Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/240

228 against Nature was carried into every branch of moral and mental education.

Such doctrines did not fail to bear their fruit. Ignorance gloried in her indifference to the vanities of worldly science. Cruelty moralized on the duty of stifling the appeals to the law of Nature. Despotism enforced the precepts of self-abasement and passive obedience. Indolence welcomed the dogma of renunciation. The suppressed love of natural science begat a chimera-brood of pseudo-sciences astrology, necromancy, alchemy, demonology, exorcism, thaumaturgism. Monkery and the neglect of rational agriculture conspired to turn garden-lands into deserts and freemen into serfs. The suppression of free inquiry begat hypocrisy and a mental sloth never equaled in the darkest ages of pagan barbarism. Freedom, driven from the open land, took refuge behind walled castles, and soon learned to make might the measure of right. Feudalism was the result, rather than the cause, of social degeneration. All the better instincts of the human mind were either suppressed or perverted by the influence of a principle equally foreign to the philosophy of the pagan moralists and the ethics of the Semitic religions—so foreign, that the attempt to amalgamate its doctrines with the manful monotheism of the Hebrew lawgiver is the chief cause of those mysterious inconsistencies which have so often frustrated the zeal of its propagandists: a benevolent Allfather, who yet frightfully and eternally tortures a vast plurality of his children; a God-created earth, that must be renounced to avoid the wrath of its creator; a godlike body, fit only to be despised and mortified.

Yet that mystery was solved by the same key that unlocked the etymological riddles of the Aryan languages—the study of the Hindoo scriptures. As the Vedas elucidated the origin and development of the Indo-Germanic tongues, the sacred writings of Buddhism revealed the root-dogma that bore its logical fruit in self-torture and renunciation: the doctrine of the worthlessness of earthly existence, and the necessity of salvation by the suppression of all earthly desires. According to the gospel of Buddha Sakyamuni, not the abuse of life, but life itself, is an evil. All earthly blessings are curses in disguise. The beauty of earth is the snare of the Maya, a mirage luring its dupes from error to error toward grief and repentance. Only he who has lifted the veil of that delusion has entered the path of salvation. Total abstinence from the joys of life is the only cure for its ills, and the highest goal of the future is Nirvana—peace and absolute deliverance from the vexations of earthly desires.

In their progress from the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Atlantic those doctrines underwent various mystifying modifications, and under the humanizing influence of pagan ethics Asceticism assumed a meaning akin to that of Stoicism—frugality, self-control, virtuous preference of manly to effeminate pleasures. But, in the