Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9

E >> Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9

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He met Danton, a freemason, like himself, and various other radicals.
"Common Sense" and "The Crisis" had been translated into French,
printed and widely distributed, and inasmuch as Paine had been a party
in bringing about one revolution, and had helped carry it through to
success, his counsel and advice were sought. A few short weeks in
France, and Paine having secured the endorsement of the Academy for
his bridge, went over to England preparatory to sailing for America.

Arriving in England, Paine found that his father had died but a short
time before. His mother was living, aged ninety-one, and in full
possession of her faculties. The meeting of mother and son was full
of tender memories. And the mother, while not being able to follow her
gifted son in all of his reasoning, yet fully sympathized with him in
his efforts to increase human rights. The Quakers, while in favor of
peace, are yet revolutionaries, for their policy is one of protest.

Paine visited the old Quaker church at Thetford, and there seated in
the silence, wrote these words:

When we consider, for the feelings of Nature can not be dismissed,
the calamities of war and the miseries it inflicts upon the human
species, the thousands and tens of thousands of every age and sex
who are rendered wretched by the event, surely there is something in
the heart of man that calls upon him to think! Surely there is some
tender chord, tuned by the hand of the Creator, that still struggles
to emit in the hearing of the soul a note of sorrowing sympathy. Let
it then be heard, and let man learn to feel that the true greatness
of a nation is founded on principles of humanity, and not on
conquest. War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen
and unsupposed circumstances, such a combination of foreign matters,
that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing
certain, and that is to increase taxes. I defend the cause of the
poor, of the manufacturer, of the tradesman, of the farmer, and of
all those on whom the real burden of taxes fall--but above all, I
defend the cause of women and children--of all humanity.

Edmund Burke, hearing of Paine's presence in England, sent for him to
come to his house. Paine accepted the invitation, and Burke doubtless
got a few interesting chapters of history at first hand. "It was equal
to meeting Washington, and perhaps better, for Paine is more of a
philosopher than his chief," wrote Burke to the elder Pitt.

Paine saw that political unrest was not confined to France--that
England was in a state of evolution, and was making painful efforts
to adapt herself to the progress of the times. Paine could remember a
time when in England women and children were hanged for poaching;
when the insane were publicly whipped, and when, if publicly
expressed, a doubt concerning the truth of Scripture meant exile or
to have your ears cut off.

Now he saw the old custom reversed and the nobles were bowing to the
will of the people. It came to him that if the many in England could
be educated, the Crown having so recently received its rebuke at the
hands of the American Colonies, a great stride to the front could be
made. Englishmen were talking about their rights. What are the natural
rights of a man? He began to set down his thoughts on the subject.
These soon extended themselves into chapters. The chapters grew into a
book--a book which he hoped would peacefully do for England what
"Common Sense" had done for America. This book, "The Rights of Man,"
was written at the same time that Mary Wollstonecraft was writing her
book, "The Rights of Women."

In London, Paine made his home at the house of Thomas Rickman, a
publisher. Rickman has given us an intimate glimpse into the life of
the patriot, and told us among other things that Paine was five feet
ten inches high, of an athletic build, and very fond of taking long
walks. Among the visitors at Rickman's house who came to see Paine
were Doctor Priestly, Home Tooke, Romney, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the
Duke of Portland and Mary Wollstonecraft. It seems very probable that
Mrs. Wollstonecraft, as she styled herself, read to Paine parts of her
book, for very much in his volume parallels hers, not only in the
thought, but in actual wording. Whether he got more ideas from her
than she got from him will have to be left to the higher critics.
Certain it is that they were in mutual accord, and that Mrs.
Wollstonecraft had read "Common Sense" and "The Rights of Man" to a
purpose.

It was too much to expect that a native-born Englishman could go
across the sea to British Colonies and rebel against British rule and
then come back to England and escape censure. The very popularity of
Paine in certain high circles centered attention on him. And Pitt, who
certainly admired Paine's talents, referred to his stay in England as
"indelicate."

England is the freest country on earth. It is her rule to let her
orators unmuzzle their ignorance and find relief in venting grievances
upon the empty air. In Hyde Park any Sunday one can hear the same
sentiments for the suppression of which Chicago paid in her Haymarket
massacre. Grievances expressed are half-cured, but England did not
think so then. The change came about through thirty years' fight,
which Paine precipitated.

