Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/353

Rh to the present time a state of bondage appears to be the normal state of humanity—bondage, at first severe and irrational, then ever loosening, and expanding into a broader freedom. As mankind progresses, moral anarchy no more follows freedom of thought than does political anarchy follow freedom of action. In Germany, in England, and in America, wherever secular power has in any measure cut loose from ecclesiastical power and thrown religion back upon public sentiment for support, a moral as well as an intellectual advance has always followed. What the mild and persuasive teachings and lax discipline of the present epoch would have been to the Christians of the fourteenth century, the free and lax government of republican America would have been to republican Rome. Therefore, let us learn to look charitably upon the past, and not forget how much we owe to evils which we now so justly hate; while we rejoice at our release from the bigotry and fanaticism of mediæval times, let us not forget the debt which civilization owes to the tyrannies of Church and state.

Christianity, by its exalted unutilitarian morality and philanthropy, has greatly aided civilization. Indeed, so marked has been the effect in Europe, so great the contrast between Christianity and Islamism and the polytheistic creeds in general, that Churchmen claim civilization as the offspring of their religion. But religion and morality must not be confounded with civilization. All these and many other activities act and react on each other as proximate principles in the social organism, but they do not, any or all of them, constitute the life of the organism. Long before morality is religion, and long after morality, religion sends the pious debauchee to his knees. Religious culture is a great assistant to moral culture, as intellectual training promotes the industrial arts, but morality is no more religion than is industry intellect. When Christianity, as in Spain during the fourteenth century, joins itself to blind bigotry and stands up in deadly antagonism to liberty, then Christianity is a drag upon civilization: and therefore we may conclude that in so far as Christianity grafts on its code of pure morality the principle of intellectual freedom, in so far is civilization promoted by Christianity; but, when Christianity engenders superstition and persecution, civilization is retarded thereby.

Then Protestantism sets up a claim to the authorship of civilization, points to Spain and then to England, compares Italy and Switzerland, Catholic America and Puritan America, declares that the intellect can never attain superiority while under the dominion of the Church of Rome; in other words, that civilization is Protestantism. It is true that protestation against irrational dogmas, or any other action that tends toward the emancipation of the intellect, is a great step in advance; but religious belief has nothing whatever to do with intellectual culture. Religion, from its very nature, is beyond the limits of reason; it is emotional rather than intellectual, an instinct and not