The New Word: 17. Exegetics: The Forbidden Fruit

The Fear of God.—1. The Worship of Falsehood.—2. The Knowledge of Good and Evil.—3. Meaning of Religion.—4. The Gods afraid of Man.—5. Divinity and Diplomacy.

WE have now got so far in this inquiry as to see that a work of an idealist tendency must be a work of a practical tendency, and in some way or other of a reforming tendency. As the Materialist, by more careful measuring and clearer reckoning corrects the mistakes of sense, so must the Idealist correct the mistakes of hope. Both work towards the same end, the benefit of mankind, and both have to overcome the same enemy, the stupidity of mankind.

The Buddha taught that all evil was owing to ignorance. But that is not so. In a great measure ignorance itself is owing to stupidity, which in its turn is a mixture of laziness and cowardice, of sloth that cannot learn, and fear that will not.

It is against sloth that the Gods themselves fight in vain. We cannot raise the beast to be a man, nor change the black man into a white. The leopard and the Ethiop have both fallen behind in the race, and we may hinder ourselves more than we help them, if we try to run in couples with them.

The wise healer, called in to cure a disease, will seek first to understand it, before he prescribes a remedy. In the case before us we have not only a disease to overcome, but a refractory patient; and the bad temper of the patient is a leading symptom of the disease. Why do men fear relief from fear? Why do they hope against hope? Why do they deem it wicked to write books of an idealist tendency?

The thoughtful man, as he walks here amidst mankind, must often feel as if he had strayed into a madhouse, wherein he could not raise his voice above a whisper without drawing down on himself the frantic clamour of the inmates, or worse, their silent, murderous hate.

For the fool never forgives. While the two parties named Gnostics and Idiots, the learned and the unlearned, were contending for the mastery of the Catholic Church, the wise were bidden to suffer the fools gladly. But fools never suffer the wise gladly. The triumph of the Idiots was sealed by the blood of the Gnostics; and from that day to this, like the frenzied Pope who dipped his pen in the consecrated chalice that he might curse his enemy in the very blood of Christ, the Catholic Church has written in the blood of truth-seekers the excommunication of Truth.

That was the question raised by the paper, and on that the discussion turned. It was not a question of how much truth they might teach the boys, but how little truth they must teach. No one in that Church Congress hinted that the whole truth should be taught. No one proposed that they should teach as much truth as they could. No one argued as though the truth about God were a good thing for boys to know, or other than an unnecessary,

II

“And the Gods commanded the Man, saying, 'Of every tree in the garden eating thou shalt eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat; for in the day that thou eatest thereof, dying thou shalt die.'

“And the Serpent said unto the Woman, 'Surely ye shall not die. For the Gods know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as the Gods, knowing good and evil.'

“And the eyes of them both were opened.

"And the Gods said,—'Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he live for ever' . . ."

The tabu of truth stands menacing on the first

The root meaning of religion, or religio, had already passed out of mind in the days of Cicero, who suggested that the word might come from relegere, to read over, the recital of a liturgy. To Lactantius and Augustine it seemed to come rather from re-ligare, to fast-bind, and to mean the bond or covenant between God and man. Both guesses have truth in them, but neither goes far enough back.

All that is religion. It is the bond in which the familiar spirit is bound by the magician; it is the magic formula which the unwilling djinn obeys in the Arabian tales. The liturgies, the rites, the dances, the sacred observances of all kinds by which the outside Powers, seen or unseen, are compelled to obey man, are religious; the oath by which man binds himself to them is also religious in its turn. The root-meaning of religion is not covenant, but bond. It is not a treaty, but a conquest, not an agreement, but a fetter.

It was the knowledge of the fetters by which they could be bound, of the laws which they themselves obeyed, in short the knowledge of religion, that the Elohim in the story grudged to the Man.

If the Men Outside did not resent man's control they would not be human. When Prospero asks his servant sprite,—"How now, moody, what wouldst thou?"—Ariel answers,—"My liberty." It is their sleepless dread lest man should master them by his conjurations that leads them to withhold their names from him, like the Red Indian who goes through life under a pseudonym to baffle the malice of his enemies. An enchantment, it should seem, like a medieval writ, must call the defendant by his right name, or the whole process is null and void. So Moses does not dare to ask the Man in the burning bush for his true name, but only for some name by which to call him; and the Man answers still more guardedly, "I am who I am." The Third of the celebrated Ten Commandments witnesses to the same belief.

As we have seen, it is not altogether a false belief. The Name has an unexplained power in the Mystery. Well did those old Hebrews hide the right name of their God, calling him Lord and King and Bright One. We, for our part, call him the Good One. We do so by way of compliment, as our peasants still speak of the spirits of flood and fell as the Good People. They hope by doing so to coax them to behave like good people. In the

To-day, Theology, driven from every other corner of the field of knowledge, is sheltering itself in its last ditch under a shield borrowed from the enemy. The theologians are claiming to be specialists. They are saying to the Materialists,--" Each of us has his own department: you leave us alone, and we will leave you alone."

The Materialist may accept that apology. The Idealist cannot. For it is, alas! in their own department that the theologians are at their worst. Their Hebrew scholarship is a hundred times worse than their Latin scholarship. Their maps of Heaven are far falser than their maps of earth. The grand fault of the theologians is, not that they have known nothing about man, but that they have known nothing about God.