The patience of England in dealing with Paine was extraordinary. Paine
was right, but at the same time he was as guilty as Theodore Parker
was when indicted by the State of Virginia along with Ol' John Brown.

"The Rights of Man" sold from the very start, and in a year fifty
thousand copies had been called for.

Unlike his other books, this one was bringing Paine a financial
return. Newspaper controversies followed, and Burke, the radical,
found himself unable to go the lengths to which Paine was logically
trying to force him.

Paine was in Paris, on a visit, on that memorable day which saw the
fall of the Bastile. Jefferson and Adams had left France, and Paine
was regarded as the authorized representative of America; in fact, he
had been doing business in France for Washington. Lafayette in a
moment of exultant enthusiasm gave the key of the Bastile to Paine to
present to Washington, and as every American schoolboy knows, this
famous key to a sad situation now hangs on its carefully guarded peg
at Mount Vernon. Lafayette thought that, without the example of
America, France would never have found strength to throw off the rule
of kings, and so America must have the key to the detested door that
was now unhinged forever.

"And to me," said Lafayette, "America without her Thomas Paine is
unthinkable." The words were carried to England and there did Paine no
especial good. But England was now giving Paine a living--there was a
market for the product of his pen--and he was being advertised both by
his loving friends and his rabid enemies.

Paine had many admirers in France, and in some ways he felt more at
home there than in England. He spoke and wrote French. However, no man
ever wrote well in more than one language, although he might speak
intelligently in several; and the orator using a foreign tongue never
reaches fluidity. "Where liberty is, there is my home," said
Franklin. And Paine answered, "Where liberty is not, there is my
home." The newspaper attacks had shown Paine that he had not made
himself clear on all points, and like every worthy orator who
considers, when too late, all the great things he intended to say, he
was stung with the thought of all the brilliant things he might have
said, but had not.

And so straightway he began to prepare Part Two of "The Rights of
Man." The book was printed in cheap form similar to "Common Sense,"
and was beginning to be widely read by workingmen.

"Philosophy is all right," said Pitt, "but it should be taught to
philosophical people. If this thing is kept up London will re-enact
the scenes of Paris."

Many Englishmen thought the same. The official order was given, and
all of Paine's books that could be found were seized and publicly used
for a bonfire by the official hangman. Paine was burned in effigy in
many cities, the charge being made that he was one of the men who had
brought about the French Revolution. With better truth it could have
been stated that he was the man, with the help of George the Third,
who had brought about the American Revolution. The terms of peace made
between England and the Colonies granted amnesty to Paine and his
colleagues in rebellion, but his acts could not be forgotten, even
though they were nominally forgiven. This new firebrand of a book was
really too much, and the author got a left-handed compliment from the
Premier on his literary style--books to burn!

Three French provinces nominated him to represent them in the Chamber
of Deputies. He accepted the solicitations of Calais, and took his
seat for that province.

He knew Danton, Mirabeau, Marat and Robespierre. Danton and
Robespierre respected him, and often advised with him. Mirabeau and
Marat were in turn suspicious and afraid of him. The times were
feverish, and Paine, a radical at heart, here was regarded as a
conservative. In America, the enemy stood out to be counted: the
division was clear and sharp; but here the danger was in the hearts of
the French themselves.

Paine argued that we must conquer our own spirits, and in this new
birth of freedom not imitate the cruelty and harshness of royalty
against which we protest. "We will kill the king, but not the man,"
were his words. But with all of his tact and logic he could not make
his colleagues see that to abolish the kingly office, not to kill the
individual, was the thing desired.

So Louis, who helped free the American Colonies, went to the block,
and his enemy, Danton, a little later, did the same; Mirabeau, the
boaster, had died peacefully in his bed; Robespierre, who signed the
death-warrant of Paine, "to save his own head," died the death he had
reserved for Paine; Marat, "the terrible dwarf," horribly honest,
fearfully sincere, jealous and afraid of Paine, hinting that he was
the secret emissary of England, was stabbed to his death by a woman's
hand.

And amid the din, escape being impossible, and also undesirable,
Thomas Paine wrote the first part of "The Age of Reason."

The second part was written in the Luxembourg prison, under the shadow
of the guillotine. But life is only a sentence of death, with an
indefinite reprieve. Prison, to Paine, was not all gloom.

