successful empire and the power of the bishops was entirely overshadowed by that of the emperors. But during the next three hundred years, under the constant menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors of Caesar began to look for a new home that would offer them greater safety. This they found in a city in a different part of their domains. It was called Byzantium, after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas who was said to have landed there shortly after the Trojan war. Situated on the straits which separated Europe from Asia and dominating the trade route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, it controlled several important monopolies and was of such great commercial importance that already[84] Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this rich fortress.

Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of Alexander and after having been for a short while part of Macedonia it had finally been incorporated into the Roman Empire.

And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity, its Golden Horn filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the center of the empire.

The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had come when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time; when one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the Bosphorus and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws made a thousand miles away.

But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow some one good. With the emperors gone, the bishops remained behind as the most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible successors to the glory of the imperial throne.

And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office had attracted the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered and failed.

But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved consistently and persistently towards one goal. In all they did and said and thought they were guided[85] by the desire to increase the glory of God and the strength and power of the organization which represented the divine will on earth.

How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.

While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.

The victory, however, which was finally won, was bought at a terrible cost.

For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred years it developed into a new supertheocracy, compared to which the old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and carefree citizens.

And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall now try to show you.

Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Coliseum and within those wind-swept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.

But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions of the adherents of the new faith, these had very little to do with religious intolerance.

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They were purely political.

The Christian, as a member of a religious sect, enjoyed the greatest possible freedom.

But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector, who bragged of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with foreign invasion and openly defied the laws of the land upon every suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an enemy of the state and was treated as such.

That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.

A Roman police judge after all was only human. When he suddenly found himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him a very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use “tact” in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles, very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.

In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified vindication of the supreme power of the state. But prison and torture meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.

The guerilla warfare therefore which finally broke out between the authorities and their Christian subjects was long[87] and painful. We possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims. According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century, several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one of the persecutions, “the number of true Christians who died for their convictions could easily be enumerated.”

On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early saints we find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of bloodshed that we begin to wonder how a religion exposed to these constant and murderous persecutions could ever have survived at all.

No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call me a prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to myself and let my readers draw their own conclusions. By studying the lives of the Emperors Decius (249-251) and Valerian (253-260) they will be able to form a fairly accurate opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance during the worst era of persecution.

Furthermore if they will remember that as wise and liberal minded a ruler as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself unable to handle the problem of his Christian subjects successfully, they will derive some idea about the difficulties which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of the empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful to their oath of office or execute those of their relatives and neighbors who could not or would not obey those few and very simple ordinances upon which the imperial government insisted as a matter of self-preservation.

Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality towards their pagan fellow-citizens, were steadily extending the sphere of their influence.

Late in the fourth century, the Emperor Gratian at the request of the Christian members of the Roman senate who[88] complained that it hurt their feelings to gather in the shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the removal of the statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators protested. This did very little good and only caused a number of them to be sent into exile.

It was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted patriot of great personal distinction, wrote his famous letter in which he tried to suggest a compromise.

“Why,” so he asked, “should we Pagans and our Christian neighbors not live in peace and harmony? We look up to the same stars, we are fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky. What matters it along which road each individual endeavors to find the ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be only one path leading to an answer.”

He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the danger which threatened the old Roman tradition of a broadminded religious policy. Simultaneously with the removal of the statue of Victory in Rome a violent quarrel had broken out between two contending factions of the Christians who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute gave rise to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance to which the world had ever listened. Themistius the philosopher, who was the author, had remained faithful to the Gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor Valens took sides in the fight between his orthodox and his non-orthodox Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of his true duty.

“There is,” so he said, “a domain over which no ruler can hope to exercise any authority. That is the domain of the virtues and especially that of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion within that field causes hypocrisy and[89] conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence it is much better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only by toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance is a divine law. God himself has most clearly demonstrated his desire for a number of different religions. And God alone can judge the methods by which humanity aspires to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery. God delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to him. He likes the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others, the Egyptians again others.”

Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.

The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was dead and all efforts to set back the clock of history were doomed beforehand. Life means progress, and progress means suffering. The old order of society was rapidly disintegrating. The army was a mutinous mob of foreign mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England and the other outlying districts had long since been surrendered to the barbarians.

When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant young men who in centuries past had entered the service of the state found themselves deprived of all but one chance for advancement. That was a career in the Church. As Christian archbishop of Spain, they could hope to exercise the power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors, they could be certain of a fairly large public if they were willing to devote themselves exclusively to theological subjects. As Christian diplomats, they could be sure of rapid promotion if they were willing to represent the bishop of Rome at the imperial court of Constantinople or undertake the hazardous job of gaining the good will of some barbarous chieftain in the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And finally, as Christian financiers, they could hope to make fortunes[90] administering those rapidly increasing estates which had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.

We have seen something of the same nature during the last five years. Up to the year 1914 the young men of Europe who were ambitious and did not depend upon manual labor for their support almost invariably entered the service of the state. They became officers of the different imperial and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher judicial positions, administered the finances or spent years in the colonies as governors or military commanders. They did not expect to grow very rich, but the social prestige of the offices which they held was very great and by the application of a certain amount of intelligence, industry and honesty, they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honorable old age.

Then came the war and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however, surrendered to the inevitable. From childhood on they had been educated to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention. Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small. And so within a few years after the great upheaval, we find most of the former officers and state officials doing the sort of work which they would not have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly. Besides, as most of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they[91] have found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are today a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had ever expected to be.

What business is today, the Church was sixteen centuries ago.

It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan war to take orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes of the Trojan war wanted and wanted badly. And therefore if they were both bright fellows (as they well may have been) they soon learned to appreciate the other fellow’s good qualities and got along beautifully. For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.

Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that there shall be one small group of clever men and women who do the ruling and a much larger group of not-quite-so-bright men and women who shall do the obeying. The stakes for which these two groups play are at different periods known by different names. Invariably they represent Strength and Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance on the other. They have been called Empire and Church and Knighthood and Monarchy and Democracy and Slavery and Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious law which governs human development works the same in Moscow as it does in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound to neither time nor place. It has often manifested itself under strange forms and disguises. More than once it has worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its love for humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring[92] about the greatest good for the greatest number. But underneath such pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and continues to hide the grim truth of that primeval law which insists that the first duty of man is to keep alive. People who resent the fact that they were born in a world of mammals are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us “materialistics” and “Cynics” and what not. Because they have always regarded history as a pleasant fairy tale, they are shocked to discover that it is a science which obeys the same iron rules which govern the rest of the universe. They might as well fight against the habits of parallel lines or the results of the tables of multiplication.

Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.

For then and only then can history some day be turned into something that shall have a practical value to the human race and cease to be the ally and confederate of those who profit by racial prejudice, tribal intolerance and the ignorance of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

And if any one doubts the truth of this statement, let him look for the proof in the chronicles of those centuries of which I was writing a few pages back.

Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the first four centuries.

Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterwards, when they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them of course were attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart and soul. But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly master to a Heavenly ruler because the chances for advancement with the latter were infinitely greater.

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The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavored to be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined towards a practical and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took their faith more emotionally, were offered every possible opportunity to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their souls.

In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion and contemplation.

The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast real-estate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to harken back to the “good old days” when all true Christians had spent their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might again be happy, they now artificially re-created what once had been a natural development of the times.

This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the next thousand years and which was to give the Church a devoted group of very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics was of Oriental origin.

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This need not surprise us.

In the countries bordering upon the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point of exhaustion. In Egypt alone, ten different and separate cycles of culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The vanity of life, the utter futility of all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as an eager promise of life, a constant appeal to their newly regained energy and enthusiasm. But Egyptians and Syrians took their religious experiences in a different mood.

To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore look upon the reality of existence.

For some curious reason the business of reform always seems to have had a particular appeal to soldiers. They, more than all other people, have come into direct contact with the cruelty and the horrors of civilization. Furthermore they have learned that nothing can be accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of the Emperor Charles V. And the man who first gathered the spiritual stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian. When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group of hermits who under the leadership of a certain[95] Anthony, who hailed from his own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully among the jackals of the desert. But as the solitary life seemed to lead to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief to the true believers) Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a more practical basis and in this way he became the founder of the first religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century) hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander who was known as the “superior general” and who in turn appointed the abbots who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so many fortresses of the Lord.

Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been carried from Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its wickedness and its too insistent creditors.

The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed. Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.

“What,” so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, “is to become of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress? Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by the[96] self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?”

The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation goes to a native of the town of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His parents had sent him to Rome to be educated, but the city had filled his Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in the Abruzzi mountains to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.

There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside and the number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.

He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it showed the influence of Benedict’s Roman origin. The monks who swore to obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work, they were expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful citizens and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.

In return for their labors, the monks were decently[97] clothed, received a sufficient amount of eatable food and were given a bed upon which they could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to work or to prayer.

But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter. They became the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity by a long and most painful period of probation and furthermore they were expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the glory of the kingdom of God.

The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come to naught, the labors of the individual preachers must be followed up by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The monks now carried their spade and their ax and their prayer-book into the wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland. They plowed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.

In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the entire Church, make use of all the manifold forces of the human spirit.

The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of an opportunity to distinguish himself as the dreamer who found happiness in the silence of the woods. There was no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste. And the result was such an increase of power that soon neither emperor nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying[98] humble attention to the wishes of those of his subjects who confessed themselves the followers of the Christ.

The way in which the final victory was gained is not without interest. For it shows that the triumph of Christianity was due to practical causes and was not (as is sometimes believed) the result of a sudden and overwhelming outburst of religious ardor.

The last great persecution of the Christians took place under the Emperor Diocletian.

Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of the worst among those many potentates who ruled Europe by the grace of their body-guards. But he suffered from a complaint which alas! is quite common among those who are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely ignorant upon the subject of elementary economics.

He found himself possessed of an empire that was rapidly going to pieces. Having spent all his life in the army, he believed the weak point lay in the organization of the Roman military system, which entrusted the defenses of the outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had gradually lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics, selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom they were supposed to keep at a safe distance from the frontiers.

It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable system. He therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating a new field army, composed of young and agile men who at a few weeks’ notice could be marched to any particular part of the empire that was threatened with an invasion.

This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a military nature, it cost an awful lot of money. This money had to be produced in the form of taxes by the people in the interior of the country. As was to be expected, they raised[99] a great hue and cry and claimed that they could not pay another denarius without going stone broke. The emperor answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his tax-gatherers certain powers thus far only possessed by the hangman. But all to no avail. For the subjects, rather than work at a regular trade which assured them a deficit at the end of a year’s hard work, deserted house and home and family and herds and flocked to the cities or became hobos. His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures and he solved the difficulty by a decree which shows how completely the old Roman Republic had degenerated into an Oriental despotism. By a stroke of his pen he made all government offices and all forms of handicraft and commerce hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or not. The sons of bakers must themselves become bakers, although they might have greater aptitude for music or pawn-broking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed to a life on shipboard, even if they were sea-sick when they rowed across the Tiber. And finally, the day laborers, although technically they continued to be freemen, were constrained to live and die on the same piece of soil on which they had been born and were henceforth nothing but a very ordinary variety of slaves.

To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence in his own ability either could or would tolerate the continued existence of a relatively small number of people who only obeyed such parts of his regulations and edicts as pleased them would be absurd. But in judging Diocletian for his harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember that he was fighting with his back against the wall and that he had good cause to suspect the loyalty of several million of his subjects who profited by the measures he had taken[100] for their protection but refused to carry their share of the common burden.

You will remember that the earliest Christians had not taken the trouble to write anything down. They expected the world to come to an end at almost any moment. Therefore why waste time and money upon literary efforts which in less than ten years would be consumed by the fire from Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and when the story of Christ (after a hundred years of patient waiting) was beginning to be repeated with such strange additions and variations that a true disciple hardly knew what to believe and what not, the need was felt for some authentic book upon the subject and a number of short biographies of Jesus and such of the original letters of the apostles as had been preserved were combined into one large volume which was called the New Testament.

This book contained among others a chapter called the Book of Revelations and therein were to be found certain references and certain prophecies about and anent a city built on “seven mountains.” That Rome was built on seven hills had been a commonly known fact ever since the days of Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this curious chapter carefully called the city of his abomination Babylon. But it took no great degree of perspicacity on the part of the imperial magistrate to understand what was meant when he read these pleasant references to the “Mother of Harlots” and the “Abomination of the Earth,” the town that was drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs, foredoomed to become the habitation of all devils, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of every unclean and hateful bird, and more expressions of a similar and slightly uncomplimentary nature.

Such sentences might have been explained away as the[101] ravings of a poor fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he thought of his many friends who had been killed during the last fifty years. But they were part of the solemn services of the Church. Week after week they were repeated in those places where the Christians came together and it was no more than natural that outsiders should think that they represented the true sentiments of all Christians towards the mighty city on the Tiber. I do not mean to imply that the Christians may not have had excellent reason to feel the way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because he failed to share their enthusiasm.

But that was not all.

The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with an expression which the world thus far had never heard. That was the word “heretics.” Originally the name “heretic” was given only to those people who had “chosen” to believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a “sect.” But gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had chosen to believe certain doctrines which were not held “correct” or “sound” or “true” or “orthodox” by the duly established authorities of the Church and which therefore, to use the language of the Apostles, were “heretical, unsound, false and eternally wrong.”

The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were technically free from the charge of heresy because they had remained outside of the fold of the Church and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be held to account for their private opinions. All the same, it did not flatter the imperial pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that “heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder, sedition and drunkenness” and a few other things which common decency prevents me from repeating on this page.

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All this led to friction and misunderstanding and friction and misunderstanding led to persecution and once more Roman jails were filled with Christian prisoners and Roman executioners added to the number of Christian martyrs and a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was accomplished and finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his home town of Salonae on the Dalmatian coast, retired from the business of ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the even more exciting pastime of raising great big cabbages in his back yard.

His successor did not continue the policy of repression. On the contrary, since he could not hope to eradicate the Christian evil by force, he decided to make the best of a bad bargain and gain the good will of his enemies by offering them some special favors.

This happened in the year 313 and the honor of having been the first to “recognize” the Christian church officially belongs to a man by the name of Constantine.

Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning Historians before whom all emperors, kings, pontiffs, presidents and mayors who now enjoy the title of the “great” shall have to submit their claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.

This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle field of Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus, was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just before he marched against his most[103] dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the “second Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and died a barbarian who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of sacrificial sheep, all this was most considerately overlooked in view of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess their private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place without fear of molestation.”

For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century, as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians and when they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree, they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity of the official church of the state. But they knew how and in what manner this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks the arrangement never quite lost its original character.

“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all the enemies of my church and in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting down thine enemies.”

There have been other bargains during the history of the last twenty centuries.

But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came to power.

Just before the curtain rings down for the last time upon the ancient world, a figure crosses the stage which had deserved a better fate than an untimely death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”

The Emperor Julian, to whom I refer, was a nephew of Constantine the Great and was born in the new capital of the empire in the year 331. In 337 his famous uncle died. At once his three sons fell upon their common heritage and upon each other with the fury of famished wolves.

To rid themselves of all those who might possibly lay claim to part of the spoils, they ordered that those of their relatives who lived in or near the city be murdered. Julian’s father was one of the victims. His mother had died a few years after his birth. In this way, at the age of six, the boy was left an orphan. An older half-brother, an invalid, shared his loneliness and his lessons. These consisted mostly of lectures upon the advantages of the Christian faith, given by a kindly but uninspired old bishop by the name of Eusebius.

But when the children grew older, it was thought wiser to send them a little further away where they would be less conspicuous and might possibly escape the usual fate of junior Byzantine princes. They were removed to a little village in the heart of Asia Minor. It was a dull life, but it gave Julian a chance to learn many useful things. For his neighbors, the Cappadocian mountaineers, were a simple people and still believed in the gods of their ancestors.

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There was not the slightest chance that the boy would ever hold a responsible position and when he asked permission to devote himself to a life of study, he was told to go ahead.

First of all he went to Nicomedia, one of the few places where the old Greek philosophy continued to be taught. There he crammed his head so full of literature and science that there was no space left for the things he had learned from Eusebius.

Next he obtained leave to go to Athens, that he might study on the very spot hallowed by the recollections of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.

Meanwhile, his half-brother too had been assassinated and Constantius, his cousin and the one and only remaining son of Constantine, remembering that he and his cousin, the boy philosopher, were by this time the only two surviving male members of the imperial family, sent for Julian, received him kindly, married him, still in the kindest of spirits, to his own sister, Helena, and ordered him to proceed to Gaul and defend that province against the barbarians.

It seems that Julian had learned something more practical from his Greek teachers than an ability to argue. When in the year 357 the Alamanni threatened France, he destroyed their army near Strassburg, and for good measure added all the country between the Meuse and the Rhine to his own province and went to live in Paris, filled his library with a fresh supply of books by his favorite authors and was as happy as his serious nature allowed him to be.

When news of these victories reached the ears of the Emperor, little Greek fire was wasted in celebration of the event. On the contrary, elaborate plans were laid to get rid of a competitor who might be just a trifle too successful.

But Julian was very popular with his soldiers. When[106] they heard that their commander-in-chief had been ordered to return home (a polite invitation to come and have one’s head cut off), they invaded his palace and then and there proclaimed him emperor. At the same time they let it be known that they would kill him if he should refuse to accept.

Julian, like a sensible fellow, accepted.

Even at that late date, the Roman roads must have been in a remarkably good state of preservation. Julian was able to break all records by the speed with which he marched his troops from the heart of France to the shores of the Bosphorus. But ere he reached the capital, he heard that his cousin Constantius had died.

And in this way, a pagan once more became ruler of the western world.

Of course the thing which Julian had undertaken to do was impossible. It is a strange thing indeed that so intelligent a man should have been under the impression that the dead past could ever be brought back to life by the use of force; that the age of Pericles could be revived by reconstructing an exact replica of the Acropolis and populating the deserted groves of the Academy with professors dressed up in togas of a bygone age and talking to each other in a tongue that had disappeared from the face of the earth more than five centuries before.

And yet that is exactly what Julian tried to do.

All his efforts during the two short years of his reign were directed towards the reëstablishment of that ancient science which was now held in profound contempt by the majority of his people; towards the rekindling of a spirit of research in a world ruled by illiterate monks who felt certain that everything worth knowing was contained in a single book and that independent study and investigation could only lead to unbelief and hell fire; towards the requickening[107] of the joy-of-living among those who had the vitality and the enthusiasm of ghosts.

Many a man of greater tenacity than Julian would have been driven to madness and despair by the spirit of opposition which met him on all sides. As for Julian, he simply went to pieces under it. Temporarily at least he clung to the enlightened principles of his great ancestors. The Christian rabble of Antioch might pelt him with stones and mud, yet he refused to punish the city. Dull-witted monks might try to provoke him into another era of persecution, yet the Emperor persistently continued to instruct his officials “not to make any martyrs.”

In the year 363 a merciful Persian arrow made an end to this strange career.

It was the best thing that could have happened to this, the last and greatest of the Pagan rulers.

Had he lived any longer, his sense of tolerance and his hatred of stupidity would have turned him into the most intolerant man of his age. Now, from his cot in the hospital, he could reflect that during his rule, not a single person had suffered death for his private opinions. For this mercy, his Christian subjects rewarded him with their undying hatred. They boasted that an arrow from one of his own soldiers (a Christian legionary) had killed the Emperor and with rare delicacy they composed eulogies in praise of the murderer. They told how, just before he collapsed, Julian had confessed the errors of his ways and had acknowledged the power of Christ. And they emptied the arsenal of foul epithets with which the vocabulary of the fourth century was so richly stocked to disgrace the fame of an honest man who had lived a life of ascetic simplicity and had devoted all his energies to the happiness of the people who had been entrusted to his care.

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When he had been carried to his grave the Christian bishops could at last consider themselves the veritable rulers of the Empire and immediately began the task of destroying whatever opposition to their domination might remain in isolated corners of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Under Valentinian and Valens, two brothers who ruled from 364 to 378, an edict was passed forbidding all Romans to sacrifice animals to the old Gods. The pagan priests were thereby deprived of their revenue and forced to look for other employment.

But the regulations were mild compared to the law by which Theodosius ordered all his subjects not only to accept the Christian doctrines, but to accept them only in the form laid down by the “universal” or “Catholic” church of which he had made himself the protector and which was to have a monopoly in all matters spiritual.

All those who after the promulgation of this ordinance stuck to their “erroneous opinions”—who persisted in their “insane heresies”—who remained faithful to their “scandalous doctrines”—were to suffer the consequences of their willful disobedience and were to be exiled or put to death.

From then on the old world marched rapidly to its final doom. In Italy and Gaul and Spain and England hardly a pagan temple remained. They were either wrecked by the contractors who needed stones for new bridges and streets and city-walls and water-works, or they were remodeled to serve as meeting places for the Christians. The thousands of golden and silver images which had been accumulated since the beginning of the Republic were publicly confiscated and privately stolen and such statues as remained were made into mortar.

The Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple which Greeks and Romans and Egyptians alike had held in the greatest veneration[109] for more than six centuries, was razed to the ground. There remained the university, famous all over the world ever since it had been founded by Alexander the Great. It had continued to teach and explain the old philosophies and as a result attracted a large number of students from all parts of the Mediterranean. When it was not closed at the behest of the Bishop of Alexandria, the monks of his diocese took the matter into their own hands. They broke into the lecture rooms, lynched Hypatia, the last of the great Platonic teachers, and threw her mutilated body into the streets where it was left to the mercy of the dogs.

In Rome things went no better.

The temple of Jupiter was closed, the Sibylline books, the very basis of the old Roman faith, were burned. The capital was left a ruin.

In Gaul, under the leadership of the famous bishop of Tours, the old Gods were declared to be the predecessors of the Christian devils and their temples were therefore ordered to be wiped off the face of the earth.

If, as sometimes happened in remote country districts, the peasants rushed forth to the defense of their beloved shrines, the soldiers were called out and by means of the ax and the gallows made an end to such “insurrections of Satan.”

In Greece, the work of destruction proceeded more slowly. But finally in the year 394, the Olympic games were abolished. As soon as this center of Greek national life (after an uninterrupted existence of eleven hundred and seventy years) had come to an end, the rest was comparatively easy. One after the other, the philosophers were expelled from the country. Finally, by order of the Emperor Justinian, the University of Athens was closed. The funds established for its maintenance were confiscated. The last seven professors, deprived of their livelihood, fled to Persia[110] where King Chosroes received them hospitably and allowed them to spend the rest of their days peacefully playing the new and mysterious Indian game called “chess.”

In the first half of the fifth century, archbishop Chrysostomus could truthfully state that the works of the old authors and philosophers had disappeared from the face of the earth. Cicero and Socrates and Virgil and Homer (not to mention the mathematicians and the astronomers and the physicians who were an object of special abomination to all good Christians) lay forgotten in a thousand attics and cellars. Six hundred years were to go by before they were called back to life, and in the meantime the world would be obliged to subsist on such literary fare as it pleased the theologians to place before it.

A strange diet, and not exactly (in the jargon of the medical faculty) a balanced one.

For the Church, although triumphant over its pagan enemies, was beset by many and serious tribulations. The poor peasant in Gaul and Lusitania, clamoring to burn incense in honor of his ancient Gods, could be silenced easily enough. He was a heathen and the law was on the side of the Christian. But the Ostrogoth or the Alaman or the Longobard who declared that Arius, the priest of Alexandria, was right in his opinion upon the true nature of Christ and that Athanasius, the bishop of that same city and Arius’ bitter enemy, was wrong (or vice versa)—the Longobard or Frank who stoutly maintained that Christ was not “of the same nature” but of a “like nature only” with God (or vice versa)—the Vandal or the Saxon who insisted that Nestor spoke the truth when he called the Virgin Mary the “mother of Christ” and not the “mother of God” (or vice versa)—the Burgundian or Frisian who denied that Jesus was possessed of two natures, one human and one divine (or vice versa)—all[111] these simple-minded but strong-armed barbarians who had accepted Christianity and were, outside of their unfortunate errors of opinion, staunch friends and supporters of the Church—these indeed could not be punished with a general anathema and a threat of perpetual hell fire. They must be persuaded gently that they were wrong and must be brought within the fold with charitable expressions of love and devotion. But before all else they must be given a definite creed that they might know for once and for all what they must hold to be true and what they must reject as false.

It was that desire for unity of some sort in all matters pertaining to the faith which finally caused those famous gatherings which have become known as Oecumenical or Universal Councils, and which since the middle of the fourth century have been called together at irregular intervals to decide what doctrine is right and what doctrine contains the germ of heresy and should therefore be adjudged erroneous, unsound, fallacious and heretical.

The first of those Oecumenical councils was held in the town of Nicaea, not far from the ruins of Troy, in the year 325. The second one, fifty-six years later, was held in Constantinople. The third one in the year 431 in Ephesus. Thereafter they followed each other in rapid succession in Chalcedon, twice again in Constantinople, once more in Nicaea and finally once again in Constantinople in the year 869.

After that, however, they were held in Rome or in some particular town of western Europe designated by the Pope. For it was generally accepted from the fourth century on that although the emperor had the technical right to call together such meetings (a privilege which incidentally obliged him to pay the traveling expenses of his faithful bishops) that very serious attention should be paid to the[112] suggestions made by the powerful Bishop of Rome. And although we do not know with any degree of certainty who occupied the chair in Nicaea, all later councils were dominated by the Popes and the decisions of these holy gatherings were not regarded as binding unless they had obtained the official approval of the supreme pontiff himself or one of his delegates.

Hence we can now say farewell to Constantinople and travel to the more congenial regions of the west.

The field of Tolerance and Intolerance has been fought over so repeatedly by those who hold tolerance the greatest of all human virtues and those who denounce it as an evidence of moral weakness, that I shall pay very little attention to the purely theoretical aspects of the case. Nevertheless it must be confessed that the champions of the Church follow a plausible line of reasoning when they try to explain away the terrible punishments which were inflicted upon all heretics.

“A church,” so they argue, “is like any other organization. It is almost like a village or a tribe or a fortress. There must be a commander-in-chief and there must be a definite set of laws and by-laws, which all members are forced to obey. It follows that those who swear allegiance to the Church make a tacit vow both to respect the commander-in-chief and to obey the law. And if they find it impossible to do this, they must suffer the consequences of their own decisions and get out.”

All of which, so far, is perfectly true and reasonable.

If today a minister feels that he can no longer believe in the articles of faith of the Baptist Church, he can turn Methodist, and if for some reason he ceases to believe in the creed as laid down by the Methodist Church, he can become a Unitarian or a Catholic or a Jew, or for that matter, a[113] Hindoo or a Turk. The world is wide. The door is open. There is no one outside his own hungry family to say him nay.

But this is an age of steamships and railroad trains and unlimited economic opportunities.

The world of the fifth century was not quite so simple. It was far from easy to discover a region where the influence of the Bishop of Rome did not make itself felt. One could of course go to Persia or to India, as a good many heretics did, but the voyage was long and the chances of survival were small. And this meant perpetual banishment for one’s self and one’s children.

And finally, why should a man surrender his good right to believe what he pleased if he felt sincerely that his conception of the idea of Christ was the right one and that it was only a question of time for him to convince the Church that its doctrines needed a slight modification?

For that was the crux of the whole matter.

The early Christians, both the faithful and the heretics, dealt with ideas which had a relative and not a positive value.

A group of mathematicians, sending each other to the gallows because they cannot agree upon the absolute value of x would be no more absurd than a council of learned theologians trying to define the undefinable and endeavoring to reduce the substance of God to a formula.

But so thoroughly had the spirit of self-righteousness and intolerance got hold of the world that until very recently all those who advocated tolerance upon the basis that “we cannot ever possibly know who is right and who is wrong” did so at the risk of their lives and usually couched their warnings in such careful Latin sentences that not more than one or two of their most intelligent readers ever knew what they meant.

Here is a little problem in mathematics which is not out of place in a book of history. Take a piece of string and make it into a circle, like this:

In this circle all diameters will of course be equal.

AB = CD = EF = GH and so on, ad infinitum.

But turn the circle into an ellipse by slightly pulling two sides. Then the perfect balance is at once disturbed. The diameters are thrown out of gear. A few like AB and EF have been[115] greatly shortened. Others, and especially CD, have been lengthened.

Now transfer the problem from mathematics to history. Let us for the sake of argument suppose that

In the figure I the perfectly balanced state, all lines are equally long and quite as much attention is paid to politics as to trade and art and militarism.

But in figure II (which is no longer a perfect circle) trade has got an undue advantage at the expense of politics and art has almost entirely disappeared, while militarism shows a gain.

Or make GH (militarism) the longest diameter, and the others will tend to disappear altogether.

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You will find this a handy key to a great many historical problems.

Try it on the Greeks.

For a short time the Greeks had been able to maintain a perfect circle of all-around accomplishments. But the foolish quarrels between the different political parties soon grew to such proportions that all the surplus energy of the nation was being absorbed by the incessant civil wars. The soldiers were no longer used for the purpose of defending the country against foreign aggression. They were turned loose upon their own neighbors, who had voted for a different candidate, or who believed in a slightly modified form of taxation.

Trade, that most important diameter of all such circles, at first became difficult, then became entirely impossible and fled to other parts of the world, where business enjoyed a greater degree of stability.

The moment poverty entered through the front gate of the city, the arts escaped by way of the back door, never to be seen again. Capital sailed away on the fastest ship it could[117] find within a hundred miles, and since intellectualism is a very expensive luxury, it was henceforth impossible to maintain good schools. The best teachers hastened to Rome and to Alexandria.

What remained was a group of second-rate citizens who subsisted upon tradition and routine.

And all this happened because the line of politics had grown out of all proportion, because the perfect circle had been destroyed, and the other lines, art, science, philosophy, etc., etc., had been reduced to nothing.

If you apply the circular problem to Rome, you will find that there the particular line called “political power” grew and grew and grew until there was nothing left of any of the others. The circle which had spelled the glory of the Republic disappeared. All that remained was a straight, narrow line, the shortest distance between success and failure.

And if, to give you still another example, you reduce the history of the medieval Church to this sort of mathematics, this is what you will find.

The earliest Christians had tried very hard to maintain a circle of conduct that should be perfect. Perhaps they had rather neglected the diameter of science, but since they were not interested in the life of the world, they could not very well be expected to pay much attention to medicine or physics or astronomy, useful subjects, no doubt, but of small appeal to men and women who were making ready for the last judgment and who regarded this world merely as the ante-room to Heaven.

But for the rest, these sincere followers of Christ endeavored (however imperfectly) to lead the good life and to be as industrious as they were charitable and as kindly as they were honest.

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As soon, however, as their little communities had been united into a single powerful organization, the perfect balance of the old spiritual circle was rudely upset by the obligations and duties of the new international responsibilities. It was easy enough for small groups of half-starved carpenters and quarry workers to follow those principles of poverty and unselfishness upon which their faith was founded. But the heir to the imperial throne of Rome, the Pontifex Maximus of the western world, the richest landowner of the entire continent, could not live as simply as if he were a sub-deacon in a provincial town somewhere in Pomerania or Spain.

Or, to use the circular language of this chapter, the diameter representing “worldliness” and the diameter representing “foreign policy” were lengthened to such an extent that the diameters representing “humility” and “poverty” and “self-negation” and the other elementary Christian virtues were being reduced to the point of extinction.

It is a pleasant habit of our time to speak patronizingly of the benighted people of the Middle Ages, who, as we all know, lived in utter darkness. It is true they burned wax tapers in their churches and went to bed by the uncertain light of a sconce, they possessed few books, they were ignorant of many things which are now being taught in our grammar schools and in our better grade lunatic asylums. But knowledge and intelligence are two very different things and of the latter, these excellent burghers, who constructed the political and social structure in which we ourselves continue to live, had their full share.

If a good deal of the time they seemed to stand apparently helpless before the many and terrible abuses in their Church, let us judge them mercifully. They had at least the courage of their convictions and they fought whatever[119] they considered wrong with such sublime disregard for personal happiness and comfort that they frequently ended their lives on the scaffold.

More than that we can ask of no one.

It is true that during the first thousand years of our era, comparatively few people fell as victims to their ideas. Not, however, because the Church felt less strongly about heresy than she did at a later date, but because she was too much occupied with more important questions to have any time to waste upon comparatively harmless dissenters.

In the first place, there remained many parts of Europe where Odin and the other heathen gods still ruled supreme.

And in the second place, something very unpleasant had happened, which had wellnigh threatened the whole of Europe with destruction.

This “something unpleasant” was the sudden appearance of a brand-new prophet by the name of Mahomet, and the conquest of western Asia and northern Africa by the followers of a new God who was called Allah.

The literature which we absorb in our childhood full of “infidel dogs” and Turkish atrocities is apt to leave us under the impression that Jesus and Mahomet represented ideals which were as mutually antagonistic as fire and water.

But as a matter of fact, the two men belonged to the same race, they spoke dialects which belonged to the same linguistic group, they both claimed Abraham as their great-great-grandfather and they both looked back upon a common ancestral home, which a thousand years before had stood on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

And yet, the followers of those two great teachers who were such close relatives have always regarded each other with bitter scorn and have fought a war which has lasted[120] more than twelve centuries and which has not yet come to an end.

At this late day and age it is useless to speculate upon what might have happened, but there was a time when Mecca, the arch-enemy of Rome, might have easily been gained for the Christian faith.

The Arabs, like all desert people, spent a great deal of their time tending their flocks and therefore were much given to meditation. People in cities can drug their souls with the pleasures of a perennial county-fair. But shepherds and fisher folk and farmers lead solitary lives and want something a little more substantial than noise and excitement.

In his quest for salvation, the Arab had tried several religions, but had shown a distinct preference for Judaism. This is easily explained, as Arabia was full of Jews. In the tenth century B.C., a great many of King Solomon’s subjects, exasperated by the high taxes and the despotism of their ruler, had fled into Arabia and again, five hundred years later in 586 B.C., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, there had been a second wholesale exodus of Jews towards the desert lands of the south.

Judaism, therefore, was well known and furthermore the quest of the Jews after the one and only true God was entirely in line with the aspirations and ideals of the Arabian tribes.

Any one in the least familiar with the work of Mahomet will know how much the Medinite had borrowed from the wisdom contained in some of the books of the Old Testament.

Nor were the descendants of Ishmael (who together with his mother Hagar lay buried in the Holy of Holies in the heart of Arabia) hostile to the ideas expressed by the young reformer from Nazareth. On the contrary, they followed Jesus eagerly when he spoke of that one God who was a[121] loving father to all men. They were not inclined to accept those miracles of which the followers of the Nazarene carpenter made so much. And as for the resurrection, they flatly refused to believe in it. But generally speaking, they felt very kindly disposed towards the new faith and were willing to give it a chance.

But Mahomet suffered considerable annoyance at the hands of certain Christian zealots who with their usual lack of discretion had denounced him as a liar and a false prophet before he had fairly opened his mouth. That and the impression which was rapidly gaining ground that the Christians were idol worshipers who believed in three Gods instead of one, made the people of the desert finally turn their backs upon Christianity and declare themselves in favor of the Medinese camel driver who spoke to them of one and only one God and did not confuse them with references to three deities that were “one” and yet were not one, but were one or three as it might please the convenience of the moment and the interests of the officiating priest.

Thus the western world found itself possessed of two religions, each of which proclaimed its own God to be the One True God and each of which insisted that all other Gods were impostors.

Such conflicts of opinion are apt to lead to warfare.

Mahomet died in 632.

Within less than a dozen years, Palestine, Syria, Persia and Egypt had been conquered and Damascus had become the capital of a great Arab empire.

Before the end of 656 the entire coast of northern Africa had accepted Allah as its divine ruler and in less than a century after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, the Mediterranean had been turned into a Moslem lake, all communications between Europe and Asia had been cut off[122] and the European continent was placed in a state of siege which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century.

Under those circumstances it had been impossible for the Church to carry her doctrines eastward. All she could hope to do was to hold on to what she already possessed. Germany and the Balkans and Russia and Denmark and Sweden and Norway and Bohemia and Hungary had been chosen as a profitable field for intensive spiritual cultivation and on the whole, the work was done with great success. Occasionally a hardy Christian of the variety of Charlemagne, well-intentioned but not yet entirely civilized, might revert to strong-arm methods and might butcher those of his subjects who preferred their own Gods to those of the foreigner. By and large, however, the Christian missionaries were well received, for they were honest men who told a simple and straightforward story which all the people could understand and because they introduced certain elements of order and neatness and mercy into a world full of bloodshed and strife and highway robbery.

But while this was happening along the frontier, things had not gone so well in the heart of the pontifical empire. Incessantly (to revert to the mathematics explained in the first pages of this chapter) the line of worldliness had been lengthened until at last the spiritual element in the Church had been made entirely subservient to considerations of a purely political and economic nature and although Rome was to grow in power and exercise a tremendous influence upon the development of the next twelve centuries, certain elements of disintegration had already made their appearance and were being recognized as such by the more intelligent among the laity and the clergy.

We modern people of the Protestant north think of a “church” as a building which stands empty six days out of[123] every seven and a place where people go on a Sunday to hear a sermon and sing a few hymns. We know that some of our churches have bishops and occasionally these bishops hold a convention in our town and then we find ourselves surrounded by a number of kindly old gentlemen with their collars turned backwards and we read in the papers that they have declared themselves in favor of dancing or against divorce, and then they go home again and nothing has happened to disturb the peace and happiness of our community.

We rarely associate this church (even if it happens to be our own) with the sum total of all our experiences, both in life and in death.

The State, of course, is something very different. The State may take our money and may kill us if it feels that such a course is desirable for the public good. The State is our owner, our master, but what is now generally called “the Church” is either our good and trusted friend or, if we happen to quarrel with her, a fairly indifferent enemy.

But in the Middle Ages this was altogether different. Then, the Church was something visible and tangible, a highly active organization which breathed and existed, which shaped man’s destiny in many more ways than the State would ever dream of doing. Very likely those first Popes who accepted pieces of land from grateful princes and renounced the ancient ideal of poverty did not foresee the consequences to which such a policy was bound to lead. In the beginning it had seemed harmless enough and quite appropriate that faithful followers of Christ should bestow upon the successor of the apostle Peter a share of their own worldly goods. Besides, there was the overhead of a complicated administration which reached all the way from John o’Groat’s to Trebizond and from Carthage to Upsala.[124] Think of all the thousands of secretaries and clerks and scribes, not to mention the hundreds of heads of the different departments, that had to be housed and clothed and fed. Think of the amount spent upon a courier service across an entire continent; the traveling expenses of diplomatic agents now going to London, then returning from Novgorod; the sums necessary to keep the papal courtiers in the style that was expected of people who foregathered with worldly princes on a footing of complete equality.

All the same, looking back upon what the Church came to stand for and contemplating what it might have been under slightly more favorable circumstances, this development seems a great pity. For Rome rapidly grew into a gigantic super-state with a slight religious tinge and the pope became an international autocrat who held all the nations of western Europe in a bondage compared to which the rule of the old emperors had been mild and generous.

And then, when complete success seemed within certain reach, something happened which proved fatal to the ambition for world dominion.

The true spirit of the Master once more began to stir among the masses and that is one of the most uncomfortable things that can happen to any religious organization.

Heretics were nothing new.

There had been dissenters as soon as there had been a single rule of faith from which people could possibly dissent and disputes, which had divided Europe and Africa and western Asia into hostile camps for centuries at a time, were almost as old as the Church herself.

But these sanguinary quarrels between Donatists and Sabellianists and Monophysites and Manichaeans and Nestorians hardly come within the scope of this book. As a rule, one party was quite as narrow-minded as the other and[125] there was little to choose between the intolerance of a follower of Arius and the intolerance of a follower of Athanasius.

Besides, these quarrels were invariably based upon certain obscure points of theology which are gradually beginning to be forgotten. Heaven forbid that I should drag them out of their parchment graves. I am not wasting my time upon the fabrication of this volume to cause a fresh outbreak of theological fury. Rather, I am writing these pages to tell our children of certain ideals of intellectual liberty for which some of their ancestors fought at the risk of their lives and to warn them against that attitude of doctrinary arrogance and cock-sureness which has caused such a terrible lot of suffering during the last two thousand years.

But when I reach the thirteenth century, it is a very different story.

Then a heretic ceases to be a mere dissenter, a disputatious fellow with a pet hobby of his own based upon the wrong translation of an obscure sentence in the Apocalypse or the mis-spelling of a holy word in the gospel of St. John.

Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which during the reign of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the village of Nazareth went to his death, and behold! he stands revealed as the only true Christian!

In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as Innocent III took possession of the papal chair.

He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided in the Lateran Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time of his ascension. An honor-student in the universities of Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever, full of energy and high ambition, he used his office so well that he could rightly claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone but of the entire world.”

He set Italy free from German interference by driving the imperial governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering those parts of the peninsula which were held by imperial troops; and finally by excommunicating the candidate to the imperial throne until that poor prince found himself beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew entirely from his domains on the other side of the Alps.

He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these proceedings[127] which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her eastern colonies and treated them accordingly.

In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished and tactful person.

The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to comply with the papal wishes.

Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV (known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of Trondhjem.

And so it went.

[128]

The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England, certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta.

From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.

And yet, some there were found who had the courage to do this very thing as we shall now see.

The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.

Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have small gift for publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets they write to explain their ideas and to defend themselves against their enemies fall an easy prey to the ever watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to be in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed. Hence we depend for our knowledge of most heresies upon such information as we are able to glean from the records of their trials and upon such articles as have been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan” to the truly faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized and warned against doing likewise.

As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired[129] individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty cellar somewhere in the lowest part of the slums, who refuses to touch decent Christian food but subsists entirely upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who keeps away from the company of women and mumbles strange prophecies about the second coming of the Messiah, who reproves the clergy for their worldliness and wickedness and generally disgusts his more respectable neighbors by his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.

Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in making a nuisance of themselves, for that seems to be the fate of people who take themselves too seriously.

Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost unholy zeal for a holy life, were dirty, looked like the devil and did not smell pleasantly and generally upset the quiet routine of their home town by their strange ideas anent a truly Christian existence.

But let us give them credit for their courage and their honesty.

They had mighty little to gain and everything to lose.

As a rule, they lost it.

Of course, everything in this world tends to become organized. Eventually even those who believe in no organization at all must form a Society for the Promotion of Disorganization, if they wish to accomplish anything. And the medieval heretics, who loved the mysterious and wallowed in emotions, were no exception to this rule. Their instinct of self-preservation made them flock together and their feeling of insecurity forced them to surround their sacred doctrines by a double barrier of mystic rites and esoteric ceremonials.

But of course the masses of the people, who remained faithful to the Church, were unable to make any distinction[130] between these different groups and sects. And they bunched them all together and called them dirty Manichaeans or some other unflattering name and felt that that solved the problem.

In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists of the Middle Ages. Of course I do not use the latter name as indicating membership in a certain well-defined political party which a few years ago established itself as the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer to a vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays bestow upon all their personal enemies from the landlord who comes to collect the rent down to the elevator boy who neglects to stop at the right floor.

A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a most objectionable person. But as he could not very well try him upon any positive charges, he condemned him upon hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable advantages over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure followed by the regular courts of law but which sometimes suffers from a lack of accuracy and is responsible for a great many judicial murders.

What made this all the more reprehensible in the case of the poor Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of the original sect, a Persian by the name of Mani, had been the very incarnation of benevolence and charity. He was an historical figure and was born during the first quarter of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his father, Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence.

He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and spent the years of his youth in a community as international, as polyglot, as pious, as godless, as material and as idealistically-spiritual as the New York of our own day.[131] Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of east and west and south and north had its followers among the crowds that visited the great commercial centers of Mesopotamia. Mani listened to all the different preachers and prophets and then distilled a philosophy of his own which was a mixtum-compositum of Buddhism, Christianity, Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a dozen old Babylonian superstitions.

Making due allowance for certain extremes to which his followers sometimes carried his doctrines, it can be stated that Mani merely revived the old Persian myth of the Good God and the Evil God who are eternally fighting for the soul of man and that he associated the ancient God of Evil with the Jehovah of the Old Testament (who thus became his Devil) and the God of All Good Things with that Heavenly Father whom we find revealed within the pages of the Four Gospels. Furthermore (and that is where Buddhistic influence made itself felt) Mani believed that the body of man was by nature a vile and despicable thing; that all people should try to rid themselves of their worldly ambitions by the constant mortification of the flesh and should obey the strictest rules of diet and behavior lest they fall into the clutches of the Evil God (the Devil) and burn in Hell. As a result he revived a large number of taboos about things that must not be eaten or drunk and prescribed for his followers a menu composed exclusively of cold water, dried vegetables and dead fish. This latter ordinance may surprise us, but the inhabitants of the sea, being cold-blooded animals, have always been regarded as less harmful to man’s immortal soul than their warm-blooded brethren of the dry land, and the self-same people who would rather suffer death than eat a veal chop cheerfully consume quantities of fish and never feel a qualm of conscience.

[132]

Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for women. He forbade his disciples to marry and advocated the slow extinction of the human race.

As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally by the Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been the exponent, Mani regarded them all with horror and instead of being submerged in water, his candidates for holy orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.

At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to explain his ideas unto all mankind. First he visited India and China where he was fairly successful. Then he turned homeward to bring the blessings of his creed to his own neighbors.

But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived of much secret revenue by the success of these unworldly doctrines turned against him and asked that he be killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the protection of the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious questions, Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They took him to the walls of the town and crucified him and flayed his corpse and publicly exposed his skin before the city gate as an example to all those who might feel inclined to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.

By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean church itself was broken up. But little bits of the prophet’s ideas, like so many spiritual meteors, were showered far and wide upon the landscape of Europe and Asia and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc among the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them up, had examined them and had found them singularly to their taste.

[133]

Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I do not know.

Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Danube. Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed immense popularity in Germany and France. There the followers of the new creed called themselves by the Oriental name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,” and so widespread was the affliction that all over western Europe the word “Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the same as “heretic.”

But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a definite religious denomination. No effort was made to establish a new sect. The Manichaean ideas exercised great influence upon a large number of people who would have stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout sons of the Church. And that made this particular form of heresy so dangerous and so difficult of detection.

It is comparatively easy for the average doctor to diagnose a disease caused by microbes of such gigantic structure that their presence can be detected by the microscope of a provincial board-of-health.

But Heaven protect us against the little creatures who can maintain their incognito in the midst of an ultra-violet illumination, for they shall inherit the earth.

Manichaeism, from the point of view of the Church, was therefore the most dangerous expression of all social epidemics and it filled the higher authorities of that organization with a terror not felt before the more common varieties of spiritual afflictions.

It was rarely mentioned above a whisper, but some of the staunchest supporters of the early Christian faith had shown unmistakable symptoms of the disease. Yea, great Saint Augustine, that most brilliant and indefatigable warrior[134] of the Cross, who had done more than any one else to destroy the last stronghold of heathenism, was said to have been at heart considerable of a Manichaean.

Priscillian, the Spanish bishop who was burned at the stake in the year 385 and who gained the distinction of being the first victim of the law against heretics, was accused of Manichaean tendencies.

Even the heads of the Church seemed gradually to have fallen under the spell of the abominable Persian doctrines.

They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading the Old Testament and finally, during the twelfth century, promulgated that famous order by which all clergymen were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not to forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of abstinence were soon to make upon one of the greatest leaders of spiritual reform, causing that most lovable of men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish a new monastic order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly earned him the title of the Buddha of the West.

But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty and humility of soul began to filter down to the common people, at the very moment when the world was filled with the din of yet another war between emperor and pope, when foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross and the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable bits of territory along the Mediterranean shores, when hordes of Crusaders were rushing home with the ill-gotten plunder they had taken from friend and enemy alike, when abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a staff of courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass that they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed something very unpleasant was bound to happen, and it did.

[135]

Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent with the state of the Church made themselves felt in that part of France where the old Roman tradition of culture had survived longest and where civilization had never been quite absorbed by barbarism.

You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an abundance of sunshine and rain.

While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.

In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.

But there had not been anything which, however remotely, could be construed into open rebellion. Here and there in certain small villages certain people were beginning to hint that their priests might live as simply and as unostentatiously as their parishioners; who refused (oh, memory of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went forth to war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they might read and study the Gospels for themselves; who let it[136] be known that they did not approve of capital punishment; who denied the existence of that Purgatory which six centuries after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed as part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important detail) refused to surrender a tenth of their income to the Church.

Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions against clerical authority were sought out and sometimes, if they were deaf to persuasion, they were discreetly put out of the way.

But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed necessary to call together a meeting of all the bishops of the Provence to discuss what measures should be taken to put a stop to this very dangerous and highly seditious agitation. They duly convened and continued their debates until the year 1056.

By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary forms of punishment and excommunication did not produce any noticeable results. The simple country folk who desired to lead a “pure life” were delighted whenever they were given a chance to demonstrate their principles of Christian charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail and if perchance they were condemned to death, they marched to the stake with the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the place left vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a dozen fresh candidates for holiness.

Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between the papal delegates who insisted upon more severe persecutions and the local nobility and clergy who (knowing the true nature of their subjects) refused to comply with the orders from Rome and protested that violence only encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the[137] voice of reason and therefore was a waste both of time and energy.

And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement received a fresh impetus from the north.

In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way of the Rhone, there lived a merchant by the name of Peter Waldo. A very serious man, a good man, a most generous man, almost fanatically obsessed by his eagerness to follow the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Thirty generations of Christians had tried to explain just what Jesus had actually meant when he uttered these words. Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He divided whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and refused to accumulate fresh wealth.

John had written, “Search ye the scriptures.”

Twenty popes had commented upon this sentence and had carefully stipulated under what conditions it might perhaps be desirable for the laity to study the holy books directly and without the assistance of a priest.

Peter Waldo did not see it that way.

John had said, “Search ye the scriptures.”

Very well. Then Peter Waldo would search.

And when he discovered that the things he found did not tally with the conclusions of Saint Jerome, he translated the New Testament into his own language and spread copies of his manuscript throughout the good land of Provence.

At first his activities did not attract much attention. His enthusiasm for poverty did not seem dangerous. Most likely he could be persuaded to found some new and very ascetic monastic order for the benefit of those who wished to lead a life of real hardships and who complained that the[138] existing monasteries were a bit too luxurious and too comfortable.

Rome had always been very clever at finding fitting outlets for those people whose excess of faith might make them troublesome.

But all things must be done according to rule and precedent. And in that respect the “pure men” of the Provence and the “poor men” of Lyons were terrible failures. Not only did they neglect to inform their bishops of what they were doing, they even went further and boldly proclaimed the startling doctrine that one could be a perfectly good Christian without the assistance of a professional member of the priesthood and that the Bishop of Rome had no more right to tell people outside of his jurisdiction what to do and what to believe than the Grand Duke of Tartary or the Caliph of Bagdad.

The Church was placed before a terrible dilemma and truth compels me to state that she waited a long time before she finally decided to exterminate this heresy by force.

But an organization based upon the principle that there is only one right way of thinking and living and that all other ways are infamous and damnable is bound to take drastic measures whenever its authority is being openly questioned.

If it failed to do so it could not possibly hope to survive and this consideration at last compelled Rome to take definite action and devise a series of punishments that should put terror into the hearts of all future dissenters.

The Albigenses (the heretics were called after the city of Albi which was a hotbed of the new doctrine) and the Waldenses (who bore the name of their founder, Peter Waldo) living in countries without great political value[139] and therefore not well able to defend themselves, were selected as the first of her victims.

The murder of a papal delegate who for several years had ruled the Provence as if it were so much conquered territory, gave Innocent III an excuse to interfere.

He preached a formal crusade against both the Albigenses and the Waldenses.

Those who for forty consecutive days would join the expedition against the heretics would be excused from paying interest on their debts; they would be absolved from all past and future sins and for the time being they would be exempted from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of law. This was a fair offer and it greatly appealed to the people of northern Europe.

Why should they bother about going all the way to Palestine when a campaign against the rich cities of the Provence offered the same spiritual and economic rewards as a trip to the Orient and when a man could gain an equal amount of glory in exchange for a much shorter term of service?

For the time being the Holy Land was forgotten and the worst elements among the nobility and gentry of northern France and southern England, of Austria, Saxony and Poland came rushing southward to escape the local sheriff and incidentally replenish its depleted coffers at the expense of the prosperous Provençals.

The number of men, women and children hanged, burned, drowned, decapitated and quartered by these gallant crusaders is variously given. I have not any idea how many thousands perished. Here and there, whenever a formal execution took place, we are provided with a few concrete figures, and these vary between two thousand and twenty thousand, according to the size of each town.

[140]

After the city of Béziers had been captured, the soldiers were in a quandary how to know who were heretics and who were not. They placed their problem before the papal delegate, who followed the army as a sort of spiritual adviser.

“My children,” the good man answered, “go ahead and kill them all. The Lord will know his own people.”

But it was an Englishman by the name of Simon de Montfort, a veteran of the real crusades, who distinguished himself most of all by the novelty and the ingenuity of his cruelties. In return for his valuable services, he afterwards received large tracts of land in the country which he had just pillaged and his subordinates were rewarded in proportion.

As for the few Waldenses who survived the massacre, they fled to the more inaccessible valleys of Piedmont and there maintained a church of their own until the days of the Reformation.

The Albigenses were less fortunate. After a century of flogging and hanging, their name disappears from the court reports of the Inquisition. But three centuries later, in a slightly modified form, their doctrines were to crop up again and propagated by a Saxon priest called Martin Luther, they were to cause that reform which was to break the monopoly which the papal super-state had enjoyed for almost fifteen hundred years.

All that, of course, was hidden to the shrewd eyes of Innocent III. As far as he was concerned, the difficulty was at an end and the principle of absolute obedience had been triumphantly re-asserted. The famous command in Luke xiv: 23 where Christ tells how a certain man who wished to give a party, finding that there still was room in his banqueting hall and that several of the guests had remained[141] away, had said unto his servant, “Go out into the highways and compel them to come in,” had once more been fulfilled.

“They,” the heretics, had been compelled to come in.

The problem how to make them stay in still faced the Church and this was not solved until many years later.

Then, after many unsuccessful experiments with local tribunals, special courts of inquiry, such as had been used for the first time during the Albigensian uprising, were instituted in the different capitals of Europe. They were given jurisdiction over all cases of heresy and they came to be known simply as the Inquisition.

Even today when the Inquisition has long since ceased to function, the mere name fills our hearts with a vague feeling of unrest. We have visions of dark dungeons in Havanna, of torture chambers in Lisbon, of rusty cauldrons and branding irons in the museum of Cracow, of yellow hoods and black masks, of a king with a heavy lower jaw leering at an endless row of old men and women, slowly shuffling to the gibbet.

Several popular novels written during the latter half of the nineteenth century have undoubtedly had something to do with this impression of sinister brutality. Let us therefore deduct twenty-five per cent for the phantasy of our romantic scribes and another twenty-five for Protestant prejudice and we shall find that enough horror remains to justify those who claim that all secret tribunals are an insufferable evil and should never again be tolerated in a community of civilized people.

Henry Charles Lea has treated the subject of the Inquisition in eight ponderous volumes. I shall have to reduce these to two or three pages, and it will be quite impossible to give a concise account of one of the most complicated problems of medieval history within so short a space. For[142] there never was an Inquisition as there is a Supreme Court or an International Court of Arbitration.

There were all sorts of Inquisitions in all sorts of countries and created for all sorts of purposes.

The best known of these was the Royal Inquisition of Spain and the Holy Inquisition of Rome. The former was a local affair which watched over the heretics in the Iberian peninsula and in the American colonies.

The latter had its ramifications all over Europe and burned Joan of Arc in the northern part of the continent as it burned Giordano Bruno in the southern.

It is true that the Inquisition, strictly speaking, never killed any one.

After sentence had been pronounced by the clerical judges, the convicted heretic was surrendered to the secular authorities. These could then do with him what they thought fit. But if they failed to pronounce the death penalty, they exposed themselves to a great deal of inconvenience and might even find themselves excommunicated or deprived of their support at the papal court. If, as sometimes happened, the prisoner escaped this fate and was not given over to the magistrates his sufferings only increased. For he then ran the risk of solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life in one of the inquisitorial prisons.

As death at the stake was preferable to the slow terror of going insane in a dark hole in a rocky castle, many prisoners confessed all sorts of crimes of which they were totally innocent that they might be found guilty of heresy and thus be put out of their misery.

It is not easy to write upon this subject without appearing to be hopelessly biased.

It seems incredible that for more than five centuries hundreds[143] of thousands of harmless people in all parts of the world were overnight lifted from their beds at the mere whispered hearsay of some loquacious neighbors; that they were held for months or for years in filthy cells awaiting an opportunity to appear before a judge whose name and qualifications were unknown to them; that they were never informed of the nature of the accusation that was brought against them; that they were not allowed to know the names of those who had acted as witnesses against them; that they were not permitted to communicate with their relatives or consult a lawyer; that if they continued to protest their innocence, they could be tortured until all the limbs of their body were broken; that other heretics could testify against them but were not listened to if they offered to tell something favorable of the accused; and finally that they could be sent to their death without the haziest notion as to the cause of their terrible fate.

It seems even more incredible that men and women who had been buried for fifty or sixty years could be dug out of their graves, could be found guilty “in absentia” and that the heirs of people who were condemned in this fashion could be deprived of their worldly possessions half a century after the death of the offending parties.

But such was the case and as the inquisitors depended for their maintenance upon a liberal share of all the goods that were confiscated, absurdities of this sort were by no means an uncommon occurrence and frequently the grandchildren were driven to beggary on account of something which their grandfather was supposed to have done two generations before.

Those of us who followed the newspapers twenty years ago when Czarist Russia was in the heyday of its power, remember the agent provocateur. As a rule the agent provocateur[144] was a former burglar or a retired gambler with a winning personality and a “grievance.” He let it be secretly known that his sorrow had made him join the revolution and in this way he often gained the confidence of those who were genuinely opposed to the imperial government. But as soon as he had learned the secrets of his new friends, he betrayed them to the police, pocketed the reward and went to the next city, there to repeat his vile practices.

During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, southern and western Europe was overrun by this nefarious tribe of private spies.

They made a living denouncing those who were supposed to have criticized the Church or who had expressed doubts upon certain points of doctrine.

If there were no heretics in the neighborhood, it was the business of such an agent provocateur to manufacture them.

As he could rest assured that torture would make his victims confess, no matter how innocent they might be, he ran no risks and could continue his trade ad infinitum.

In many countries a veritable reign of terror was introduced by this system of allowing anonymous people to denounce those whom they suspected of spiritual deficiencies. At last, no one dared trust his nearest and dearest friends. Members of the same family were forced to be on their guard against each other.

The mendicant friars who handled a great deal of the inquisitorial work made excellent use of the panic which their methods created and for almost two centuries they lived on the fat of the land.

Yes, it is safe to say that one of the main underlying causes of the Reformation was the disgust which a large number of people felt for those arrogant beggars who under a cloak of piety forced themselves into the homes[145] of respectable citizens, who slept in the most comfortable beds, who partook of the best dishes, who insisted that they be treated as honored guests and who were able to maintain themselves in comfort by the mere threat that they would denounce their benefactors to the Inquisition if ever they were deprived of any of those luxuries which they had come to regard as their just due.

The Church of course could answer to all this that the Inquisition merely acted as a spiritual health officer whose sworn duty it was to prevent contagious errors from spreading among the masses. It could point to the leniency shown to all heathen who acted in ignorance and therefore could not be held responsible for their opinions. It could even claim that few people ever suffered the penalty of death unless they were apostates and were caught in a new offense after having forsworn their former errors.

But what of it?

The same trick by which an innocent man was changed into a desperate criminal could afterwards be used to place him in an apparent position of recantation.

The agent provocateur and the forger have ever been close friends.

And what are a few faked documents between spies?

Modern intolerance, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts; the intolerance of laziness, the intolerance of ignorance and the intolerance of self-interest.

The first of these is perhaps the most general. It is to be met with in every country and among all classes of society. It is most common in small villages and old-established towns, and it is not restricted to human beings.

Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape.

Our scientific world has thus far spent so much time learning the defunct dialects of Polynesian islands that the language of dogs and cats and horses and donkeys has been sadly neglected. But could we know what Dude says to his former neighbors of Coley Town, we would hear an outburst of the most ferocious equine intolerance. For Dude is no longer young and therefore is “set” in his ways. His horsey habits were all formed years and years ago and therefore all the Coley Town manners, customs and habits seem right to him and all the Westport customs and manners[147] and habits will be declared wrong until the end of his days.

It is this particular variety of intolerance which makes parents shake their heads over the foolish behavior of their children, which has caused the absurd myth of “the good old days”; which makes savages and civilized creatures wear uncomfortable clothes; which fills the world with a great deal of superfluous nonsense and generally turns all people with a new idea into the supposed enemies of mankind.

Otherwise, however, this sort of intolerance is comparatively harmless.

We are all of us bound to suffer from it sooner or later. In ages past it has caused millions of people to leave home, and in this way it has been responsible for the permanent settlement of vast tracts of uninhabited land which otherwise would still be a wilderness.

The second variety is much more serious.

An ignorant man is, by the very fact of his ignorance, a very dangerous person.

But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack of mental faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then he erects within his soul a granite bulwark of self-righteousness and from the high pinnacle of this formidable fortress, he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not share his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed to live.

People suffering from this particular affliction are both uncharitable and mean. Because they live constantly in a state of fear, they easily turn to cruelty and love to torture those against whom they have a grievance. It was among people of this ilk that the strange notion of a predilected group of a “chosen people” first took its origin. Furthermore,[148] the victims of this delusion are forever trying to bolster up their own courage by an imaginary relationship which exists between themselves and the invisible Gods. This, of course, in order to give a flavor of spiritual approbation to their intolerance.

For instance, such citizens never say, “We are hanging Danny Deever because we consider him a menace to our own happiness, because we hate him with a thousand hates and because we just love to hang him.” Oh, no! They get together in solemn conclave and deliberate for hours and for days and for weeks upon the fate of said Danny Deever. When finally sentence is read, poor Danny, who has perhaps committed some petty sort of larceny, stands solemnly convicted as a most terrible person who has dared to offend the Divine Will (as privately communicated to the elect who alone can interpret such messages) and whose execution therefore becomes a sacred duty, bringing great credit upon the judges who have the courage to convict such an ally of Satan.

That good-natured and otherwise kind-hearted people are quite as apt to fall under the spell of this most fatal delusion as their more brutal and blood-thirsty neighbors is a commonplace both of history and psychology.

