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Title: For Good or Ill? Author: Charlotte Wilson Date: October 1887 Language: en Topics: religion, anti-religion, anti-christian Source: https://www.revoltlib.com/anarchism/for-good-or-ill/view.php
We have been speaking of the spontaneous action of human energy as a
great fact, which it is foolish and dangerous to overlook or ignore. But
there are two ways of accepting the existence of a fact. We may rejoice
in it and welcome it as a good, or find it distasteful and repel it as
an evil. We may use our conscious exercise of will to give it free play,
or we may set ourselves to counteract or evade its action.
How do we look upon the spontaneous upleaping of energy in man whether
it take shape in thought, feeling, or action, The common answer now-a
days is, It is good or evil according to the circumstances like the
manifestation of energy in fire, which we say is a good servant but a
bad master. Au answer characteristic of our epoch of transition, in
which all vital questions are wrapped in a haze of doubt and
contradiction, and the search for truth too frequently issues in the
vague acceptance of a compromise.
In sturdier ages men had no such doubts to bewilder them. During those
dark times when the principle of authority was strong and full of life,
and reigned supreme in society, moralists and priests had no hesitation
in condemning the spontaneous motions of human nature as necessarily,
essentially, and entirely evil. According to the teaching of the
Christian Church the heart of man was deceitful and desperately wicked.
Out of it proceeded naught but cruelty and lies. All its acts were evil
continually. Man of his own motion could do no good thing. "I am full of
decay," moans Thomas a' Kempis one of the moat gifted and tender
exponents of Catholicism during the ages of faith. "Fight thou strongly
for me," he prays,, "and vanquish the evil besets, I mean the alluring
desires of the flesh." When one turns over the pages of 'The Imitation
of Christ ' to discover the character of these evil beasts, from whom
the poor monk implores so piteously to be delivered, we find they are
the healthy and natural desires of man's heart for knowledge, for human
love and companionship, for personal freedom, for the esteem of his
fellows,, for the enjoyments of the sense,, and for a share of the good
things of this life. These natural impulses all war against the dreamy
state of mental abstraction in an imaginary world which the monk calls
the spiritual life, where, if a man desire to walk, " it is necessary
that he mortify all his corrupt and inordinate affections, and that he
should not earnestly cleave to any creature with particular love." The
"natural man" or the "flesh," i.e., full and complete human nature, must
be crushed, subdued, suppressed to make room for "grace," the good with
which it may be inspired by the action of God, either directly or
through the priests and lawgivers whom he has inspired to rule the lives
of their fellows.. " Go where thou wilt," writes A' Kempis, " thou shalt
find no rest but in humble subjection under the government of a
superior."
The great movement towards freedom of thought, which resulted in the
revolt against authority, galled the Reformation, by no means put an end
to the fixed belief in the essential depravity of human nature and the
need to crush out human desires and affections.
The articles of the Reformed Church of England assert of every man that
he " is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth
always contrary to the spirit, and therefore in every person born into
this world it deserveth God's wrath and damnation. And l this infection
of nature cloth remain, yea in them that are regenerated whereby the
lust of the flesh,, which some do expound the wisdom some sensuality,
some the affection, some the desire of the flesh, is not subject to the
law of God."
Decidedly in the opinion of Christian churchmen and theologians the
spontaneous manifestations of human energy were the workings of original
sin, and the promptings of the devil.
The first practical outcome of this belief among the masses of the
people was the loss of self-respect The proud Englishman, who in his
heathen days had scorned to kneel before gods or men, learned to grovel
in morbid self-disgust before the ascetic,, who by moral suicide had
killed or perverted the healthy impulses of his own nature. Men grew to
be ashamed of their true selves. Conscientious persons lived under a
continual sense of guilt and humiliation, or else of self-delusion and
hypocrisy, induced by a continual effort to appear what they were not.
Careless and unconscious natures tended to become utterly reckless in
the selfishness of their self-indulgence. Fortunately, men are
continually better than their beliefs, or the Christian world would have
become an actual realization of its own inhuman heaven and hell.
Another result of this strange idea of a bad nature to be destroyed that
goodness might be, as it were, pumped into man's heart from the outside,
was the acceptance of coercion as a necessity. The people were taught by
their masters that the evil dispositions of men must be restrained by
laws made and enforced by divinely inspired priests and rulers, and by
degrees this teaching took wide and deep hold of the popular mind. It
lies hidden there to this day.
I do not, of course, mean that this general belief in human depravity
was the cause of the authority exercised during these many ages by
churchmen, aristocrats, kings, and parliament, or that it was the origin
of law. It is important to recognize that it was neither. But it was the
reason which was put forward, and is sometimes put forward to this day,
to cloak the perverted instinct of domination run mad. It was the reason
that men, who usurped authority over their fellows, gave to themselves
for their unnatural conduct; the excuse they made to their own
consciences, and by means of which they appealed to the moral sense of
the masses whom they controlled.
Next month we will notice how this belief began to die, and its active
effects to fade out of social life.