The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 62

What we want is to reconcile both science and theology with sincerity and good breeding, to make our experts understand that they are nothing if they are not single-minded and urbane. Get them to understand this, and there will be no difficulty about reconciling science and theology.

The Church and the Supernatural

If we saw the Church wis.h.i.+ng to back out of the supernatural and anxious to explain it away where possible, we would keep our disbelief in the supernatural in the background, as far as we could, and would explain away our rejection of the miracles, as far as was decent; furthermore we would approximate our language to theirs wherever possible, and insist on the points on which we are all agreed, rather than on points of difference; in fact, we would meet them half way and be only too glad to do it. I maintain that in my books I actually do this as much as is possible, but I shall try and do it still more. As a matter of fact, however, the Church clings to the miraculous element of Christianity more fondly than ever; she parades it more and more, and shows no sign of wis.h.i.+ng to give up even the smallest part of it. It is this which makes us despair of being able to do anything with her and feel that either she or we must go.

Grat.i.tude and Revenge

Grat.i.tude is as much an evil to be minimised as revenge is. Justice, our law and our law courts are for the taming and regulating of revenge. Current prices and markets and commercial regulations are for the taming of grat.i.tude and its reduction from a public nuisance to something which shall at least be tolerable. Revenge and grat.i.tude are correlative terms. Our system of commerce is a protest against the unbridled licence of grat.i.tude. Grat.i.tude, in fact, like revenge, is a mistake unless under certain securities.

Cant and Hypocrisy

We should organise a legitimate channel for instincts so profound as these, just as we have found it necessary to do with l.u.s.t and revenge by the inst.i.tutions of marriage and the law courts. This is the raison d'etre of the church. You kill a man just as much whether you murder him or hang him after the formalities of a trial. And so with l.u.s.t and marriage, mutatis mutandis. So again with the professions of religion and medicine. You swindle a man as much when you sell him a drug of whose action you are ignorant, and tell him it will protect him from disease, as when you give him a bit of bread, which you a.s.sure him is the body of Jesus Christ, and then send a plate round for a subscription. You swindle him as much by these acts as if you picked his pocket, or obtained money from him under false pretences in any other way; but you swindle him according to the rules and in an authorised way.

Real Blasphemy

On one of our Sunday walks near London we pa.s.sed a forlorn and dilapidated Primitive Methodist Chapel. The windows were a good deal broken and there was a notice up offering 10/--reward to any one who should give such information as should lead to the, &c. Cut in stone over the door was this inscription, and we thought it as good an example of real blasphemy as we had ever seen:

When G.o.d makes up his last account Of holy children in his mount, 'Twill be an honour to appear As one new born and nourished here.

The English Church Abroad

People say you must not try to abolish Christianity until you have something better to put in its place. They might as well say we must not take away turnpikes and corn laws till we have some other hindrances to put in their place. Besides no one wants to abolish Christianity--all we want is not to be snubbed and bullied if we reject the miraculous part of it for ourselves.

At Biella an English clergyman asked if I was a Roman Catholic. I said, quite civilly, that I was not a Catholic.

He replied that he had asked me not if I was a Catholic but if I was a Roman Catholic. What was I? Was I an Anglican Catholic? So, seeing that he meant to argue, I replied:

"I do not know. I am a Londoner and of the same religion as people generally are in London."

This made him angry. He snorted:

"Oh, that's nothing at all;" and almost immediately left the table.

As much as possible I keep away from English-frequented hotels in Italy and Switzerland because I find that if I do not go to service on Sunday I am made uncomfortable. It is this bullying that I want to do away with. As regards Christianity I should hope and think that I am more Christian than not.

People ought to be allowed to leave their cards at church, instead of going inside. I have half a mind to try this next time I am in a foreign hotel among English people.

Drunkenness

When we were at Shrewsbury the other day, coming up the Abbey Foregate, we met a funeral and debated whether or not to take our hats off. We always do in Italy, that is to say in the country and in villages and small towns, but we have been told that it is not the custom to do so in large towns and in cities, which raises a question as to the exact figure that should be reached by the population of a place before one need not take off one's hat to a funeral in one of its streets. At Shrewsbury seeing no one doing it we thought it might look singular and kept ours on. My friend Mr. Phillips, the tailor, was in one carriage, I did not see him, but he saw me and afterwards told me he had pointed me out to a clergyman who was in the carriage with him.

"Oh," said the clergyman, "then that's the man who says England owes all her greatness to intoxication."

This is rather a free translation of what I did say; but it only shows how impossible it is to please those who do not wish to be pleased. Tennyson may talk about the slow sad hours that bring us all things ill and all good things from evil, because this is vague and indefinite; but I may not say that, in spite of the terrible consequences of drunkenness, man's intellectual development would not have reached its present stage without the stimulus of alcohol--which I believe to be both perfectly true and pretty generally admitted-- because this is definite. I do not think I said more than this and am sure that no one can detest drunkenness more than I do. {343} It seems to me it will be wiser in me not to try to make headway at Shrewsbury.

h.e.l.l-Fire

If Vesuvius does not frighten those who live under it, is it likely that h.e.l.l-fire should frighten any reasonable person?