The crowds that gaped delightedly at the sad plight of a thousand poor martyrs were most assuredly not composed of criminals. They were decent, pious folk and they felt sure that they were doing something very creditable and pleasing in the sight of their own particular Divinity.

Had one spoken to them of tolerance, they would have rejected the idea as an ignoble confession of Moral weakness. Perhaps they were intolerant, but in that case they were proud of the fact and with good right. For there, out in the cold dampness of early morning, stood Danny[149] Deever, clad in a saffron colored shirt and in a pair of pantaloons adorned with little devils, and he was going, going slowly but surely, to be hanged in the Market Place. While they themselves, as soon as the show was over, would return to a comfortable home and a plentiful meal of bacon and beans.

Was not that in itself proof enough that they were acting and thinking correctly?

Otherwise would they be among the spectators? Would not the rôles be reversed?

A feeble argument, I confess, but a very common one and hard to answer when people feel sincerely convinced that their own ideas are the ideas of God and are unable to understand how they could possibly be mistaken.

There remains as a third category the intolerance caused by self-interest. This, of course, is really a variety of jealousy and as common as the measles.

When Jesus came to Jerusalem, there to teach that the favor of Almighty God could not be bought by the killing of a dozen oxen or goats, all those who made a living from the ceremonial sacrifices in the temple decried him as a dangerous revolutionist and caused him to be executed before he could do any lasting damage to their main source of income.

When Saint Paul, a few years later, came to Ephesus and there preached a new creed which threatened to interfere with the prosperity of the jewelers who derived great profit from the sale of little images of the local Goddess Diana, the Guild of the Goldsmiths almost lynched the unwelcome intruder.

And ever since there has been open warfare between those who depend for their livelihood upon some established form[150] of worship and those whose ideas threaten to take the crowd away from one temple in favor of another.

When we attempt to discuss the intolerance of the Middle Ages, we must constantly remember that we have to deal with a very complicated problem. Only upon very rare occasions do we find ourselves confronted with only one manifestation of these three separate forms of intolerance. Most frequently we can discover traces of all three varieties in the cases of persecution which are brought to our attention.

That an organization, enjoying great wealth, administering thousands of square miles of land and owning hundreds of thousands of serfs, should have turned the full vigor of its anger against a group of peasants who had undertaken to reëstablish a simple and unpretentious Kingdom-of-Heaven-on-Earth was entirely natural.

And in that case, the extermination of heretics became a matter of economic necessity and belonged to class C, the intolerance of self-interest.

But when we begin to consider another group of men who were to feel the heavy hand of official disapprobation, the scientists, the problem becomes infinitely more complicated.

And in order to understand the perverse attitude of the Church authorities towards those who tried to reveal the secrets of nature, we must go back a good many centuries and study what had actually happened in Europe during the first six centuries of our era.

The invasion of the Barbarians had swept across the continent with the ruthless thoroughness of a flood. Here and there a few pieces of the old Roman fabric of state had remained standing erect amidst the wastes of the turbulent waters. But the society that had once dwelled within these[151] walls had perished. Their books had been carried away by the waves. Their art lay forgotten in the deep mud of a new ignorance. Their collections, their museums, their laboratories, their slowly accumulated mass of scientific facts, all these had been used to stoke the camp-fires of uncouth savages from the heart of Asia.

We possess several catalogues of libraries of the tenth century. Of Greek books (outside of the city of Constantinople, then almost as far removed from central Europe as the Melbourne of today) the people of the west possessed hardly any. It seems incredible, but they had completely disappeared. A few translations (badly done) of a few chapters from the works of Aristotle and Plato were all the scholar of that time could find when he wanted to familiarize himself with the thoughts of the ancients. If he desired to learn their language, there was no one to teach it to him, unless a theological dispute in Byzantium had driven a handful of Greek monks from their customary habitats and had forced them to find a temporary asylum in France or Italy.

Latin books there were in great quantity, but most of those dated from the fourth and fifth centuries. The few manuscripts of the classics that survived had been copied so often and so indifferently that their contents were no longer understandable to any one who had not made a life study of paleography.

As for books of science, with the possible exception of some of the simplest problems of Euclid, they were no longer to be found in any of the available libraries and what was much more regrettable, they were no longer wanted.

For the people who now ruled the world regarded science with a hostile eye and discouraged all independent labor in the field of mathematics, biology and zoology, not to mention medicine and astronomy, which had descended to[152] such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of the slightest practical value.

It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand such a state of affairs.

We men and women of the twentieth century, whether rightly or wrongly, profoundly believe in the idea of progress. Whether we ever shall be able to make this world perfect, we do not know. In the meantime we feel it to be our most sacred duty to try.

Yea, sometimes this faith in the unavoidable destiny of progress seems to have become the national religion of our entire country.

But the people of the Middle Ages did not and could not share such a view.

The Greek dream of a world filled with beautiful and interesting things had lasted such a lamentably short time! It had been so rudely disturbed by the political cataclysm that had overtaken the unfortunate country that most Greek writers of the later centuries had been confirmed pessimists who, contemplating the ruins of their once happy fatherland, had become abject believers in the doctrine of the ultimate futility of all worldly endeavor.

The Roman authors, on the other hand, who could draw their conclusions from almost a thousand years of consecutive history, had discovered a certain upward trend in the development of the human race and their philosophers, notably the Epicureans, had cheerfully undertaken the task of educating the younger generation for a happier and better future.

Then came Christianity.

The center of interest was moved from this world to the other. Almost immediately people fell back into a deep and dark abyss of hopeless resignation.

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Man was evil. He was evil by instinct and by preference. He was conceived in sin, born in sin, he lived in sin and he died repenting of his sins.

But there was a difference between the old despair and the new.

The Greeks were convinced (and perhaps rightly so) that they were more intelligent and better educated than their neighbors and they felt rather sorry for those unfortunate barbarians. But they never quite reached the point at which they began to consider themselves as a race that had been set apart from all others because it was the chosen people of Zeus.

Christianity on the other hand was never able to escape from its own antecedents. When the Christians adopted the Old Testament as one of the Holy Books of their own faith, they fell heir to the incredible Jewish doctrine that their race was “different” from all others and that only those who professed a belief in certain officially established doctrines could hope to be saved while the rest were doomed to perdition.

This idea was, of course, of enormous direct benefit to those who were lacking sufficiently in humility of spirit to believe themselves predilected favorites among millions and millions of their fellow creatures. During many highly critical years it had turned the Christians into a closely-knit, self-contained little community which floated unconcernedly upon a vast ocean of paganism.

What happened elsewhere on those waters that stretched far and wide towards the north and the south and the east and the west was a subject of the most profound indifference to Tertullian or St. Augustine, or any of those other early writers who were busily engaged in putting the ideas of their Church into the concrete form of written[154] books. Eventually they hoped to reach a safe shore and there to build their city of God. Meanwhile, what those in other climes hoped to accomplish and to achieve was none of their concern.

Hence they created for themselves entirely new conceptions about the origin of man and about the limits of time and space. What the Egyptians and Babylonians and the Greeks and the Romans had discovered about these mysteries did not interest them in the least. They were sincerely convinced that all the old values had been destroyed with the birth of Christ.

There was for example the problem of our earth.

The ancient scientists held it to be one among a couple of billion of other stars.

The Christians flatly rejected this idea. To them, the little round disk on which they lived was the heart and center of the universe.

It had been created for the special purpose of providing one particular group of people with a temporary home. The way in which this had been brought about was very simple and was fully described in the first chapter of Genesis.

When it became necessary to decide just how long this group of predilected people had been on this earth, the problem became a little more complicated. On all sides there were evidences of great antiquity, of buried cities, of extinct monsters and of fossilized plants. But these could be reasoned away or overlooked or denied or shouted out of existence. And after this had been done, it was a very simple matter to establish a fixed date for the beginning of time.

In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain[155] year, and would end at another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space.

True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books.

One book was enough.

That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were divinely inspired.

A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly amused if he had been told of a supposedly holy volume which contained scraps of ill-digested national history, doubtful love poems, the inarticulate visions of half-demented prophets and whole chapters devoted to the foulest denunciation of those who for some reason or another were supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s many tribal deities.

But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble respect for the “written word” which to him was one of the great mysteries of civilization, and when this particular book, by successive councils of his Church, was recommended to him as being without error, flaw or slip, he willingly enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum total of everything that man had ever known, or ever could hope to know, and joined in the denunciation and[156] persecution of those who defied Heaven by extending their researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and Isaiah.

The number of people willing to die for their principles has always been necessarily limited.

At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part of certain people is so irrepressible that some outlet must be found for their pent up energy. As a result of this conflict between curiosity and repression there grew up that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to be known as Scholasticism.

It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was then that Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, gave birth to a son who has better claims to be considered the patron saint of the French nation than that good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of eight hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded his subjects’ loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their own.

When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus, as you may see this very day at the bottom of many an ancient charter. The signature is a little clumsy. But Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As a boy he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took up writing, his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent fighting the Russians and the Moors that he had to give up the attempt and hired the best scribes of his day to act as his secretaries and do his writing for him.

For this old frontiersman, who prided himself upon the fact that only twice within fifty years had he worn “city clothes” (the toga of a Roman nobleman), had a most genuine appreciation of the value of learning, and turned his court into a private university for the benefit of his own children and for the sons and daughters of his officials.

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There, surrounded by the most famous men of his time, the new imperator of the west loved to spend his hours of leisure. And so great was his respect for academic democracy that he dropped all etiquette and as simple Brother David took an active share in the conversation and allowed himself to be contradicted by the humblest of his professors.

But when we come to examine the problems that interested this goodly company and the questions they discussed, we are reminded of the list of subjects chosen by the debating teams of a rural high school in Tennessee.

They were very naïve, to say the least. And what was true in the year 800 held equally good for 1400. This was not the fault of the medieval scholar, whose brain was undoubtedly quite as good as that of his successors of the twentieth century. But he found himself in the position of a modern chemist or doctor who is given complete liberty of investigation, provided he does not say or do anything at variance with the chemical and medical information contained in the volumes of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica of the year 1768 when chemistry was practically an unknown subject and surgery was closely akin to butchery.

As a result (I am mixing my metaphors anyway) the medieval scientist with his tremendous brain capacity and his very limited field of experimentation reminds one somewhat of a Rolls-Royce motor placed upon the chassis of a flivver. Whenever he stepped on the gas, he met with a thousand accidents. But when he played safe and drove his strange contraption according to the rules and regulations of the road he became slightly ridiculous and wasted a terrible lot of energy without getting anywhere in particular.

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Of course the best among these men were desperate at the rate of speed which they were forced to observe.

They tried in every possible way to escape from the everlasting observation of the clerical policemen. They wrote ponderous volumes, trying to prove the exact opposite of what they held to be true, in order that they might give a hint of the things that were uppermost in their minds.

They surrounded themselves with all sorts of hocus pocus; they wore strange garments; they had stuffed crocodiles hanging from their ceilings; they displayed shelves full of bottled monsters and threw evil smelling herbs in the furnace that they might frighten their neighbors away from their front door and at the same time establish a reputation of being the sort of harmless lunatics who could be allowed to say whatever they liked without being held too closely responsible for their ideas. And gradually they developed such a thorough system of scientific camouflage that even today it is difficult for us to decide what they actually meant.

That the Protestants a few centuries later showed themselves quite as intolerant towards science and literature as the Church of the Middle Ages had done is quite true, but it is beside the point.

The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to their hearts’ content, but they were rarely able to turn their threats into positive acts of repression.

The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed the power to crush its enemies but it made use of it, whenever the occasion presented itself.

The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like to indulge in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values of tolerance and intolerance.

But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were[159] placed before the choice of a public recantation or an equally public flogging.

And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what they held to be true, and preferred to waste their time on cross-word puzzles made up exclusively from the names of the animals mentioned in the Book of Revelations, let us not be too hard on them.

I am quite certain that I never would have written the present volume, six hundred years ago.

I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. I was taught to look upon all events of the past in the light of a definitely established order of things; a universe more or less competently managed by emperors and kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury. Furthermore, in the days of my youth, the good Lord was still tacitly recognized as the ex-officio head of everything, and a personage who had to be treated with great respect and decorum.

Then came the war.

The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times.

Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.

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Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy.

Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land, some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.

The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as an insufferable survival of the Dark Ages and we of the great republic of the west saved copies of the American comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks at home what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually were.

Then came the great Russian revolution.

For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist had howled that he was a poor, persecuted creature who enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as evidence thereof he had pointed to the strict supervision of all journals devoted to the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the victorious friends of freedom abolish censorship of the press? By no means. They padlocked all papers and magazines which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the new masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia or Archangel (not much to choose) and in general showed themselves a hundred times more intolerant than the much maligned ministers and police sergeants of the Little White Father.

It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community, which heartily believed in the motto of Milton that the “liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to our own conscience, is the highest form of liberty.”

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“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see the day when the Sermon on the Mount was declared to be a dangerous pro-German document which must not be allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million sovereign citizens and the publication of which would expose the editors and the printers to fines and imprisonment.

In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to drop the further study of history and to take up short story writing or real estate.

But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall stick to my job, trying to remember that in a well regulated state, every decent citizen is supposed to have the right to say and think and utter whatever he feels to be true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners of polite society or break one of the rules of the local police.

This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all official censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought to watch out for certain magazines and papers which are being printed for the purpose of turning pornography into private gain. But for the rest, I would let every one print whatever he liked.

I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical person who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with the history of the last five hundred years. That period shows clearly that violent methods of suppression of the printed or spoken word have never yet done the slightest good.

Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is contained in a small and hermetically closed space and subjected to a violent impact from without. A poor devil, full of half-baked economic notions, when left to himself will[163] attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and as a rule will be laughed at for his pains.

The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate sheriff, dragged to jail and condemned to thirty-five years of solitary confinement, will become an object of great pity and in the end will be regarded and honored as a martyr.

But it will be well to remember one thing.

There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as martyrs for good causes. They are tricky people and one never can tell what they will do next.

Hence I would say, let them talk and let them write. If they have anything to say that is good, we ought to know it, and if not, they will soon be forgotten. The Greeks seem to have felt that way, and the Romans did until the days of the Empire. But as soon as the commander-in-chief of the Roman armies had become an imperial and semi-divine personage, a second-cousin to Jupiter and a thousand miles removed from all ordinary mortals, this was changed.

The crime of “laesa majestas,” the heinous offense of “offering insult to his Majesty,” was invented. It was a purely political misdemeanor and from the time of Augustus until the days of Justinian, many people were sent to prison because they had been a little too outspoken in their opinions about their rulers. But if one let the person of the emperor alone, there was practically no other subject of conversation which the Roman must avoid.

This happy condition came to an end when the world was brought under the domination of the Church. The line between good and bad, between orthodox and heretical, was definitely drawn before Jesus had been dead more than a few years. During the second half of the first century, the apostle Paul spent quite a long time in the neighborhood[164] of Ephesus in Asia Minor, a place famous for its amulets and charms. He went about preaching and casting out devils, and with such great success that he convinced many people of the error of their heathenish ways. As a token of repentance they came together one fine day with all their books of magic and burned more than ten thousand dollars worth of secret formulae, as you may read in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

This, however, was an entirely voluntary act on the part of a group of repentant sinners and it is not stated that Paul made an attempt to forbid the other Ephesians from reading or owning similar books.

Such a step was not taken until a century later.

Then, by order of a number of bishops convened in this same city of Ephesus, a book containing the life of St. Paul was condemned and the faithful were admonished not to read it.

During the next two hundred years, there was very little censorship. There also were very few books.

But after the Council of Nicaea (325) when the Christian Church had become the official church of the Empire, the supervision of the written word became part of the routine duty of the clergy. Some books were absolutely forbidden. Others were described as “dangerous” and the people were warned that they must read them at their own risk. Until authors found it more convenient to assure themselves of the approval of the authorities before they published their works and made it a rule to send their manuscripts to the local bishops for their approbation.

Even then, a writer could not always be sure that his works would be allowed to exist. A book which one Pope had pronounced harmless might be denounced as blasphemous and indecent by his successor.

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On the whole, however, this method protected the scribes quite effectively against the risk of being burned together with their parchment offspring and the system worked well enough as long as books were copied by hand and it took five whole years to get out an edition of three volumes.

All this of course was changed by the famous invention of Johann Gutenberg, alias John Gooseflesh.

After the middle of the fifteenth century, an enterprising publisher was able to produce as many as four or five hundred copies in less than two weeks’ time and in the short period between 1453 and 1500 the people of western and southern Europe were presented with not less than forty thousand different editions of books that had thus far been obtainable only in some of the better stocked libraries.

The Church regarded this unexpected increase in the number of available books with very serious misgivings. It was difficult enough to catch a single heretic with a single home made copy of the Gospels. What then of twenty million heretics with twenty million copies of cleverly edited volumes? They became a direct menace to all idea of authority and it was deemed necessary to appoint a special tribunal to inspect all forthcoming publications at their source and say which could be published and which must never see the light of day.

Out of the different lists of books which from time to time were published by this committee as containing “forbidden knowledge” grew that famous Index which came to enjoy almost as nefarious a reputation as the Inquisition.

But it would be unfair to create the impression that such a supervision of the printing-press was something peculiar to the Catholic Church. Many states, frightened by the sudden avalanche of printed material that threatened to upset the peace of the realm, had already forced their local[166] publishers to submit their wares to the public censor and had forbidden them to print anything that did not bear the official mark of approbation.

But nowhere, except in Rome, has the practice been continued until today. And even there it has been greatly modified since the middle of the sixteenth century. It had to be. The presses worked so fast and furiously that even that most industrious Commission of Cardinals, the so-called Congregation of the Index, which was supposed to inspect all printed works, was soon years behind in its task. Not to mention the flood of rag-pulp and printers-ink which was poured upon the landscape in the form of newspapers and magazines and tracts and which no group of men, however diligent, could hope to read, let alone inspect and classify, in less than a couple of thousand years.

But rarely has it been shown in a more convincing fashion how terribly this sort of intolerance avenges itself upon the rulers who force it upon their unfortunate subjects.

Already Tacitus, during the first century of the Roman Empire, had declared himself against the persecution of authors as “a foolish thing which tended to advertise books which otherwise would never attract any public attention.”

The Index proved the truth of this statement. No sooner had the Reformation been successful than the list of forbidden books was promoted to a sort of handy guide for those who wished to keep themselves thoroughly informed upon the subject of current literature. More than that. During the seventeenth century, enterprising publishers in Germany and in the Low Countries maintained special agents in Rome whose business it was to get hold of advance copies of the Index Expurgatorius. As soon as they had obtained these, they entrusted them to special couriers who raced across the Alps and down the valley of the Rhine that the[167] valuable information might be delivered to their patrons with the least possible loss of time. Then the German and the Dutch printing shops would set to work and would get out hastily printed special editions which were sold at an exorbitant profit and were smuggled into the forbidden territory by an army of professional book-leggers.

But the number of copies that could be carried across the frontier remained necessarily very small and in such countries as Italy and Spain and Portugal, where the Index was actually enforced until a short time ago, the results of this policy of repression became very noticeable.

If such nations gradually dropped behind in the race for progress, the reason was not difficult to find. Not only were the students in their universities deprived of all foreign text-books, but they were forced to use a domestic product of very inferior quality.

And worst of all, the Index discouraged people from occupying themselves seriously with literature or science. For no man in his senses would undertake to write a book when he ran the risk of seeing his work “corrected” to pieces by an incompetent censor or emendated beyond recognition by the inconsequential secretary of an Inquisitorial Board of Investigators.

Instead, he went fishing or wasted his time playing dominoes in a wine-shop.

Or he sat down and in sheer despair of himself and his people, he wrote the story of Don Quixote.

In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of warning in many of the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his more timid friends.

“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the Lutheran controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very careful how you handle it, because you might easily offend the Pope, who wishes you well.”

Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge tells me that you are about to publish a book of short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do not incur the displeasure of the Emperor, who might be in a position to do you great harm.”

Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.

Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted to literature and the[169] word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where historians come together.

But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell.

“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.”

Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say something about this in your story of tolerance.”

And so on.

No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part of all good citizens.

History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt. It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and unseen.

Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the modern spirit of intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled in our news sheets, it is possible to discern signs of a more hopeful future.

For nowadays many things which previous generations would have accepted as self-evident and which would have[170] been passed by with the remark that “it has always been that way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often our neighbors rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our fathers and our grandfathers and not infrequently they are successful in their warfare upon some particularly obnoxious demonstration of the mob spirit.

This book must be kept very short.

I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful pawn-brokers, the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic supremacy, the dark ignorance of backwoods evangelists, the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis. These good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.

But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the State, they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized countries, such a possibility is entirely precluded.

Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more discomfort in any given community than the combined efforts of measles, small-pox and a gossiping woman. But private intolerance does not possess executioners of its own. If, as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law and becomes a proper subject for police supervision.

Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot prescribe to an entire nation what it shall think and say and eat and drink. If it tries to do this, it creates such a terrific resentment among all decent folk, that the new ordinance becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out even in the District of Columbia.