The jailer, Benoit, was good-natured and cherished his unwilling
guests as his children. When they left for freedom or for death, he
kissed them, and gave each a little ring in which was engraved the
single word, "Mizpah." But finally Benoit, himself, was led away, and
there was none to kiss his cheek, nor to give him a ring and cry
cheerily, "Good luck, Citizen Comrade! Until we meet again!"

* * * * *

A great deal has been said by the admirers of Thomas Paine about the
abuse and injustice heaped upon his name, and the prevarications
concerning his life, by press and pulpit and those who profess a life
of love, meekness and humility. But we should remember that all this
vilification was really the tribute that mediocrity pays genius. To
escape censure, one only has to move with the mob, think with the mob,
do nothing that the mob does not do--then you are safe. The saviors of
the world have usually been crucified between thieves, despised,
forsaken, spit upon, rejected of men. In their lives they seldom had a
place where they could safely lay their weary heads, and dying their
bodies were either hidden in another man's tomb or else subjected to
the indignities which the living man failed to survive: torn limb from
limb, eyeless, headless, armless, burned and the ashes scattered or
sunk in the sea.

And the peculiar thing is that most of this frightful inhumanity was
the work of so-called good men, the pillars of society, the
respectable element, what we are pleased to call "our first citizens,"
instigated by the Church that happened to be in power. Socrates
poisoned; Aristides ostracized; Aristotle fleeing for his life; Jesus
crucified; Paul beheaded; Peter crucified head downward; Savonarola
martyred; Spinoza hunted, tracked and cursed, and an order issued that
no man should speak to him nor supply him food or shelter; Bruno
burned; Galileo imprisoned; Huss, Wyclif, Latimer and Tyndale used for
kindling--all this in the name of religion, institutional religion,
the one thing that has caused more misery, heartaches, bloodshed, war,
than all other causes combined. Leo Tolstoy says, "Love, truth,
compassion, service, sympathy, tenderness, exist in the hearts of men,
and are the essence of religion, but try to encompass these things in
an institution and you get a church--and the Church stands for and has
always stood for coercion, intolerance, injustice and cruelty."

No man ever lifted up his voice or pen in a criticism against love,
truth, compassion, service, sympathy and tenderness. And if he had, do
you think that love, truth, compassion, service, sympathy, tenderness,
would feel it necessary to go after him with stocks, chains,
thumbscrews and torches?

You can not imagine it.

Then what is it goes after men who criticize the prevailing religion
and shows where it can be improved upon? Why, it is hate, malice,
vengeance, jealousy, injustice, intolerance, cruelty, fear.

The reason the Church does not visit upon its critics today the same
cruelties that it did three hundred years ago is simply because it has
not the power. Incorporate a beautiful sentiment and hire a man to
preach and defend it, and then buy property and build costly buildings
in which to preach your beautiful sentiment, and if the gentleman who
preaches your beautiful sentiment is criticized he will fight and
suppress his critics if he can. And the reason he fights his critics
is not because he believes the beautiful sentiment will suffer, but
because he fears losing his position, which carries with it ease,
honors and food, and a parsonage and a church, tax-free.

Just as soon as the gentleman employed to defend and preach the
beautiful sentiment grows fearful about the permanency of his
position, and begins to have goose-flesh when a critic's name is
mentioned, the beautiful sentiment evaporates out of the window, and
exists only in that place forever as a name. The Church is ever a
menace to all beautiful sentiments, because it is an economic
institution, and the chief distributor of degrees, titles and honors.

Anything that threatens to curtail its power it is bound to oppose and
suppress, if it can. Men who cease useful work, in order to devote
themselves to religion, are right in the same class with women who
quit work to make a business of love. Men who know history and
humanity and have reasonably open minds are not surprised at the
treatment visited upon Paine by the country he had so much benefited.
Superstition and hallucination are really one thing, and fanaticism,
which is mental obsession, easily becomes acute, and the whirling
dervish runs amuck at sight of a man whose religious opinions are
different from his own.

Paine got off very easy; he lived his life, and expressed himself
freely to the last. Men who discover continents are destined to die in
chains. That is the price they pay for the privilege of sailing on,
and on, and on, and on.