I met a traveller who had returned from Hades where he had conversed with Tantalus and with others of the shades. They all agreed that for the first six, or perhaps twelve, months they disliked their punishment very much; but after that, it was like sh.e.l.ling peas on a hot afternoon in July. They began by discovering (no doubt long after the fact had been apparent enough to every one else) that they had not been noticing what they were doing so much as usual, and that they had been even thinking of something else. From this moment, the automatic stage of action having set in, the progress towards always thinking of something else was rapid and they soon forgot that they were undergoing any punishment.

Tantalus did get a little something not infrequently; water stuck to the hairs of his body and he gathered it up in his hand; he also got many an apple when the wind was napping as it had to do sometimes.

Perhaps he could have done with more, but he got enough to keep him going quite comfortably. His sufferings were nothing as compared with those of a needy heir to a fortune whose father, or whoever it may be, catches a dangerous bronchitis every winter but invariably recovers and lives to 91, while the heir survives him a month having been worn out with long expectation.

Sisyphus had never found any pleasure in life comparable to the delight of seeing his stone bound down-hill, and in so timing its rush as to inflict the greatest possible scare on any unwary shade who might be wandering below. He got so great and such varied amus.e.m.e.nt out of this that his labour had become the automatism of reflex action--which is, I understand, the name applied by men of science to all actions that are done without reflection. He was a pompous, ponderous old gentleman, very irritable and always thinking that the other shades were laughing at him or trying to take advantage of him. There were two, however, whom he hated with a fury that tormented him far more seriously than anything else ever did.

The first of these was Archimedes who had inst.i.tuted a series of experiments in regard to various questions connected with mechanics and had conceived a scheme by which he hoped to utilise the motive power of the stone for the purpose of lighting Hades with electricity. The other was Agamemnon, who took good care to keep out of the stone's way when it was more than a quarter of the distance up the slope, but who delighted in teasing Sisyphus so long as he considered it safe to do so. Many of the other shades took daily pleasure in gathering together about stone-time to enjoy the fun and to bet on how far the stone would roll.

As for t.i.tyus--what is a bird more or less on a body that covers nine acres? He found the vultures a gentle stimulant to the liver without which it would have become congested.

Sir Isaac Newton was intensely interested in the hygrometric and barometric proceedings of the Danaids.

"At any rate," said one of them to my informant, "if we really are being punished, for goodness' sake don't say anything about it or we may be put to other work. You see, we must be doing something, and now we know how to do this, we don't want the bother of learning something new. You may be right, but we have not got to make our living by it, and what in the name of reason can it matter whether the sieves ever get full or not?"

My traveller reported much the same with regard to the eternal happiness on Mount Olympus. Hercules found Hebe a fool and could never get her off his everlasting knee. He would have sold his soul to find another AEgisthus.

So Jove saw all this and it set him thinking.

"It seems to me," said he, "that Olympus and Hades are both failures."

Then he summoned a council and the whole matter was thoroughly discussed. In the end Jove abdicated, and the G.o.ds came down from Olympus and a.s.sumed mortality. They had some years of very enjoyable Bohemian existence going about as a company of strolling players at French and Belgian town fairs; after which they died in the usual way, having discovered at last that it does not matter how high up or how low down you are, that happiness and misery are not absolute but depend on the direction in which you are tending and consist in a progression towards better or worse, and that pleasure, like pain and like everything that grows, holds in perfection but a little moment.

XXII--RECONCILIATION

Religion

By religion I mean a living sense that man proposes and G.o.d disposes, that we must watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, that he who thinketh he standeth must take heed lest he fall, and the countless other like elementary maxims which a man must hold as he holds life itself if he is to be a man at all.

If religion, then, is to be formulated and made tangible to the people, it can only be by means of symbols, counters and a.n.a.logies, more or less misleading, for no man professes to have got to the root of the matter and to have seen the eternal underlying verity face to face--and even though he could see it he could not grip it and hold it and convey it to another who has not. Therefore either these feelings must be left altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed, then soon undeveloped and atrophied, or they must be expressed by the help of images or idols--by the help of something not more actually true than a child's doll is to a child, but yet helpful to our weakness of understanding, as the doll no doubt gratifies and stimulates the motherly instinct in the child.

Therefore we ought not to cavil at the visible superst.i.tion and absurdity of much on which religion is made to rest, for the unknown can never be satisfactorily rendered into the known. To get the known from the unknown is to get something out of nothing, a thing which, though it is being done daily in every fraction of every second everywhere, is logically impossible of conception, and we can only think by logic, for what is not in logic is not in thought. So that the attempt to symbolise the unknown is certain to involve inconsistencies and absurdities of all kinds and it is childish to complain of their existence unless one is prepared to advocate the stifling of all religious sentiment, and this is like trying to stifle hunger or thirst. To be at all is to be religious more or less. There never was any man who did not feel that behind this world and above it and about it there is an unseen world greater and more incomprehensible than anything he can conceive, and this feeling, so profound and so universal, needs expression. If expressed it can only be so by the help of inconsistencies and errors. These, then, are not to be ordered impatiently out of court; they have grown up as the best guesses at truth that could be made at any given time, but they must become more or less obsolete as our knowledge of truth is enlarged. Things become known which were formerly unknown and, though this brings us no nearer to ultimate universal truth, yet it shows us that many of our guesses were wrong.