In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the indifference of the majority of the citizens of a free country will allow it to go, and no further. Whereas official intolerance is practically almighty.

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It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.

It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims of its meddlesome fury. It will listen to no argument. And ever again it backs up its decisions by an appeal to the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain the will of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were an exclusive possession of those who had been successful at the most recent elections.

If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used in the sense of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention to the private variety, have patience with me.

I can only do one thing at a time.

There is a learned cartoonist in our land who takes pleasure in asking himself, what do billiard-balls and cross-word puzzles and bull-fiddles and boiled shirts and door-mats think of this world?

But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas?

All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing.

A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had hit the gas factory or not.

The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful.

The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least holding his own.

Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object, could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different angle.

But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world of their own. Even with the assistance[173] of a couple of full-fledged professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing any harm whatsoever.

Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot.

Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the Renaissance.

Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary, images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating, listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most ponderous of wood-cuts.

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This great intellectual curiosity was very lucrative for the Frobens and the Alduses and the Etiennes and the other new firms of printers who were making a fortune out of the invention which had ruined Gutenberg, but otherwise the literary output of the Renaissance did not very greatly affect the state of that world in which the authors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries happened to find themselves. The distinction of having contributed something new was restricted to only a very few heroes of the quill and they were like our friends of the big guns. They rarely discovered during their own lifetime in how far they had been successful and how much damage their writings had actually done. But first and last they managed to demolish a great many of the obstacles which stood in the way of progress. And they deserve our everlasting gratitude for the thoroughness with which they cleaned up a lot of rubbish which otherwise would continue to clutter our intellectual front yard.

Strictly speaking, however, the Renaissance was not primarily a forward-looking movement. It turned its back in disgust upon the recent past, called the works of its immediate predecessors “barbaric” (or “Gothic” in the language of the country where the Goths had enjoyed the same reputation as the Huns), and concentrated its main interest upon those arts which seem to be pervaded with that curious substance known as the “classical spirit.”

If nevertheless the Renaissance struck a mighty blow for the liberty of conscience and for tolerance and for a better world in general, it was done in spite of the men who were considered the leaders of the new movement.

Long before the days of which we are now speaking, there had been people who had questioned the rights of a Roman bishop to dictate to Bohemian peasants and to English yeomen[175] in what language they should say their prayers, in what spirit they should study the words of Jesus, how much they should pay for an indulgence, what books they should read and how they should bring up their children. And all of them had been crushed by the strength of that super-state, the power of which they had undertaken to defy. Even when they had acted as champions and representatives of a national cause, they had failed.

The smoldering ashes of great John Huss, thrown ignominiously into the river Rhine, were a warning to all the world that the Papal Monarchy still ruled supreme.

The corpse of Wycliffe, burned by the public executioner, told the humble peasants of Leicestershire that councils and Popes could reach beyond the grave.

Frontal attacks, evidently, were impossible.

The mighty fortress of tradition, builded slowly and carefully during fifteen centuries of unlimited power, could not be taken by assault. The scandals which had taken place within these hallowed enclosures; the wars between three rival Popes, each claiming to be the legitimate and exclusive heir to the chair of Holy Peter; the utter corruption of the courts of Rome and Avignon, where laws were made for the purpose of being broken by those who were willing to pay for such favors; the utter demoralization of monastic life; the venality of those who used the recently increased horrors of purgatory as an excuse to blackmail poor parents into paying large sums of money for the benefit of their dead children; all these things, although widely known, never really threatened the safety of the Church.

But the chance shots fired at random by certain men and women who were not at all interested in ecclesiastical matters, who had no particular grievance against either pope or[176] bishop, these caused the damage which finally made the old edifice collapse.

What the “thin, pale man” from Prague had failed to accomplish with his high ideals of Christian virtue was brought about by a motley crowd of private citizens who had no other ambition than to live and die (preferably at a ripe old age) as loyal patrons of all the good things of this world and faithful sons of the Mother Church.

They came from all the seven corners of Europe. They represented every sort of profession and they would have been very angry, had an historian told them what they were doing.

For instance, take the case of Marco Polo.

We know him as a mighty traveler, a man who had seen such wondrous sights that his neighbors, accustomed to the smaller scale of their western cities, called him “Million Dollar Marc” and laughed uproariously when he told them of golden thrones as high as a tower and of granite walls that would stretch all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill. Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had never known before. For although[177] Polo was a simple-minded fellow who firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the previous twelve hundred years.

Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison.

And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous.

For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the Old Testament had never even suspected.

I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which only a few[178] years before would have brought them into contact with the agents of the Inquisition.

Take that strange story to which the friends of Boccaccio listened on the first day of their agreeable exile from Florence. All religious systems, so it told, were probably equally true and equally false. But if this were true, and they were all equally true and false, then how could people be condemned to the gallows for ideas which could neither be proven nor contradicted?

Read the even stranger adventures of a famous scholar like Lorenzo Valla. He died as a highly respectable member of the government of the Roman Church. Yet in the pursuit of his Latin studies he had incontrovertibly proven that the famous donation of “Rome and Italy and all the provinces of the West,” which Constantine the Great was supposed to have made to Pope Sylvester (and upon which the Popes had ever since based their claims to be regarded as super-lords of all Europe), was nothing but a clumsy fraud, perpetrated hundreds of years after the death of the Emperor by an obscure official of the papal chancery.

Or to return to more practical questions, what were faithful Christians, carefully reared in the ideas of Saint Augustine who had taught that a belief in the presence of people on the other side of the earth was both blasphemous and heretical, since such poor creatures would not be able to see the second coming of Christ and therefore had no reason to exist, what indeed were the good people of the year 1499 to think of this doctrine when Vasco da Gama returned from his first voyage to the Indies and described the populous kingdoms which he had found on the other side of this planet?

What were these same simple folk, who had always been told that our world was a flat dial and that Jerusalem was[179] the center of the universe, what were they to believe when the little “Vittoria” returned from her voyage around the globe and when the geography of the Old Testament was shown to contain some rather serious errors?

I repeat what I have said before. The Renaissance was not an era of conscious scientific endeavor. In spiritual matters it often showed a most regrettable lack of real interest. Everything during these three hundred years was dominated by a desire for beauty and entertainment. Even the Popes, who fulminated loudest against the iniquitous doctrines of some of their subjects, were only too happy to invite those self-same rebels for dinner if they happened to be good conversationalists and knew something about printing or architecture. And eager zealots for virtue, like Savonarola, ran quite as great a risk of losing their lives as the bright young agnostics who in poetry and prose attacked the fundaments of the Christian faith with a great deal more violence than good taste.

But throughout all these manifestations of a new interest in the business of living, there undoubtedly ran a severe undercurrent of discontent with the existing order of society and the restrictions put upon the development of human reason by the claims of an all-powerful Church.

Between the days of Boccaccio and those of Erasmus, there is an interval of almost two centuries. During these two centuries, the copyist and the printer never enjoyed an idle moment. And outside of the books published by the Church herself, it would be difficult to find an important piece of work which did not contain some indirect reference to the sad plight into which the world had fallen when the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome had been superseded by the anarchy of the barbarian invaders and[180] western society was placed under the tutelage of ignorant monks.

The contemporaries of Machiavelli and Lorenzo de’ Medici were not particularly interested in ethics. They were practical men who made the best of a practical world. Outwardly they remained at peace with the Church because it was a powerful and far-reaching organization which was capable of doing them great harm and they never consciously took part in any of the several attempts at reform or questioned the institutions under which they lived.

But their insatiable curiosity concerning old facts, their continual search after new emotions, the very instability of their restless minds, caused a world which had been brought up in the conviction “We know” to ask the question “Do we really know?”

And that is a greater claim to the gratitude of all future generations than the collected sonnets of Petrarch or the assembled works of Raffael.

Modern psychology has taught us several useful things about ourselves. One of them is the fact that we rarely do anything actuated by one single motive. Whether we give a million dollars for a new university or refuse a nickel to a hungry tramp; whether we proclaim that the true life of intellectual freedom can only be lived abroad or vow that we will never again leave the shores of America; whether we insist upon calling black white or white black, there are always a number of divergent reasons which have caused us to make our decision, and way down deep in our hearts we know this to be true. But as we would cut a sorry figure with the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason why we did so and so.”

But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a few minutes.

We are all of us familiar with this most embarrassing truth and therefore ever since the beginning of civilization people have tacitly agreed with each other that this should never under any circumstances be referred to in public.

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What we think in private, that is our own business. As long as we maintain an outward air of respectability, we are perfectly satisfied with ourselves and merrily act upon the principle “You believe my fibs and I will believe yours.”

Nature, which has no manners, is the one great exception to this generous rule of conduct. As a result, nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society. And as history thus far has been a pastime of the few, the poor muse known as Clio has led a very dull life, especially when we compare it to the career of many of her less respectable sisters who have been allowed to dance and sing and have been invited to every party ever since the beginning of time. This of course has been a source of great annoyance to poor Clio and repeatedly in her own subtle way she has managed to get her revenge.

A perfectly human trait, this, but a very dangerous one and ofttimes very expensive in the matter of human lives and property.

For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying, continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. Regiments of cavalry begin to dash hither and yon and interminable rows of foot soldiers commence to crawl slowly across the landscape. And ere all these people have been safely returned to their respective homes or cemeteries, whole countries have been laid bare and innumerable exchequers have been drained down to the last kopek.

Very slowly, as I have said before, it is beginning to dawn upon the members of our guild that history is a science as well as an art and is therefore subject to certain of the immutable laws of nature which thus far have only been respected[183] in chemical laboratories and astronomical observatories. And as a result we are now doing some very useful scientific house-cleaning which will be of inestimable benefit to all coming generations.

Which brings me at last to the subject mentioned at the head of this chapter, to wit: the Reformation.

Until not so very long ago there were only two opinions regarding this great social and spiritual upheaval. It was either wholly good or wholly bad.

According to the adherents of the former opinion it had been the result of a sudden outbreak of religious zeal on the part of a number of noble theologians who, profoundly shocked by the wickedness and the venality of the papal super-state, had established a separate church of their own where the true faith was to be henceforward taught to those who were seriously trying to be true Christians.

Those who had remained faithful to Rome were less enthusiastic.

The Reformation, according to the scholars from beyond the Alps, was the result of a damnable and most reprehensible conspiracy on the part of a number of despicable princes who wanted to get unmarried and who besides hoped to acquire the possessions which had formerly belonged to their Holy Mother the Church.

As usual, both sides were right and both sides were wrong.

The Reformation was the work of all sorts of people with all sorts of motives. And it is only within very recent times that we have begun to realize how religious discontent played only a minor rôle in this great upheaval and that it was really an unavoidable social and economic revolution with a slightly theological background.

Of course it is much easier to teach our children that[184] good Prince Philip was a very enlightened ruler who took a profound personal interest in the reformed doctrines, than to explain to them the complicated machinations of an unscrupulous politician who willingly accepted the help of the infidel Turks in his warfare upon other Christians. In consequence whereof we Protestants have for hundreds of years made a magnanimous hero out of an ambitious young landgrave who hoped to see the house of Hesse play the rôle thus far played by the rival house of Hapsburg.

On the other hand it is so much simpler to turn Pope Clement into a loving shepherd who wasted the last remnants of his declining strength trying to prevent his flocks from following false leaders, than to depict him as a typical prince of the house of Medici who regarded the Reformation as an unseemly brawl of drunken German monks and used the power of the Church to further the interests of his own Italian fatherland, that we need feel no surprise if such a fabulous figure smiles at us from the pages of most Catholic text-books.

But while that sort of history may be necessary in Europe, we fortunate settlers in a new world are under no obligation to persist in the errors of our continental ancestors and are at liberty to draw a few conclusions of our own.

Just because Philip of Hesse, the great friend and supporter of Luther, was a man dominated by an enormous political ambition, it does not necessarily follow that he was insincere in his religious convictions.

By no means.

When he put his name to the famous “Protest” of the year 1529, he knew as well as his fellow signers that they were about to “expose themselves to the violence of a terrible storm,” and might end their lives on the scaffold. If he had not been a man of extraordinary courage, he[185] would never have undertaken to play the rôle he actually played.

But the point I am trying to make is this: that it is exceedingly difficult, yes, almost impossible, to judge an historical character (or for that matter, any of our immediate neighbors) without a profound knowledge of all the many motives which have inspired him to do what he has done or forced him to omit doing what he has omitted to do.

The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who ages ago reserved that right to himself.

Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more than enough for our limited human ability.

And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this slight detour.

As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and political development of the last three centuries and which came to be known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced during the course of the last five centuries.

Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party, strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had been held for such a long time.

If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements[186] had not been temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have succeeded.

It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic inquisitors.

The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those guilty of a “breach of discipline.”

Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of their power.

A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.

To look back from the safe distance of almost four centuries upon this era of great hope and even greater disappointment, to think of the sublime courage of so many men and women who wasted their lives on the scaffold and on the field of battle for an ideal that was never to be realized, to contemplate the sacrifice made by millions of obscure citizens for the things they held to be holy and then to remember the utter failure of the Protestant rebellion as a movement towards a more liberal and more intelligent world, is to put one’s charity to a most severe test.

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For Protestantism, if the truth must be told, took away from this world many things that were good and noble and beautiful and it added a great many others that were narrow and hateful and graceless. And instead of making the history of the human race simpler and more harmonious, it made it more complicated and less orderly. All that, however, was not so much the fault of the Reformation as of certain inherent weaknesses in the mental habits of most people.

They refuse to be hurried.

They cannot possibly keep up with the pace set by their leaders.

They are not lacking in good will. Eventually they will all cross the bridge that leads into the newly discovered territory. But they will do so in their own good time and bringing with them as much of the ancestral furniture as they can possibly carry.

As a result the Great Reform, which was to establish an entirely new relationship between the individual Christian and his God, which was to do away with all the prejudices and all the corruptions of a bygone era, became so thoroughly cluttered up with the medieval baggage of its trusted followers that it could move neither forward nor backward and soon looked for all the world like a replica of that papal establishment which it held in such great abhorrence.

For that is the great tragedy of the Protestant rebellion. It could not rise above the mean average of intelligence of the majority of its adherents.

And as a result the people of western and northern Europe did not progress as much as might have been expected.

Instead of a man who was supposed to be infallible, the[188] Reformation gave the world a book which was held to be infallible.

Instead of one potentate who ruled supreme, there arose a thousand and one little potentates, each one of whom in his own way tried to rule supreme.

Instead of dividing all Christendom into two well defined halves, the ins and the outs, the faithful and the heretics, it created endless little groups of dissenters who had nothing in common but a most intense hatred for all those who failed to share their own opinions. Instead of establishing a reign of tolerance, it followed the example of the early Church and as soon as it had attained power and was firmly entrenched behind numberless catechisms, creeds and confessions, it declared bitter warfare upon those who dared to disagree with the officially established doctrines of the community in which they happened to live.

All this was, no doubt, most regrettable.

But it was unavoidable in view of the mental development of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”

A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world can offer no adequate comparison.

That these bold rebels soon found friends and supporters, friends with a purpose of their own and supporters who[189] hoped to fish successfully in troubled waters, all this is neither here nor there.

When these men began to gamble with their lives for the sake of their conscience, they could not foresee that this would happen and that most of the nations of the north would eventually enlist under their banners.

But once they had been thrown into this maelstrom of their own making, they were obliged to go whither the current carried them.

Soon the mere question of keeping themselves above water took all of their strength. In far away Rome the Pope had at last learned that this contemptible disturbance was something more serious than a personal quarrel between a few Dominican and Augustinian friars, and an intrigue on the part of a former French chaplain. To the great joy of his many creditors, he temporarily ceased building his pet cathedral and called together a council of war. The papal bulls and excommunications flew fast and furiously. Imperial armies began to move. And the leaders of the rebellion, with their backs against the wall, were forced to stand and fight.

It was not the first time in history that great men in the midst of a desperate conflict lost their sense of proportion. The same Luther who at one time proclaims that it is “against the Holy Spirit to burn heretics,” a few years later goes into such a tantrum of hate when he thinks of the wickedness of those Germans and Dutchmen who have a leaning towards the ideas of the Anabaptists, that he seems to have lost his reason.

The intrepid reformer who begins his career by insisting that we must not force our own system of logic upon God, ends his days by burning an opponent whose power of reasoning was undoubtedly superior to his own.

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The heretic of today becomes the arch-enemy of all dissenters of tomorrow.

And with all their talk of a new era in which the dawn has at last followed upon the dark, both Calvin and Luther remained faithful sons of the Middle Ages as long as they lived.

Tolerance did not and could not possibly show itself to them in the light of a virtue. As long as they themselves were outcasts, they were willing to invoke the divine right of freedom of conscience that they might use it as an argument against their enemies. Once the battle was won, this trusted weapon was carefully deposited in a corner of the Protestant junk-room, already cluttered with so many other good intentions that had been discarded as unpractical. There it lay, forgotten and neglected, until a great many years later, when it was discovered behind a trunk full of old sermons. But the people who picked it up, scraped off the rust and once more carried it into battle were of a different nature from those who had fought the good fight in the early days of the sixteenth century.

And yet, the Protestant revolution contributed greatly to the cause of tolerance. Not through what it accomplished directly. In that field the gain was small indeed. But indirectly the results of the Reformation were all on the side of progress.

In the first place, it made people familiar with the Bible. The Church had never positively forbidden people to read the Bible, but neither had it encouraged the study of the sacred book by ordinary laymen. Now at last every honest baker and candlestick maker could own a copy of the holy work; could peruse it in the privacy of his workshop and could draw his own conclusions without running the risk of being burned at the stake.

Familiarity is apt to kill those sentiments of awe and[191] fear which we feel before the mysteries of the unknown. During the first two hundred years which followed immediately upon the Reformation, pious Protestants believed everything they read in the Old Testament from Balaam’s ass to Jonah’s whale. And those who dared to question a single comma (the “inspired” vowel-points of learned Abraham Colovius!) knew better than to let their sceptical tittering be heard by the community at large. Not because they were afraid any longer of the Inquisition, but Protestant pastors could upon occasion make a man’s life exceedingly unpleasant and the economic consequences of a public ministerial censure were often very serious, not to say disastrous.

Gradually however this eternally repeated study of a book which was really the national history of a small nation of shepherds and traders was to bear results which Luther and Calvin and the other reformers had never foreseen.

If they had, I am certain they would have shared the Church’s dislike of Hebrew and Greek and would have kept the scriptures carefully out of the hands of the uninitiated. For in the end, an increasing number of serious students began to appreciate the Old Testament as a singularly interesting book, but containing such dreadful and blood-curdling tales of cruelty, greed and murder that it could not possibly have been inspired and must, by the very nature of its contents, be the product of a people who had still lived in a state of semi-barbarism.

After that, of course, it was impossible for many people to regard the Bible as the only font of all true wisdom. And once this obstacle to free speculation had been removed, the current of scientific investigation, dammed up for almost a thousand years, began to flow in its natural channel and the interrupted labors of the old Greek and Roman[192] philosophers were picked up where they had been left off twenty centuries before.

And in the second place, and this is even more important from the point of view of tolerance, the Reformation delivered northern and western Europe from the dictatorship of a power which under the guise of a religious organization had been in reality nothing but a spiritual and highly despotic continuation of the Roman Empire.

With these statements, our Catholic readers will hardly agree. But they too have reason to be grateful to a movement which was not only unavoidable, but which was to render a most salutary service to their own faith. For, thrown upon her own resources, the Church made an heroic effort to rid herself of those abuses which had made her once sacred name a byword for rapacity and tyranny.

And she succeeded most brilliantly.

After the middle of the sixteenth century, no more Borgias were tolerated in the Vatican. The Popes as ever before continued to be Italians. A deflection from this rule was practically impossible, as the Roman proletariat would have turned the city upside down if the cardinals entrusted with the election of a new pontiff had chosen a German or a Frenchman or any other foreigner.

The new pontiffs, however, were selected with great care and only candidates of the highest character could hope to be considered. And these new masters, faithfully aided by their devoted Jesuit auxiliaries, began a thorough house-cleaning.

The sale of indulgences came to an end.

Monastic orders were enjoined to study (and henceforth to obey) the rules laid down by their founders.

Mendicant friars disappeared from the streets of civilized cities.

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And the general spiritual indifference of the Renaissance was replaced by an eager zeal for holy and useful lives spent in good deeds and in humble service towards those unfortunate people who were not strong enough to carry the burden of existence by themselves.

Even so, the greater part of the territory which had been lost was never regained. Speaking with a certain geographical freedom, the northern half of Europe remained Protestant, while the southern half stayed Catholic.

But when we translate the result of the Reformation into the language of pictures, the actual changes which took place in Europe become more clearly revealed.

During the Middle Ages there had been one universal spiritual and intellectual prison-house.

The Protestant rebellion had ruined the old building and out of part of the available material it had constructed a jail of its own.

After the year 1517 there are therefore two dungeons, one reserved exclusively for the Catholics, the other for the Protestants.