Said Paine:

The moral duty of a man consists in imitating the moral goodness and
beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all creatures.
That seeing as we daily do, the goodness of God to all men, it is an
example calling upon all men to practise towards each other, and
consequently that everything of persecution and revenge between man
and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of
moral duty.

* * * * *

The pen of Paine made the sword of Washington possible. And as Paine's
book, "Common Sense," broke the power of Great Britain in America,
and "The Rights of Man" gave free speech and a free press to England,
so did "The Age of Reason" give pause to the juggernaut of orthodoxy.
Thomas Paine was the legitimate ancestor of Hosea Ballou, who founded
the Universalist Church, and also of Theodore Parker, who made
Unitarianism in America an intellectual torch.

Channing, Ripley, Bartol, Martineau, Frothingham, Hale, Curtis,
Collyer, Swing, Thomas, Conway, Leonard, Savage--yes, even Emerson and
Thoreau--were spiritual children, all, of Thomas Paine. He blazed the
way and made it possible for men to preach the sweet reasonableness of
reason. He was the pioneer in a jungle of superstition. Thomas Paine
was the real founder of the so-called Liberal Denominations, and the
business of the liberal denominations has not been to become great,
powerful and popular, but to make all other denominations more
liberal. So today in all so-called orthodox pulpits one can hear the
ideas of Paine, Henry Frank and B. Fay Mills expounded.

JOHN KNOX

The repentance of England requireth two things: First, the expulsion
of all dregs of popery and the treading under foot of all glistering
beauty of vain ceremonies. Next, no power or liberty must be
permitted to any, of what estate, degree or authority they be,
either to live without the yoke of discipline by God's word
commanded, or to alter one jot in religion which from God's mouth
thou hast received. If prince, king or emperor would enterprise to
change or disannul the same, that he be the reputed enemy to God,
while a prince who erects idolatry must be adjudged to death.
--_John Knox_

[Illustration: John Knox]

John Knox the Scotchman, Martin Luther the German, and John Calvin the
Frenchman, were contemporaries. They constitute a trinity of strong
men who profoundly influenced their times; and the epoch they made was
so important that we call it "The Reformation." They form the undertow
of that great tidal wave of reason and commonsense called the Italian
Renaissance. And as the chief business of the Hahnemannian school of
medicine was to dilute the dose of the Allopaths, and the Christian
Scientists confirmed the homeopaths in a belief concerning the
beauties of the blank tablet, so did Luther, Calvin and Knox
neutralize the arrogance of Rome, and dilute the dose of despotism.

Knox, Luther, and Calvin were hunted men. They lived stormy,
tumultuous lives, torn by plot and counterplot. Very naturally, their
religion is filled with fever and fear, and their God is jealous,
revengeful, harsh, arbitrary, savage--a God of wrath.

Only a bold man, rough and coarse, could have defied the reigning
powers and done the work which Destiny had cut out for John Knox to
do. His power lay in the hallucination that his utterances were the
final expressions of truth. Had he known more he would have done less.

Life is a sequence, and we are what we are because this man lived. To
the memory of John Knox we acknowledge our obligation; but we realize
that for us to accept and adopt the conclusions and ideals of one who
lived in such tempestuous times is no honor to ourselves, nor to him.

The Christian Church has preached five special phases of belief, as
follows: First, Religion by Definition; Second, Religion by
Submission; Third, Religion by Substitution; Fourth, Religion by
Culture; Fifth, Religion by Service.

All of these phases overlap, more or less, and the difference in sects
consists simply in the amount of emphasis which is placed upon each or
any particular phase. And this is largely a matter of temperament.

The Catholic Church emphasizes definition above all things. You are
told the nature of evil; the Godhead, the trinity, the sacraments,
the "elements" are explained, and the syllabus and catechism play
most important parts. Before you are confirmed you have to memorize
many definitions: little girls of ten glibly explain the difference
between a mortal and a venal sin, and boys in knee-breeches discourse
upon the geography of other worlds, and the state of sinners after
death.