At least that had been the original plan.

But the Protestants, who did not have the advantage of centuries of training along the lines of persecution and repression, failed to make their lockup dissenter-proof.

Through windows and chimneys and cellar-doors a large number of the unruly inmates escaped.

Ere long the entire building was a wreck.

At night the miscreants came and took away whole cartloads of stones and beams and iron bars which they used the next morning to build a little fortress of their own. But although this had the outward appearance of that original jail, constructed a thousand years before by Gregory[194] the Great and Innocent III, it lacked the necessary inner strength.

No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their temporary convictions.

This process was repeated so often that finally there developed a sort of spiritual no-man’s-land between the different lockups where curious souls could roam at random and where honest people could think whatever they pleased without hindrance or molestation.

And this is the great service which Protestantism rendered to the cause of tolerance.

It reëstablished the dignity of the individual man.

In the writing of every book there occurs a crisis. Sometimes it comes during the first fifty pages. Upon other occasions it does not make itself manifest until the manuscript is almost finished. Indeed, a book without a crisis is like a child that has never had the measles. There probably is something the matter with it.

The crisis in the present volume happened a few minutes ago, for I have now reached the point where the idea of a work upon the subject of tolerance in the year of grace 1925 seems quite preposterous; where all the labor spent thus far upon a preliminary study appears in the light of so much valuable time wasted; where I would like best of all to make a bonfire of Bury and Lecky and Voltaire and Montaigne and White and use the carbon copies of my own work to light the stove.

How to explain this?

There are many reasons. In the first place, there is the inevitable feeling of boredom which overtakes an author when he has been living with his topic on a very intimate footing for too long a time. In the second place, the suspicion that books of this sort will not be of the slightest practical value. And in the third place the fear that the present volume will be merely used as a quarry from which our less tolerant fellow-citizens will dig a few easy facts with which to bolster up their own bad causes.

But apart from these arguments (which hold good for[196] most serious books) there is in the present case the almost insurmountable difficulty of “system.”

A story in order to be a success must have a beginning and an end. This book has a beginning, but can it ever have an end?

What I mean is this.

I can show the terrible crimes apparently committed in the name of righteousness and justice, but really caused by intolerance.

I can depict the unhappy days upon which mankind fell when intolerance was elevated to the rank of one of the major virtues.

I can denounce and deride intolerance until my readers shout with one accord, “Down with this curse, and let us all be tolerant!”

But there is one thing I cannot do. I cannot tell how this highly desirable goal is to be reached. There are handbooks which undertake to give us instruction in everything from after-dinner speaking to ventriloquism. In an advertisement of a correspondence course last Sunday I read of no less than two hundred and forty-nine subjects which the institute guaranteed to teach to perfection in exchange for a very small gratuity. But no one thus far has offered to explain in forty (or in forty thousand) lessons “how to become tolerant.”

And even history, which is supposed to hold the key to so many secrets, refuses to be of any use in this emergency.

Yes, it is possible to compose learned tomes devoted to slavery or free trade or capital punishment or the growth and development of Gothic architecture, for slavery and free trade and capital punishment and Gothic architecture are very definite and concrete things. For lack of all other material we could at least study the lives of the men and[197] women who had been the champions of free trade and slavery and capital punishment and Gothic architecture or those who had opposed them. And from the manner in which those excellent people had approached their subjects, from their personal habits, their associations, their preferences in food and drink and tobacco, yea, from the very breeches they had worn, we could draw certain conclusions about the ideals which they had so energetically espoused or so bitterly denounced.

But there never were any professional protagonists of tolerance. Those who worked most zealously for the great cause did so incidentally. Their tolerance was a by-product. They were engaged in other pursuits. They were statesmen or writers or kings or physicians or modest artisans. In the midst of the king business or their medical practice or making steel engravings they found time to say a few good words for tolerance, but the struggle for tolerance was not the whole of their careers. They were interested in it as they may have been interested in playing chess or fiddling. And because they were part of a strangely assorted group (imagine Spinoza and Frederick the Great and Thomas Jefferson and Montaigne as boon companions!) it is almost impossible to discover that common trait of character which as a rule is to be found in all those who are engaged upon a common task, be it soldiering or plumbing or delivering the world from sin.

In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma. But upon this particular subject, the Bible and Shakespeare and Izaak Walton and even old Benham leave us in the lurch. Perhaps Jonathan Swift (I quote from memory) came nearest to the problem when he said that most men had just enough religion to hate their neighbors[198] but not quite enough to love them. Unfortunately that bright remark does not quite cover our present difficulty. There have been people possessed of as much religion as any one individual could safely hold who have hated their neighbors as cordially as the best of them. There have been others who were totally devoid of the religious instinct who squandered their affection upon all the stray cats and dogs and human beings of Christendom.

No, I shall have to find an answer of my own. And upon due cogitation (but with a feeling of great uncertainty) I shall now state what I suspect to be the truth.

The men who have fought for tolerance, whatever their differences, had all of them one thing in common; their faith was tempered by doubt; they might honestly believe that they themselves were right, but they never reached the point where that suspicion hardened into an absolute conviction.

In this day and age of super-patriotism, with our enthusiastic clamoring for a hundred-percent this and a hundred-percent that, it may be well to point to the lesson taught by nature which seems to have a constitutional aversion to any such ideal of standardization.

Purely bred cats and dogs are proverbial idiots who are apt to die because no one is present to take them out of the rain. Hundred-percent pure iron has long since been discarded for the composite metal called steel. No jeweler ever undertook to do anything with hundred-percent pure gold or silver. Fiddles, to be any good, must be made of six or seven different varieties of wood. And as for a meal composed entirely of a hundred-percent mush, I thank you, no!

In short, all the most useful things in this world are compounds and I see no reason why faith should be an exception.[199] Unless the base of our “certainty” contains a certain amount of the alloy of “doubt,” our faith will sound as tinkly as a bell made of pure silver or as harsh as a trombone made of brass.

It was a profound appreciation of this fact which set the heroes of tolerance apart from the rest of the world.

As far as personal integrity went, honesty of conviction, unselfish devotion to duty and all the other household virtues, most of these men could have passed muster before a board of Puritan Inquisitors. I would go further than that and state that at least half of them lived and died in such a way that they would now be among the saints, if their peculiar trend of conscience had not forced them to be the open and avowed enemies of that institution which has taken upon itself the exclusive right of elevating ordinary human beings to certain celestial dignities.

But fortunately they were possessed of the divine doubt.

They knew (as the Romans and the Greeks had known before them) that the problem which faced them was so vast that no one in his right senses would ever expect it to be solved. And while they might hope and pray that the road which they had taken would eventually lead them to a safe goal, they could never convince themselves that it was the only right one, that all other roads were wrong and that the enchanting by-paths which delighted the hearts of so many simple people were evil thoroughfares leading to damnation.

All this sounds contrary to the opinions expressed in most of our catechisms and our text-books on ethics. These preach the superior virtue of a world illuminated by the pure white flame of absolute faith. Perhaps so. But during those centuries when that flame was supposed to be burning at its brightest, the average rank and file of humanity[200] cannot be said to have been either particularly happy or extraordinarily comfortable. I don’t want to suggest any radical reforms, but just for a change we might try that other light, by the rays of which the brethren of the tolerant guild have been in the habit of examining the affairs of the world. If that does not prove successful, we can always go back to the system of our fathers. But if it should prove to throw an agreeable luster upon a society containing a little more kindness and forbearance, a community less beset by ugliness and greed and hatred, a good deal would have been gained and the expense, I am sure, would be quite small.

And after this bit of advice, offered for what it is worth, I must go back to my history.

When the last Roman was buried, the last citizen of the world (in the best and broadest sense of the word) perished. And it was a long time before society was once more placed upon such a footing of security that the old spirit of an all-encompassing humanity, which had been characteristic of the best minds of the ancient world, could safely return to this earth.

That, as we saw, happened during the Renaissance.

The revival of international commerce brought fresh capital to the poverty stricken countries of the west. New cities arose. A new class of men began to patronize the arts, to spend money upon books, to endow those universities which followed so closely in the wake of prosperity. And it was then that a few devoted adherents of the “humanities,” of those sciences which boldly had taken all mankind as their field of experiment, arose in rebellion against the narrow limitations of the old scholasticism and strayed away from the flock of the faithful who regarded their[201] interest in the wisdom and the grammar of the ancients as a manifestation of a wicked and impure curiosity.

Among the men who were in the front ranks of this small group of pioneers, the stories of whose lives will make up the rest of this book, few deserve greater credit than that very timid soul who came to be known as Erasmus.

For timid he was, although he took part in all the great verbal encounters of his day and successfully managed to make himself the terror of his enemies, by the precision with which he handled that most deadly of all weapons, the long-range gun of humor.

Far and wide the missiles containing the mustard-gas of his wit were shot into the enemy’s country. And those Erasmian bombs were of a very dangerous variety. At a first glance they looked harmless enough. There was no sputtering of a tell-tale fuse. They had the appearance of an amusing new variety of fire-cracker, but God help those who took them home and allowed the children to play with them. The poison was sure to get into their little minds and it was of such a persistent nature that four centuries have not sufficed to make the race immune against the effects of the drug.

It is strange that such a man should have been born in one of the dullest towns of the mudbanks which are situated along the eastern coast of the North Sea. In the fifteenth century those water soaked lands had not yet attained the glories of an independent and fabulously rich commonwealth. They formed a group of little insignificant principalities, somewhere on the outskirts of civilized society. They smelled forever of herring, their chief article of export. And if ever they attracted a visitor, it was some helpless mariner whose ship had been wrecked upon their dismal shores.

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But the very horror of a childhood spent among such unpleasant surroundings may have spurred this curious infant into that fury of activity which eventually was to set him free and make him one of the best known men of his time.

From the beginning of life, everything was against him. He was an illegitimate child. The people of the Middle Ages, being on an intimate and friendly footing both with God and with nature, were a great deal more sensible about such children than we are. They were sorry. Such things ought not to occur and of course they greatly disapproved. For the rest, however, they were too simple-minded to punish a helpless creature in a cradle for a sin which most certainly was not of its own making. The irregularity of his birth certificate inconvenienced Erasmus only in so far as both his father and his mother seem to have been exceedingly muddle-headed citizens, totally incapable of handling the situation and leaving their children to the care of relatives who were either boobs or scoundrels.

These uncles and guardians had no idea of what to do with their two little wards and after the mother had died, the children never had a home of their own. First of all they were sent to a famous school in Deventer, where several of the teachers belonged to the Society of the Brothers of the Common Life, but if we are to judge by the letters which Erasmus wrote later in life, these young men were only “common” in a very different sense of the word. Next the two boys were separated and the younger was taken to Gouda, where he was placed under the immediate supervision of the head-master of the Latin school, who was also one of the three guardians appointed to administer his slender inheritance. If that school in the days of Erasmus was as bad as when I visited it four centuries later,[203] I can only feel sorry for the poor kid. And to make matters worse, the guardians by this time had wasted every penny of his money and in order to escape prosecution (for the old Dutch courts were strict upon such matters) they hurried the infant into a cloister, rushed him into holy orders and bade him be happy because “now his future was secure.”

The mysterious mills of history eventually ground this terrible experience into something of great literary value. But I hate to think of the many terrible years this sensitive youngster was forced to spend in the exclusive company of the illiterate boors and thick-fingered rustics who during the end of the Middle Ages made up the population of fully half of all monasteries.

Fortunately the laxity of discipline at Steyn permitted Erasmus to spend most of his time among the Latin manuscripts which a former abbot had collected and which lay forgotten in the library. He absorbed those volumes until he finally became a walking encyclopedia of classical learning. In later years this stood him in good stead. Forever on the move, he rarely was within reach of a reference library. But that was not necessary. He could quote from memory. Those who have ever seen the ten gigantic folios which contain his collected works, or who have managed to read through part of them (life is so short nowadays) will appreciate what a “knowledge of the classics” meant in the fifteenth century.

Of course, eventually Erasmus was able to leave his old monastery. People like him are never influenced by circumstances. They make their own circumstances and they make them out of the most unlikely material.

And the rest of his life Erasmus was a free man, searching[204] restlessly after a spot where he might work without being disturbed by a host of admiring friends.

But not until the fateful hour when with an appeal to the “lieve God” of his childhood he allowed his soul to slip into the slumber of death, did he enjoy a moment of that “true leisure” which has always appeared as the highest good to those who have followed the footsteps of Socrates and Zeno and which so few of them have ever found.

These peregrinations have often been described and I need not repeat them here in detail. Wherever two or more men lived together in the name of true wisdom, there Erasmus was sooner or later bound to make his appearance.

He studied in Paris, where as a poor scholar he almost died of hunger and cold. He taught in Cambridge. He printed books in Basel. He tried (quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. He was offered a liberal pension if he would only move to Venice and whenever a new university was opened, he was sure to be honored with a call to whatever chair he wished to take or to no chair at all, provided he would grace the Campus with his occasional presence.

But he steadily refused all such invitations because they seemed to contain a threat of permanence and dependency. Before all things he wanted to be free. He preferred a comfortable room to a bad one, he preferred amusing companions[205] to dull ones, he knew the difference between the good rich wine of the land called Burgundy and the thin red ink of the Apennines, but he wanted to live life on his own terms and this he could not do if he had to call any man “master.”

The rôle which he had chosen for himself was really that of an intellectual search-light. No matter what object appeared above the horizon of contemporary events, Erasmus immediately let the brilliant rays of his intellect play upon it, did his best to make his neighbors see the thing as it really was, denuded of all frills and divested of that “folly,” that ignorance which he hated so thoroughly.

That he was able to do this during the most turbulent period of our history, that he managed to escape the fury of the Protestant fanatics while keeping himself aloof from the fagots of his friends of the Inquisition, this is the one point in his career upon which he has been most often condemned.

Posterity seems to have a veritable passion for martyrdom as long as it applies to the ancestors.

“Why didn’t this Dutchman stand up boldly for Luther and take his chance together with the other reformers?” has been a question which seems to have puzzled at least twelve generations of otherwise intelligent citizens.

The answer is, “Why should he?”

It was not in his nature to do violent things and he never regarded himself as the leader of any movement. He utterly lacked that sense of self-righteous assurance which is so characteristic of those who undertake to tell the world how the millennium ought to be brought about. Besides he did not believe that it is necessary to demolish the old home every time we feel the necessity of rearranging our quarters. Quite true, the premises were sadly in need of[206] repairs. The drainage was old-fashioned. The garden was all cluttered up with dirt and odds and ends left behind by people who had moved out long before. But all this could be changed if the landlord was made to live up to his promises and would only spend some money upon immediate improvements. Beyond that, Erasmus did not wish to go. And although he was what his enemies sneeringly called a “moderate,” he accomplished quite as much (or more) than those out and out “radicals” who gave the world two tyrannies where only one had been before.

Like all truly great men, he was no friend of systems. He believed that the salvation of this world lies in our individual endeavors. Make over the individual man and you have made over the entire world!

Hence he made his attack upon existing abuses by way of a direct appeal to the average citizen. And he did this in a very clever way.

In the first place he wrote an enormous amount of letters. He wrote them to kings and to emperors and to popes and to abbots and to knights and to knaves. He wrote them (and this in the days before the stamped and self-addressed envelope) to any one who took the trouble to approach him and whenever he took his pen in hand he was good for at least eight pages.

In the second place, he edited a large number of classical texts which had been so often and so badly copied that they no longer made any sense. For this purpose he had been obliged to learn Greek. His many attempts to get hold of a grammar of that forbidden tongue was one of the reasons why so many pious Catholics insisted that at heart he must be as bad as a real heretic. This of course sounds absurd but it was the truth. In the fifteenth century, respectable Christians would never have dreamed of[207] trying to learn this forbidden language. It was a tongue of evil repute like modern Russian. A knowledge of Greek might lead a man into all sorts of difficulties. It might tempt him to compare the original gospels with those translations that had been given to him with the assurance that they were a true reproduction of the original. And that would only be the beginning. Soon he would make a descent into the Ghetto to get hold of a Hebrew grammar. From that point to open rebellion against the authority of the Church was only a step and for a long time the possession of a book with strange and outlandish pothooks was regarded as ipso facto evidence of secret revolutionary tendencies.

Quite often rooms were raided by ecclesiastical authorities in search of this contraband, and Byzantine refugees who were trying to eke out an existence by teaching their native tongue were not infrequently forced to leave the city in which they had found an asylum.

In spite of all these many obstacles, Erasmus had learned Greek and in the asides which he added to his editions of Cyprian and Chrysostom and the other Church fathers, he hid many sly observations upon current events which could never have been printed had they been the subject of a separate pamphlet.

But this impish spirit of annotation manifested itself in an entirely different sort of literature of which he was the inventor. I mean his famous collections of Greek and Latin proverbs which he had brought together in order that the children of his time might learn to write the classics with becoming elegance. These so-called “Adagia” are filled with clever comments which in the eyes of his conservative neighbors were by no means what one had the right[208] to expect of a man who enjoyed the friendship of the Pope.

And finally he was the author of one of those strange little books which are born of the spirit of the moment, which are really a joke conceived for the benefit of a few friends and then assume the dignity of a great literary classic before the poor author quite realizes what he has done. It was called “The Praise of Folly” and we happen to know how it came to be written.

It was in the year 1515 that the world had been startled by a pamphlet written so cleverly that no one could tell whether it was meant as an attack upon the friars or as a defense of the monastic life. No name appeared upon the title page, but those who knew what was what in the world of letters recognized the somewhat unsteady hand of one Ulrich von Hutten. And they guessed right; for that talented young man, poet laureate and town bum extraordinary, had taken no mean share in the production of this gross but useful piece of buffoonery and he was proud of it. When he heard that no one less than Thomas More, the famous champion of the New Learning in England, had spoken well of his work, he wrote to Erasmus and asked him for particulars.

Erasmus was no friend of von Hutten. His orderly mind (reflected in his orderly way of living) did not take kindly to those blowsy Teuton Ritters who spent their mornings and afternoons valiantly wielding pen and rapier for the cause of enlightenment and then retired to the nearest pot-house that they might forget the corruption of the times by drinking endless bumpers of sour beer.

But von Hutten, in his own way, was really a man of genius and Erasmus answered him civilly enough. Yea, as he wrote, he grew eloquent upon the virtues of his London[209] friend and depicted so charming a scene of domestic contentment that the household of Sir Thomas might well serve as a model for all other families until the end of time. It was in this letter that he mentions how More, himself a humorist of no small parts, had given him the original idea for his “Praise of Folly” and very likely it was the good-natured horse-play of the More establishment (a veritable Noah’s ark of sons and daughters-in-law and daughters and sons-in-law and birds and dogs and a private zoo and private theatricals and bands of amateur fiddlers) which had inspired him to write that delightful piece of nonsense with which his name is forever associated.

In some vague way the book reminds me of the Punch and Judy shows which for so many centuries were the only amusement of little Dutch children. Those Punch and Judy shows, with all the gross vulgarity of their dialogue, invariably maintained a tone of lofty moral seriousness. The hollow voiced figure of Death dominated the scene. One by one the other actors were forced to appear before this ragged hero and give an account of themselves. And one by one, to the everlasting delight of the youthful audience, they were knocked on the head with an enormous cudgel and were thrown on an imaginary scrap-heap.

In the “Praise of Folly,” the whole social fabric of the age is carefully taken apart while Folly, as a sort of inspired Coroner, stands by and favors the public at large with her comments. No one is spared. The whole of Medieval Main Street is ransacked for suitable characters. And of course, the go-getters of that day, the peddling friars of salvation with all their sanctimonius sales-talk, their gross ignorance and the futile pomposity of their arguments, came in for a drubbing which was never forgotten and never forgiven.

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But the Pope and his cardinals and his bishops, incongruous successors to the poverty stricken fishermen and carpenters from the land of Galilee, were also on the bill and held the stage for several chapters.

The “Folly” of Erasmus however was a much more substantial personage than the usual Jack-in-the-Box of humorous literature. Throughout this little book (as indeed throughout everything he wrote) Erasmus preached a gospel of his own which one might call the philosophy of tolerance.

It was this willingness to live and let live; this insistence upon the spirit of the divine law rather than upon the commas and the semi-colons in the original version of that divine law; this truly human acceptance of religion as a system of ethics rather than as a form of government which made serious-minded Catholics and Protestants inveigh against Erasmus as a “godless knave” and an enemy of all true religion who “slandered Christ” but hid his real opinions behind the funny phrases of a clever little book.

This abuse (and it lasted until the day of his death) did not have any effect. The little man with the long pointed nose, who lived until the age of seventy at a time when the addition or omission of a single word from an established text might cause a man to be hanged, had no liking at all for the popular-hero business and he said so openly. He expected nothing from an appeal to swords and arquebusses and knew only too well the risk the world was running when a minor theological dispute was allowed to degenerate into an international religious war.

And so, like a gigantic beaver, he worked day and night to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.

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Of course he failed. It was impossible to stop those floods of ill-will and hatred which were sweeping down from the mountains of Germany and the Alps, and a few years after his death his work had been completely washed away.

But so well had he wrought that many bits of wreckage, thrown upon the shores of posterity, proved exceedingly good material for those irrepressible optimists who believe that some day we shall have a set of dykes that will actually hold.

Erasmus departed this life in July of the year 1586.

His sense of humor never deserted him. He died in the house of his publisher.

Social upheavals make strange bed-fellows.

The name of Erasmus can be printed in a respectable book intended for the entire family. But to mention Rabelais in public is considered little short of a breach of good manners. Indeed, so dangerous is this fellow that laws have been passed in our country to keep his wicked works out of the hands of our innocent children and that in many states copies of his books can only be obtained from the more intrepid among our book-leggers.

This of course is merely one of the absurdities which have been forced upon us by the reign of terror of a flivver aristocracy.

In the first place, the works of Rabelais to the average citizen of the twentieth century are about as dull reading as “Tom Jones” or “The House of the Seven Gables.” Few people ever get beyond the first interminable chapter.

And in the second place, there is nothing intentionally suggestive in what he says. Rabelais used the common vocabulary of his time. That does not happen to be the common vernacular of our own day. But in the era of the bucolic blues, when ninety percent of the human race lived close to the soil, a spade was actually a spade and lady-dogs were not “lady-dogs.”

No, the current objections to the works of this distinguished surgeon go much deeper than a mere disapproval of his rich but somewhat outspoken collection of idioms.[213] They are caused by the horror which many excellent people experience when they come face to face with the point of view of a man who point blank refuses to be defeated by life.

The human race, as far as I can make out, is divided into two sorts of people; those who say “yes” unto life and those who say “no.” The former accept it and courageously they endeavor to make the best of whatever bargain fate has handed out to them.

The latter accept it too (how could they help themselves?) but they hold the gift in great contempt and fret about it like children who have been given a new little brother when they really wanted a puppy or a railroad train.

But whereas the cheerful brethren of “yes” are willing to accept their morose neighbors at their own valuation and tolerate them, and do not hinder them when they fill the landscape with their lamentations and the hideous monuments to their own despair, the fraternity of “no” rarely extends this same courtesy to the parties of the first part.

Indeed if they had their own way, the “nays” would immediately purge this planet of the “yeas.”

As this cannot very well be done, they satisfy the demands of their jealous souls by the incessant persecution of those who claim that the world belongs to the living and not to the dead.

Dr. Rabelais belonged to the former class. Few of his patients or his thoughts ever went out to the cemetery. This, no doubt, was very regrettable, but we cannot all be grave-diggers. There have to be a few Poloniuses and a world composed exclusively of Hamlets would be a terrible place of abode.

As for the story of Rabelais’ life, there was nothing very mysterious about it. The few details which are omitted[214] in the books written by his friends are found in the works of his enemies and as a result we can follow his career with a fair degree of accuracy.

Rabelais belonged to the generation which followed immediately upon Erasmus but he was born into a world still largely dominated by monks, nuns, deacons, and a thousand and one varieties of mendicant friars. He was born in Chinon. His father was either an apothecary or a dealer in spirits (which were different professions in the fifteenth century) and the old man was sufficiently well-to-do to send his son to a good school. There young François was thrown into the company of the scions of a famous local family called du Bellay-Langey. These boys, like their father, had a streak of genius. They wrote well. Upon occasion they could fight well. They were men of the world in the good sense of that oft misunderstood expression. They were faithful servitors of their master the king, held endless public offices, became bishops and cardinals and ambassadors, translated the classics, edited manuals of infantry drill and ballistics and brilliantly performed all the many useful services that were expected of the aristocracy in a day when a title condemned a man to a life of few pleasures and many duties and responsibilities.

The friendship which the du Bellays afterwards bestowed upon Rabelais shows that he must have been something more than an amusing table companion. During the many ups and downs of his life he could always count upon the assistance and the support of his former classmates. Whenever he was in trouble with his clerical superiors he found the door of their castle wide open and if perchance the soil of France became a little too hot for this blunt young moralist, there was always a du Bellay, conveniently going upon a foreign mission and greatly in[215] need of a secretary who should be somewhat of a physician besides being a polished Latin scholar.

This was no small detail. More than once when it seemed that the career of our learned doctor was about to come to an abrupt and painful end, the influence of his old friends saved him from the fury of the Sorbonne or from the anger of those much disappointed Calvinists who had counted upon him as one of their own and who were greatly incensed when he pilloried the jaundiced zeal of their Genevan master as mercilessly as he had derided the three-bottled sanctity of his erstwhile colleagues in Fontenay and Maillezais.

Of these two enemies, the former was of course by far the more dangerous. Calvin could fulminate to his heart’s content, but outside of the narrow boundaries of a small Swiss canton, his lightning was as harmless as a fire-cracker.

The Sorbonne, on the other hand, which together with the University of Oxford stood firmly for orthodoxy and the Old Learning, knew of no mercy when her authority was questioned and could always count upon the hearty coöperation of the king of France and his hangman.

And alas! Rabelais, as soon as he left school, was a marked man. Not because he liked to drink good wine and told funny stories about his fellow-monks. He had done much worse, he had succumbed to the lure of the wicked Greek tongue.

When rumor thereof had first reached the abbot of his cloister, it was decided to search his cell. It was found to be full of literary contraband, a copy of Homer, one of the New Testament, one of Herodotus.

This was a terrible discovery and it had taken a great deal of wire-pulling on the part of his influential friends to get him out of this scrape.

It was a curious period in the development of the Church.

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Originally, as I told you before, the monasteries had been advance posts of civilization and both friars and nuns had rendered inestimable service in promoting the interest of the Church. More than one Pope, however, had foreseen the danger that might come from a too powerful development of the monastic institutions. But as so often happens, just because every one knew that something ought to be done about these cloisters, nothing was ever done.

Among the Protestants there seems to be a notion that the Catholic Church is a placid institution which is run silently and almost automatically by a small body of haughty autocrats and which never suffers from those inner upheavals which are an integral part of every other organization composed of ordinary mortals.

Nothing is further from the truth.

Perhaps, as is so often the case, this opinion has been caused by the misinterpretation of a single word.

A world addicted to democratic ideals is easily horrified at the idea of an “infallible” human being.

“It must be easy,” so the popular argument runs, “to administer this big institution when it is enough for one man to say that a thing is so to have all the others fall upon their knees and shout amen and obey him.”

It is extremely difficult for one brought up in Protestant countries to get a correct and fair view of this rather intricate subject. But if I am not mistaken, the “infallible” utterances of the supreme pontiff are as rare as constitutional amendments in the United States.

Furthermore, such important decisions are never reached until the subject has been thoroughly discussed and the debates which precede the final verdict often rock the very body of the Church. Such pronunciamentos are therefore “infallible” in the sense that our own constitutional[217] amendments are infallible, because they are “final” and because all further argument is supposed to come to an end as soon as they have been definitely incorporated into the highest law of the land.

If any one were to proclaim that it is an easy job to govern these United States because in case of an emergency all the people are found to stand firmly behind the Constitution, he would be just as much in error as if he were to state that all Catholics who in supreme matters of faith recognize the absolute authority of their pope are docile sheep and have surrendered every right to an opinion of their own.

If this were true, the occupants of the Lateran and the Vatican palaces would have had an easy life. But even the most superficial study of the last fifteen hundred years will show the exact opposite. And those champions of the reformed faith who sometimes write as if the Roman authorities had been ignorant of the many evils which Luther and Calvin and Zwingli denounced with such great vehemence are either ignorant of the facts or are not quite fair in their zeal for the good cause.

Such men as Adrian VI and Clement VII knew perfectly well that something very serious was wrong with their Church. But it is one thing to express the opinion that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. It is quite a different matter to correct the evil, as even poor Hamlet was to learn.

Nor was that unfortunate prince the last victim of the pleasant delusion that hundreds of years of misgovernment can be undone overnight by the unselfish efforts of an honest man.

Many intelligent Russians knew that the old official structure[218] which dominated their empire was corrupt, inefficient and a menace to the safety of the nation.

They made Herculean efforts to bring about reforms and they failed.

How many of our citizens who have ever given the matter an hour’s thought fail to see that a democratic instead of a representative form of government (as intended by the founders of the Republic) must eventually lead to systematized anarchy?

And yet, what can they do about it?

Such problems, by the time they have begun to attract public attention, have become so hopelessly complicated that they are rarely solved except by a social cataclysm. And social cataclysms are terrible things from which most men shy away. Rather than run to such extremes, they try to patch up the old, decrepit machinery and meanwhile they pray that some miracle will occur which will make it work.

An insolent religious and social dictatorship, set up and maintained by a number of religious orders, was one of the most flagrant evils of the out-going Middle Ages.

For the so-many-eth time in history, the army was about to run away with the commander-in-chief. In plain words, the situation had grown entirely beyond the control of the popes. All they could do was to sit still, improve their own party organization, and meanwhile try to mitigate the fate of those who had incurred the displeasure of their common enemies, the friars.

Erasmus was one of the many scholars who had frequently enjoyed the protection of the Pope. Let Louvain storm and the Dominicans rave, Rome would stand firm and woe unto him who disregarded her command, “Leave the old man alone!”

And after these few introductory remarks, it will be no[219] matter of surprise that Rabelais, a mutinous soul but a brilliant mind withal, could often count upon the support of the Holy See when the superiors of his own order wished to punish him and that he readily obtained permission to leave his cloister when constant interference with his studies began to make his life unbearable.

And so with a sigh of relief, he shook the dust of Maillezais off his feet and went to Montpellier and to Lyons to follow a course in medicine.

Surely here was a man of extraordinary talents! Within less than two years the former Benedictine monk had become chief physician of the city hospital of Lyons. But as soon as he had achieved these new honors, his restless soul began to look for pastures new. He did not give up his powders and pills but in addition to his anatomical studies (a novelty almost as dangerous as the study of Greek) he took up literature.

Lyons, situated in the center of the valley of the Rhone, was an ideal city for a man who cared for belles lettres. Italy was nearby. A few days easy travel carried the traveler to the Provence and although the ancient paradise of the Troubadours had suffered dreadfully at the hands of the Inquisition, the grand old literary tradition had not yet been entirely lost. Furthermore, the printing-presses of Lyons were famous for the excellence of their product and her book stores were well stocked with all the latest publications.

When one of the master printers, Sebastian Gryphius by name, looked for some one to edit his collection of medieval classics, it was natural that he should bethink himself of the new doctor who was also known as a scholar. He hired Rabelais and set him to work. In rapid succession almanachs and chap-books followed upon the learned treatises[220] of Galen and Hippocrates. And out of these inconspicuous beginnings grew that strange tome which was to make its author one of the most popular writers of his time.

The same talent for novelty which had turned Rabelais into a successful medical practitioner brought him his success as a novelist. He did what few people had dared to do before him. He began to write in the language of his own people. He broke with a thousand-year-old tradition which insisted that the books of a learned man must be in a tongue unknown to the vulgar multitude. He used French and, furthermore, he used the unadorned vernacular of the year 1532.

I gladly leave it to the professors of literature to decide where and how and when Rabelais discovered his two pet heroes, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Maybe they were old heathenish Gods who, after the nature of their species, had managed to live through fifteen hundred years of Christian persecution and neglect.

Then again, he may have invented them in an outburst of gigantic hilarity.

However that be, Rabelais contributed enormously to the gayety of nations and greater praise no author can gain than that he has added something to the sum total of human laughter. But at the same time, his works were not funny books in the terrible modern sense of the word. They had their serious side and struck a bold blow for the cause of tolerance by their caricature of the people who were responsible for that clerical reign of terror which caused such untold misery during the first fifty years of the sixteenth century.

Rabelais, a skillfully trained theologian, was able to avoid all such direct statements as might have got him into trouble, and acting upon the principle that one cheerful humorist out[221] of jail is better than a dozen gloomy reformers behind the bars, refrained from a too brazen exposition of his highly unorthodox opinions.

But his enemies knew perfectly well what he was trying to do. The Sorbonne condemned his books in unmistakable terms and the Parliament of Paris put him on their index and confiscated and burned all such copies of his works as could be found within their jurisdiction. But notwithstanding the activities of the hangman (who in those days was also the official book destroyer) the “Lives and Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and his Sonne Pantagruel” remained a popular classic. For almost four centuries it has continued to edify those who can derive pleasure from a clever mixture of good-natured laughter and bantering wisdom and it will never cease to irritate those others who firmly believe that the Goddess of Truth, caught with a smile on her lips, cannot possibly be a good woman.

As for the author himself, he was and is a “man of one book.” His friends, the du Bellays, remained faithful to him until the end, but most of his life Rabelais practiced the virtue of discretion and kept himself at a polite distance from the residence of that Majesty by whose supposed “privilege” he published his nefarious works.

He ventured however upon a visit to Rome and met with no difficulties, but on the contrary was received with every manifestation of a cordial welcome. In the year 1550 he returned to France and went to live in Meudon. Three years later he died.

It is of course quite impossible to measure the exact and positive influence exercised by such a man. After all, he was a human being and not an electric current or a barrel of gasoline.

It has been said that he was merely destructive.

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Perhaps so.

But he was destructive in an age when there was a great and crying need for a social wrecking crew, headed by just such people as Erasmus and Rabelais.

That many of the new buildings were going to be just as uncomfortable and ugly as the old ones which they were supposed to replace was something which no one was able to foresee.

And, anyway, that was the fault of the next generation.

They are the people we ought to blame.

They were given a chance such as few people ever enjoyed to make a fresh start.

May the Lord have mercy upon their souls for the way in which they neglected their opportunities.

The greatest of modern poets saw the world as a large ocean upon which sailed many ships. Whenever these little vessels bumped against each other, they made a “wonderful music” which people call history.

I would like to borrow Heine’s ocean, but for a purpose and a simile of my own. When we were children it was fun to drop pebbles into a pond. They made a nice splash and then the pretty little ripples caused a series of ever widening circles and that was very nice. If bricks were handy (which sometimes was the case) one could make an Armada of nutshells and matches and submit this flimsy fleet to a nice artificial storm, provided the heavy projectile did not create that fatal loss of equilibrium which sometimes overtakes small children who play too near the water’s edge and sends them to bed without their supper.

In that special universe reserved for grown-ups, the same pastime is not entirely unknown, but the results are apt to be far more disastrous.

Everything is placid and the sun is shining and the water-wigglers are skating merrily, and then suddenly a bold, bad boy comes along with a piece of mill-stone (Heaven only knows where he found it!) and before any one can stop him he has heaved it right into the middle of the old duck pond and then there is a great ado about who did it and how he ought to be spanked and some say, “Oh, let him go,” and others, out of sheer envy of the kid who is attracting all[224] the attention, pick up any old thing that happens to lie around and they dump it into the water and everybody gets splashed and one thing leading to another, the usual result is a free-for-all fight and a few million broken heads.

Alexander was such a bold, bad boy.

And Helen of Troy, in her own charming way, was such a bad, bold girl, and history is just full of them.

But by far the worst offenders are those wicked citizens who play this game with ideas and use the stagnant pool of man’s spiritual indifference as their playground. And I for one don’t wonder that they are hated by all right-thinking citizens and are punished with great severity if ever they are unfortunate enough to let themselves be caught.

Think of the damage they have done these last four hundred years.

There were the leaders of the rebirth of the ancient world. The stately moats of the Middle Ages reflected the image of a society that was harmonious in both color and texture. It was not perfect. But people liked it. They loved to see the blending of the brick-red walls of their little homes with the somber gray of those high cathedral towers that watched over their souls.

Came the terrible splash of the Renaissance and overnight everything was changed. But it was only a beginning. For just when the poor burghers had almost recovered from the shock, that dreadful German monk appeared with a whole cartload of specially prepared bricks and dumped them right into the heart of the pontifical lagoon. Really, that was too much. And no wonder that it took the world three centuries to recover from the shock.

The older historians who studied this period often fell into a slight error. They saw the commotion and decided[225] that the ripples had been started by a common cause, which they alternately called the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Today we know better.

The Renaissance and the Reformation were movements which professed to be striving after a common purpose. But the means by which they hoped to accomplish their ultimate object were so utterly different that Humanist and Protestant not infrequently came to regard each other with bitter hostility.

They both believed in the supreme rights of man. During the Middle Ages the individual had been completely merged in the community. He did not exist as John Doe, a bright citizen who came and went at will, who sold and bought as he liked, who went to any one of a dozen churches (or to none at all, as suited his tastes and his prejudices). His life from the time of his birth to the hour of his death was lived according to a rigid handbook of economic and spiritual etiquette. This taught him that his body was a shoddy garment, casually borrowed from Mother Nature and of no value except as a temporary receptacle for his immortal soul.

It trained him to believe that this world was a halfway house to future glory and should be regarded with that profound contempt which travelers destined for New York bestow upon Queenstown and Halifax.

And now unto the excellent John, living happily in the best of all possible worlds (since it was the only world he knew), came the two fairy god-mothers, Renaissance and Reformation, and said: “Arise, noble citizen, from now on thou art to be free.”

But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers greatly differed.

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“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance replied.

“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished him.

“Free to search the records of the past when the world was truly the realm of men. Free to realize those ideals which once filled the hearts of poets and painters and sculptors and architects. Free to turn the universe into thine eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her secrets,” was the promise of the Renaissance.

“Free to study the word of God, that thou mayest find salvation for thy soul and forgiveness for thy sins,” was the warning of the Reformation.

And they turned on their heels and left poor John Doe in the possession of a new freedom which was infinitely more embarrassing than the thralldom of his former days.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Renaissance soon made her peace with the established order of things. The successors of Phidias and Horace discovered that a belief in the established Deity and outward conformity to the rules of the Church were two very different things and that one could paint pagan pictures and compose heathenish sonnets with complete impunity if one took the precaution to call Hercules, John the Baptist, and Hera, the Virgin Mary.

They were like tourists who go to India and who obey certain laws which mean nothing to them at all in order that they may gain entrance to the temples and travel freely without disturbing the peace of the land.

But in the eyes of an honest follower of Luther, the most trifling of details at once assumed enormous importance. An erroneous comma in Deuteronomy might mean exile. As for a misplaced full stop in the Apocalypse, it called for instant death.

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To people like these who took what they considered their religious convictions with bitter seriousness, the merry compromise of the Renaissance seemed a dastardly act of cowardice.

As a result, Renaissance and Reformation parted company, never to meet again.

Whereupon the Reformation, alone against all the world, buckled on the armor of righteousness and made ready to defend her holiest possessions.

In the beginning, the army of revolt was composed almost exclusively of Germans. They fought and suffered with extreme bravery, but that mutual jealousy which is the bane and the curse of all northern nations soon lamed their efforts and forced them to accept a truce. The strategy which led to the ultimate victory was provided by a very different sort of genius. Luther stepped aside to make room for Calvin.

It was high time.

In that same French college where Erasmus had spent so many of his unhappy Parisian days, a black-bearded young Spaniard with a limp (the result of a Gallic gunshot) was dreaming of the day when he should march at the head of a new army of the Lord to rid the world of the last of the heretics.

It takes a fanatic to fight a fanatic.

And only a man of granite, like Calvin, would have been able to defeat the plans of Loyola.

Personally, I am glad that I was not obliged to live in Geneva in the sixteenth century. At the same time I am profoundly grateful that the Geneva of the sixteenth century existed.

Without it, the world of the twentieth century would[228] have been a great deal more uncomfortable and I for one would probably be in jail.

The hero of this glorious fight, the famous Magister Joannes Calvinus (or Jean Calvini or John Calvin) was a few years younger than Luther. Date of birth: July 10, 1509. Place of birth: the city of Noyon in northern France. Background: French middle class. Father: a small clerical official. Mother: the daughter of an inn-keeper. Family: five sons and two daughters. Characteristic qualities of early education: thrift, simplicity, and a tendency to do all things in an orderly manner, not stingily, but with minute and efficient care.

John, the second son, was meant for the priesthood. The father had influential friends, and could eventually get him into a good parish. Before he was thirteen years old, he already held a small office in the cathedral of his home city. This gave him a small but steady income. It was used to send him to a good school in Paris. A remarkable boy. Every one who came in contact with him said, “Watch out for that youngster!”

The French educational system of the sixteenth century was well able to take care of such a child and make the best of his many gifts. At the age of nineteen, John was allowed to preach. His future as a duly established deacon seemed assured.

But there were five sons and two daughters. Advancement in the Church was slow. The law offered better opportunities. Besides, it was a time of great religious excitement and the future was uncertain. A distant relative, a certain Pierre Olivétan, had just translated the Bible into French. John, while in Paris, had spent much time with his cousin. It would never do to have two heretics in one family. John was packed off to Orleans and was apprenticed[229] to an old lawyer that he might learn the business of pleading and arguing and drawing up briefs.

Here the same thing happened as in Paris. Before the end of the year, the pupil had turned teacher and was coaching his less industrious fellow-students in the principles of jurisprudence. And soon he knew all there was to know and was ready to start upon that course which, so his father fondly hoped, would some day make him the rival of those famous avocats who got a hundred gold pieces for a single opinion and who drove in a coach and four when they were called upon to see the king in distant Compiègne.