Next to Religion by Definition is Religion by Submission, and usually
they go together. Persons too stupid to define can still submit.
Service is not an essential, and in fact service without definition is
usually regarded as hideous, "the righteousness of an unbeliever being
as filthy rags." However, if it were not for the service rendered by
the monks, priests and nuns, the Catholic Church could never have
retained its hold upon humanity. Its schools, asylums, hospitals and
houses of refuge have been its excuse for existence, and the undoing
of the infidel. But service with the Catholic Church is emphasized
only for the priesthood--the laity being simply asked to define,
submit and pay. Culture and character are left to natural selection,
and the thought that any person but a priest could have either is a
very modern hypothesis. In way of Religion by Definition, Saint Paul
was the great modern exponent. That the Theological Quibblers' Club
existed long before his time we know full well. In fact, the chief
invective of Jesus against Judaism was that it had degenerated into a
mere matter of dispute concerning intricate nothings.

When Paul was brought before Gallio, the brother of Seneca, Gallio
paid his respects to the same quibbling propensities against which
Jesus had inveighed, by saying, "If it were a matter of wrong or of
wicked villainy. O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you:
but if they are questions about words and names and your own law, look
to it yourselves; I am not minded to be a judge of these matters."

Pity and piety have nothing necessarily to do with Religion by
Definition. We can all recall men of acute minds who thought
themselves pious, who had bartered their souls away in order to become
senior wranglers. Intellect lured them on into wordy unseemliness;
their skill in forensics became a passion, and to embarrass and defeat
the antagonist became the thing desired, not the pursuit of truth.
They fell victims to their facility in syntax and prosody--semi-
Solomons in Scriptural explanations, waxing wise in defining the
difference 'twixt hyssop and myrrh.

Forty years ago no town in America was free from joint debates where
the disputants would argue six nights and days together concerning
vicarious salvation, baptism, regeneration, justification and the
condition of unbaptized infants after death. Debates of this kind set
the entire populace by the ears, and at post-office, tavern, grocery,
family table, and even after the disputants had gone to bed, reasons
nice, and subtleties hairsplitting were passed back and forth, until
finally the party getting worsted fell back on maternal pedigrees, and
epithet took the place of logic.

If the matter ended merely with the weapons of wordy warfare, it was
fortunate and well, for these eyes have seen a camp-meeting where
singletrees, neck-yokes, harness-tugs and scalding water augmented
arguments concerning foreordination as taught by John Calvin and
freewill as defined by John Knox.

Theological wrangles belong essentially to a pioneer people: an
earnest, stubbornly honest people, whose lives are given over to a
battle with the elements and the brute forces of Nature, always
argufy.

Submission is not recognized in their formula except as a word, and
their abnegation takes the form of a persistent pursuit of the thing
desired, by following another trail. Such persons are always very
proud, and the thing upon which they most pride themselves is their
humility, and absence of pride.

"Morality comes only after physical self-preservation is secure," says
Herbert Spencer, and with culture it is the same, and so the word is
not in the bright lexicon of pioneers. All of their service is of the
Connecticut variety--if you need things, they have them for sale. And
so we get the wooden-nutmeg enterprise, and the peculiar incident of
the New Haven man at the Pan-American Fair, who sold wooden nutmegs
for charms and bangles. But one day, running out of wooden nutmegs, he
went to a wholesale grocer and bought a bushel of the genuine ones,
and these he palmed off upon the innocent and unsuspecting, until he
was brought to book on the charge of false pretenses. Human service,
as taught by Jesus of Nazareth, has only been tried in a very
spasmodic way, except for advertising purposes. The world has now, for
the first time in history, reached a point where as a vital problem
the production of wealth is secondary to the question of how we shall
distribute it. And so the Religion of Service is being seriously
considered, and perhaps will soon be given a trial. The man who said
that the number of marriages was in exact ratio to the price of corn
spoke wisely. What he meant was that physical well-being directly
affects all of our social relations. It is exactly the same with our
religion. Economics and religion are very closely related. People in a
certain physical environment have a certain religion. A tired and
overworked people, enslaved as chattels or by the spirit of the times,
find solace in a mournful religion, and a haven of rest hereafter--
also, in the contemplation of a Hell for those who believe differently
from what they do. They sing, "All Days Will Be Sunday By and By," or
"Sweet Rest in Heaven." If they are oppressed by debt and mortgages
that gnaw, they sing, "Jesus paid it all, yes, all the debt I owe." A
warlike people whose wealth has come from conquest will shout the
English National Hymn and take joy in such lines as "Confound their
knavish tricks," expressed as a prayer.

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