But nothing came of these dreams. John Calvin never practiced law.

Instead, he returned to his first love, sold his digests and his pandects, devoted the proceeds to a collection of theological works and started in all seriousness upon that task which was to make him one of the most important historical figures of the last twenty centuries.

The years, however, which he had spent studying the principles of Roman law put their stamp upon all his further activities. It was impossible for him to approach a problem by way of his emotions. He felt things and he felt them deeply. Read his letters to those of his followers who had fallen into the hands of Catholics and who had been condemned to be roasted to death over slow burning coal fires. In their helpless agony they are as fine a bit of writing as anything of which we have a record. And they show such a delicate understanding of human psychology that the poor victims went to their death blessing the name of the man whose teaching had brought them into their predicament.

No, Calvin was not, as so many of his enemies have said, a man without a heart. But life to him was a sacred duty.

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And he tried so desperately hard to be honest with himself and with his God that he must first reduce every question to certain fundamental principles of faith and doctrine before he dared to expose it to the touchstone of human sentiment.

When Pope Pius IV heard of his death, he remarked, “The power of that heretic lay in the fact that he was indifferent to money.” If His Holiness meant to pay his enemy the compliment of absolute personal disinterestedness, he was right. Calvin lived and died a poor man and refused to accept his last quarterly salary because “illness had made it impossible for him to earn that money as he should have done.”

But his strength lay elsewhere.

He was a man of one idea, his life centered around one all-overpowering impulse; the desire to find the truth of God as revealed in the Scriptures. When he finally had reached a conclusion that seemed proof against every possible form of argument and objection, then at last he incorporated it into his own code of life. And thereafter he went his way with such utter disregard for the consequences of his decision that he became both invincible and irresistible.

This quality, however, was not to make itself manifest until many years later. During the first decade after his conversion he was obliged to direct all his energies toward the very commonplace problem of keeping alive.

A short triumph of the “new learning” in the University of Paris, an orgy of Greek declensions, Hebrew irregular verbs and other forbidden intellectual fruit had been followed by the usual reaction. When it appeared that even the rector of that famous seat of learning had been contaminated with the pernicious new German doctrines, steps[231] were taken to purge the institution of all those who in terms of our modern medical science might be considered “idea carriers.” Calvin, who, ’twas said, had given the rector the material for several of his most objectionable speeches, was among those whose names appeared at the top of the list of suspects. His rooms were searched. His papers were confiscated and an order was issued for his arrest.

He heard of it and hid himself in the house of a friend.

But storms in an academic tea-pot never last very long. All the same, a career in the Church of Rome had become an impossibility. The moment had arrived for a definite choice.

In the year 1534 Calvin broke away from the old faith. Almost at the same moment, on the hills of Montmartre, high above the French capital, Loyola and a handful of his fellow students were taking that solemn vow which shortly afterwards was to be incorporated into the constitution of the Society of Jesus.

Thereupon they both left Paris.

Ignatius set his face towards the east, but remembering the unfortunate outcome of his first assault upon the Holy Land, he retraced his steps, went to Rome and there began those activities which were to carry his fame (or otherwise) to every nook and corner of our planet.

John was of a different caliber. His Kingdom of God was bound to neither time nor place and he wandered forth that he might find a quiet spot and devote the rest of his days to reading, to contemplation and to the peaceful expounding of his ideas.

He happened to be on his way to Strassburg when the outbreak of a war between Charles V and Francis I forced him to make a detour through western Switzerland. In Geneva he was welcomed by Guillaume Farel, one of the[232] stormy petrels of the French Reformation, fugitive extraordinary from all ecclesiastical and inquisitorial dungeons. Farel welcomed him with open arms, spoke to him of the wondrous things that might be accomplished in this little Swiss principality and bade him stay. Calvin asked time to consider. Then he stayed.

In this way did the chances of war decree that the New Zion should be built at the foot of the Alps.

It is a strange world.

Columbus sets forth to discover the Indies and stumbles upon a new continent.

Calvin, in search of a quiet spot where he may spend the rest of his days in study and holy meditation, wanders into a third-rate Swiss town and makes it the spiritual capital of those who soon afterwards turn the domains of their most Catholic Majesties into a gigantic Protestant empire.

Why should any one ever read fiction when history serves all purposes?

I do not know whether the family Bible of Calvin has been preserved. But if it still exists, the volume will show considerable wear on that particular page which contains the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel. The French reformer was a modest man, but often he must have found consolation in the story of that other steadfast servant of the living God who also had been cast into a den of lions and whose innocence had saved him from a gruesome and untimely death.

Geneva was no Babylon. It was a respectable little city inhabited by respectable Swiss cloth makers. They took life seriously, but not quite so seriously as that new master who was now holding forth in the pulpit of their Saint Peter.

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And furthermore, there was a Nebuchadnezzar in the form of a Duke of Savoy. It was during one of their interminable quarrels with the house of Savoy that the descendants of Caesar’s Allobroges had decided to make common cause with the other Swiss cantons and join the Reformation. The alliance therefore between Geneva and Wittenberg was a marriage of convenience, an engagement based upon common interests rather than common affection.

But no sooner had the news spread abroad that “Geneva had gone Protestant,” than all the eager apostles of half a hundred new and crazy creeds flocked to the shores of Lake Leman. With tremendous energy they began to preach some of the queerest doctrines ever conceived by mortal man.

Calvin detested these amateur prophets with all his heart. He fully appreciated what a menace they would prove to the cause of which they were such ardent but ill-guided champions. And the first thing he did as soon as he had enjoyed a few months leisure was to write down as precisely and briefly as he could what he expected his new parishioners to hold true and what he expected them to hold false. And that no man might claim the ancient and time-worn excuse, “I did not know the law,” he, together with his friend Farel, personally examined all Genevans in batches of ten and allowed only those to the full rights of citizenship who swore the oath of allegiance to this strange religious constitution.

Next he composed a formidable catechism for the benefit of the younger generation.

Next he prevailed upon the Town Council to expel all those who still clung to their old erroneous opinions.

Then, having cleared the ground for further action, he set about to found him a state along the lines laid down[234] by the political economists of the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. For Calvin, like so many other of the great reformers, was really much more of an ancient Jew than a modern Christian. His lips did homage to the God of Jesus, but his heart went out to the Jehovah of Moses.

This, of course, is a phenomenon often observed during periods of great emotional stress. The opinions of the humble Nazarene carpenter upon the subject of hatred and strife are so definite and so clear cut that no compromise has ever been found possible between them and those violent methods by which nations and individuals have, during the last two thousand years, tried to accomplish their ends.

Hence, as soon as a war breaks out, by silent consent of all concerned, we temporarily close the pages of the Gospels and cheerfully wallow in the blood and thunder and the eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the Old Testament.

And as the Reformation was really a war and a very atrocious one, in which no quarter was asked and very little quarter was given, it need not surprise us that the state of Calvin was in reality an armed camp in which all semblance of personal liberty was gradually suppressed.

Of course, all this was not accomplished without tremendous opposition, and in the year 1538 the attitude of the more liberal elements in the community became so threatening that Calvin was forced to leave the city. But in 1541 his adherents returned to power. Amidst the ringing of many bells and the loud hosannas of the deacons, Magister Joannes returned to his citadel on the river Rhone. Thereafter he was the uncrowned King of Geneva and the next twenty-three years he devoted to the establishment and the perfection of a theocratic form of government, the like[235] of which the world had not seen since the days of Ezekiel and Ezra.

The word “discipline” according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary, means “to bring under control, to train to obedience and order, to drill.” It expresses best the spirit which permeated the entire political-clerical structure of Calvin’s dreams.

Luther, after the nature of most Germans, had been a good deal of a sentimentalist. The Word of God alone, so it seemed to him, would show a man the way to the life everlasting.

This was much too indefinite to suit the taste of the great French reformer. The Word of God might be a beacon light of hope, but the road was long and dark and many were the temptations that made people forget their true destination.

The minister, however, could not go astray. He was a man set apart. He knew all pitfalls. He was incorruptible. And if perchance he felt inclined to wander from the straight path, the weekly meetings of the clergy, at which these worthy gentlemen were invited to criticize each other freely, would speedily bring him back to a realization of his duties. Hence he was the ideal held before all those who truly aspired after salvation.

Those of us who have ever climbed mountains know that professional guides can upon occasion be veritable tyrants. They know the perils of a pile of rocks, the hidden dangers of an innocent-looking snowfield. Wherefore they assume complete command of the party that has entrusted itself to their care and profanity raineth richly upon the head of the foolish tourist who dares to disobey their orders.

The ministers of Calvin’s ideal state had a similar conception of their duties. They were ever delighted to extend[236] a helping hand to those who stumbled and asked that they be supported. But when willful people purposely left the beaten track and wandered away from the flock, then that hand was withdrawn and became a fist which meted out punishment that was both quick and terrible.

In many other communities the dominies would have been delighted to exercise a similar power. But the civil authorities, jealous of their own prerogatives, rarely allowed the clergy to compete with the courts and the executioners. Calvin knew this and within his own bailiwick he established a form of church discipline which practically superseded the laws of the land.

Among the curious historical misconceptions which have gained such popularity since the days of the great war, none is more surprising than the belief that the French people (in contrast to their Teuton neighbors) are a liberty-loving race and detest all regimentation. The French have for centuries submitted to the rule of a bureaucracy quite as complicated and infinitely less efficient than the one which existed in Prussia in the pre-war days. The officials are a little less punctual about their office hours and the spotlessness of their collars and they are given to sucking a particularly vile sort of cigarette. Otherwise they are quite as meddlesome and as obnoxious as those in the eastern republic, and the public accepts their rudeness with a meekness that is astonishing in a race so addicted to rebellion.

Calvin was the ideal Frenchman in his love for centralization. In some details he almost approached the perfection for detail which was the secret of Napoleon’s success. But unlike the great emperor, he was utterly devoid of all personal ambition. He was just a dreadfully serious man with a weak stomach and no sense of humor.

He ransacked the Old Testament to discover what would[237] be agreeable to his particular Jehovah. And then the people of Geneva were asked to accept this interpretation of the Jewish chronicles as a direct revelation of the divine will.

Almost over night the merry city on the Rhone became a community of rueful sinners. A civic inquisition composed of six ministers and twelve elders watched night and day over the private opinions of all citizens. Whosoever was suspected of an inclination towards “forbidden heresies” was cited to appear before an ecclesiastic tribunal that he might be examined upon all points of doctrine and explain where, how and in what way he had obtained the books which had given him the pernicious ideas which had led him astray. If the culprit showed a repentant spirit, he might escape with a sentence of enforced attendance at Sunday School. But in case he showed himself obstinate, he must leave the city within twenty-four hours and never again show himself within the jurisdiction of the Genevan commonwealth.

But a proper lack of orthodox sentiment was not the only thing that could get a man into trouble with the so-called Consistorium. An afternoon spent at a bowling-alley in a nearby village, if properly reported (as such things invariably are), could be reason enough for a severe admonition. Jokes, both practical and otherwise, were considered the height of bad form. An attempt at wit during a wedding ceremony was sufficient cause for a jail sentence.

Gradually the New Zion was so encumbered with laws, edicts, regulations, rescripts and decrees that life became a highly complicated affair and lost a great deal of its old flavor.

Dancing was not allowed. Singing was not allowed. Card playing was not allowed. Gambling, of course, was[238] not allowed. Birthday parties were not allowed. County fairs were not allowed. Silks and satins and all manifestations of external splendor were not allowed. What was allowed was going to church and going to school. For Calvin was a man of positive ideas.

The verboten sign could keep out sin, but it could not force a man to love virtue. That had to come through an inner persuasion. Hence the establishment of excellent schools and a first-rate university and the encouragement of all learning. And the establishment of a rather interesting form of communal life which absorbed a good deal of the surplus energy of the community and which made the average man forget the many hardships and restrictions to which he was submitted. If it had been entirely lacking in human qualities, the system of Calvin could never have survived and it certainly would not have played such a very decisive rôle in the history of the last three hundred years. All of which however belongs in a book devoted to the development of political ideas. This time we are interested in the question of what Geneva did for tolerance and we come to the conclusion that the Protestant Rome was not a whit better than its Catholic namesake.

The extenuating circumstances I have enumerated a few pages back. In a world which was forced to stand by and witness such bestial occurrences as the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the wholesale extermination of scores of Dutch cities, it was unreasonable to expect that one side (the weaker one at that) should practice a virtue which was equivalent to a self-imposed sentence of death.

This, however, does not absolve Calvin from the crime of having aided and abetted in the legal murder of Gruet and Servetus.

In the case of the former, Calvin might have put up the[239] excuse that Jacques Gruet was seriously suspected of having incited his fellow citizens to riot and that he belonged to a political party which was trying to bring about the downfall of the Calvinists. But Servetus could hardly be called a menace to the safety of the community, as far as Geneva was concerned.

He was what the modern passport regulations call a “transient.” Another twenty-four hours and he would have been gone. But he missed his boat. And so he came to lose his life, and it is a pretty terrible story.

Miguel Serveto, better known as Michael Servetus, was a Spaniard. His father was a respectable notary-public (a semi-legal position in Europe and not just a young man with a stamping machine who charges you a quarter for witnessing your signature) and Miguel was also destined for the law. He was sent to the University of Toulouse, for in those happy days when all lecturing was done in Latin learning was international and the wisdom of the entire world was open to those who had mastered five declensions and a few dozen irregular verbs.

At the French university Servetus made the acquaintance of one Juan de Quintana who shortly afterwards became the confessor of the Emperor Charles V.

During the Middle Ages, an imperial coronation was a good deal like a modern international exhibition. When Charles was crowned in Bologna in the year 1530, Quintana took his friend Michael with him as his secretary and the bright young Spaniard saw all there was to be seen. Like so many men of his time, he was of an insatiable curiosity and he spent the next ten years dabbling in an infinite variety of subjects, medicine, astronomy, astrology, Hebrew, Greek, and, most fatal of all, theology. He was a very competent doctor and in the pursuit of his theological[240] studies he hit upon the idea of the circulation of the blood. It is to be found in the fifteenth chapter of the first one of his books against the doctrine of the Trinity. It shows the one-sidedness of the theological mind of the sixteenth century that none of those who examined the works of Servetus ever discovered that this man had made one of the greatest discoveries of all ages.

If only Servetus had stuck to his medical practice! He might have died peacefully in his bed at a ripe old age.

But he simply could not keep away from the burning questions of his day, and having access to the printing shops of Lyons, he began to give vent to his opinions upon sundry subjects.

Nowadays a generous millionaire can persuade a college to change its name from Trinity College to that of a popular brand of tobacco and nothing happens. The press says, “Isn’t it good of Mr. Dingus to be so generous with his money!” and the public at large shouts “Amen!”

In a world which seems to have lost all capacity for being shocked by such a thing as blasphemy, it is not easy to write of a time when the mere suspicion that one of its fellow citizens had spoken disrespectfully of the Trinity would throw an entire community into a state of panic. But unless we fully appreciate this fact, we shall never be able to understand the horror in which Servetus was held by all good Christians of the first half of the sixteenth century.

And yet he was by no means a radical.

He was what today we would call a liberal.

He rejected the old belief in the Trinity as held both by the Protestants and the Catholics, but he believed so sincerely (one feels inclined to say, so naïvely) in the correctness of his own views, that he committed the grave error of writing letters to Calvin suggesting that he be allowed to[241] visit Geneva for a personal interview and a thorough discussion of the entire problem.

He was not invited.

And, anyway, it would have been impossible for him to accept. The Inquisitor General of Lyons had already taken a hand in the affair and Servetus was in jail. This inquisitor (curious readers will find a description of him in the works of Rabelais who refers to him as Doribus, a pun upon his name, which was Ory) had got wind of the Spaniard’s blasphemies through a letter which a private citizen of Geneva, with the connivance of Calvin, had sent to his cousin in Lyons.

Soon the case against him was further strengthened by several samples of Servetus’ handwriting, also surreptitiously supplied by Calvin. It really looked as if Calvin did not care who hanged the poor fellow as long as he got hung, but the inquisitors were negligent in their sacred duties and Servetus was able to escape.

First he seems to have tried to reach the Spanish frontier. But the long journey through southern France would have been very dangerous to a man who was so well known and so he decided to follow the rather round-about route via Geneva, Milan, Naples and the Mediterranean Sea.

Late one Saturday afternoon in August of the year 1553 he reached Geneva. He tried to find a boat to cross to the other side of the lake, but boats were not supposed to sail so shortly before the Sabbath day and he was told to wait until Monday.

The next day was Sunday. As it was a misdemeanor for both natives and strangers to stay away from divine service, Servetus went to church. He was recognized and arrested. By what right he was put into jail was never explained. Servetus was a Spanish subject and was not[242] accused of any crime against the laws of Geneva. But he was a liberal in the matter of doctrine, a blasphemous and profane person who dared to have opinions of his own upon the subject of the Trinity. It was absurd that such a person should invoke the protection of the law. A common criminal might do so. A heretic, never! And without further ado he was locked up in a filthy and damp hole, his money and his personal belongings were confiscated and two days later he was taken to court and was asked to answer a questionnaire containing thirty-eight different points.

The trial lasted two months and twelve days.

In the end he was found guilty of “heresies against the foundations of the Christian religion.” The answers which he had given during the discussions of his opinions had exasperated his judges. The usual punishment for cases of his sort, especially if the accused were a foreigner, was perpetual banishment from the territory of the city of Geneva. In the case of Servetus an exception was made. He was condemned to be burned alive.

In the meantime the French tribunal had re-opened the case of the fugitive and the officials of the Inquisition had come to the same conclusion as their Protestant colleagues. They too had condemned Servetus to death and had dispatched their sheriff to Geneva with the request that the culprit be surrendered to him and be brought back to France.

This request was refused.

Calvin was able to do his own burning.

As for that terrible walk to the place of execution, with a delegation of arguing ministers surrounding the heretic upon his last journey, the agony which lasted for more than half an hour and did not really come to an end until the crowd, in their pity for the poor martyr, had thrown a fresh supply of fagots upon the flames, all this makes interesting[243] reading for those who care for that sort of thing, but it had better be omitted. One execution more or less, what difference did it make during a period of unbridled religious fanaticism?

But the case of Servetus really stands by itself. Its consequences were terrible. For now it was shown, and shown with brutal clearness, that those Protestants who had clamored so loudly and persistently for “the right to their own opinions” were merely Catholics in disguise, that they were just as narrow-minded and cruel to those who did not share their own views as their enemies and that they were only waiting for the opportunity to establish a reign of terror of their own.

This accusation is a very serious one. It cannot be dismissed by a mere shrug of the shoulders and a “Well, what would you expect?”

We possess a great deal of information upon the trial and know in detail what the rest of the world thought of this execution. It makes ghastly reading. It is true that Calvin, in an outburst of generosity, suggested that Servetus be decapitated instead of burned. Servetus thanked him for his kindness, but offered still another solution. He wanted to be set free. Yea, he insisted (and the logic was all on his side) that the court had no jurisdiction over him, that he was merely an honest man in search for the truth and that therefore he had the right to be heard in open debate with his opponent, Dr. Calvin.

But of this Calvin would not hear.

He had sworn that this heretic, once he fell into his hands, should never be allowed to escape with his life, and he was going to be as good as his word. That he could not get a conviction without the coöperation of his arch-enemy, the Inquisition, made no difference to him. He would have[244] made common cause with the pope if His Holiness had been in the possession of some documents that would further incriminate the unfortunate Spaniard.

But worse was to follow.

On the morning of his death, Servetus asked to see Calvin and the latter came to the dark and filthy dungeon that had served his enemy as a prison.

Upon this occasion at least he might have been generous; more, he might have been human.

He was neither.

He stood in the presence of a man who within another hour would be able to plead his case before the throne of God and he argued. He debated and sputtered, grew green and lost his temper. But not a word of pity, of charity, or kindliness. Not a word. Only bitterness and hatred, the feeling of “Serve you right, you obstinate scoundrel. Burn and be damned!”

All this happened many, many years ago.

Servetus is dead.

All our statues and memorial tablets will not bring him back to life again.

Calvin is dead.

A thousand volumes of abuse will not disturb the ashes of his unknown grave.

They are all of them dead, those ardent reformers who during the trial had shuddered with fear lest the blasphemous scoundrel be allowed to escape, those staunch pillars of the Church who after the execution broke forth into paeans of praise and wrote each other, “All hail to Geneva! The deed is done.”

[245]

They are all of them dead, and perhaps it were best they were forgotten too.

Only let us have a care.

Tolerance is like liberty.

No one ever gets it merely by asking for it. No one keeps it except by the exercise of eternal care and vigilance.

For the sake of some future Servetus among our own children, we shall do well to remember this.

Every generation has a bogey-man all its own.

We have our “Reds.”

Our fathers had their Socialists.

Our grandfathers had their Molly Maguires.

Our great-great-grandfathers had their Jacobins.

And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not a bit better off.

They had their Anabaptists.