THE TAMING OF HISTORY

It is whether Confucius anticipated Christ by many centuries in formulating the Golden Rule, or, to meet the better-informed apologists, whether Confucius recommended it only in a negative form. As nothing is more common, and probably has been since the Stone Age, than to hear folk say, "Do as you would be done by," or some such phrase, which is the Golden rule in fireside English, the fuss about it is amusing. However, the champions of Christ's unique moral genius will have it that Confucius gave it only in the negative form. "What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others." As the Christian decalogue consists almost entirely of negations, that is not bad. But in the 11th edition Legge goes on to explain that when a disciple asked the master if it could be expressed in a word he used a compound Chinese word which means "As Heart" (or Reciprocity), and Legge says that he conceived the, rule in its most positive and most comprehensive form. The Rev. Mr. X suppresses this to save space and Inserts this pointless sentence:

"It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form to give force to a positive statement."

So the preacher end pamphleteer continue to inform folk on the authority of J. Logge in the Encyclopedia Britannica that Confucius knew the Golden Rule only in the inferior negative form.

There was no need to let X loose with his little hatchet upon the article "Constantine." It was, like "Charlemagne," "Justinian," and most such articles already subservient to piety and an outrage on historical truth. Constantine's character is falsified by suppressing facts. For instance, in profane (and ancient Roman) history you will read that Constantine was driven from Rome by the scorn of the Romans because he had had his wife and his son murdered, probably in a fit of jealousy. Here his quitting Rome and founding Constantinople is represented as a matter of high strategy and a core for the interests of religion. Not a hint about the "execution" of his wife, bastard son, and nephew. The Romans compared him to Nero.

In 20 pages on "Crime" we do not get any statistical information whatever about the relation of crime to religious education, which after all is of some interest to our age, so, skipping a few minor matters, we come to "Crusades." Again the article in the old Encyclopedia was so devout and misleading that X could not improve upon it. It admits that Europe had become rather boorish owing to the barbaric invasions but claims that it did provide the Church with the grand force of knight-hood to use against the wicked Moslem:

"The institution of chivalry represents such a clerical consecration, for ideal ends and noble purposes, of the martial impulses which the Church had endeavored to cheek...."

And so on. A lie in every syllable. The knights of Europe were, with rare exceptions, erotic brutes -- their ladies as bad -- as all authoritative historians describe them. The Pope -- his words are preserved -- dangled the loot of the highly civilized East before their eyes in summoning the first Crusade; and the story, almost from beginning to end, is a mixture of superstition, greed, and savagery. The only faint reference to the modern debunking of the traditional fairy tale is:

"When all is said the Crusades remain a wonderful and perpetually astonishing act in the great drama of human life."

Even a cleric must be 150 years old and ignorant of history to write honestly like this article.

Pope "Saint" Damasus I retains his nimbus in the new great Encyclopedia though he is now known to have been an unscrupulous Spanish adventurer and, as contemporary priests said, "tickler of matrons' ears." A few remarks that were made in the short article in the 11th edition about the incredible massacres at his election and the impeachment of him later (for adultery) in the civil court are cut out. But while "Damasus" is abbreviated thus by cutting out references to his misdeeds, the article "Darwin," is shortened by suppressing whole paragraphs of Professor Poulton's fine appreciation of his character and work and the world-honors he received. "David" is in this modern encyclopedia treated as much more important than Darwin, and, while even theologians now often reject him as a myth or a dim shapeless figure, almost the whole biblical account of him is given as history.

But I have overlooked the short article on the "Dark Age," which is nauseous. There was no article in the 11th edition on it, so an obscure professor at a third-rate British University has been commissioned to write one. The phrase was, he says, "formerly used to cover the whole period between the end of the classical civilization and the revival of learning in the 15th century." Bunk. No historian extended it beyond the end of the 11th century. In short, he copies certain American professors of history who cater to Catholics and who give no evidence that they can even read medieval literature. The period is only dark "owing to the insufficiency of the historical evidence" yet "great intellectual work was done in unfavorable conditions." No on except an expert today reads any book written between 420 and 1100 A.D.; and if that doesn't mean a Dark Age we wonder what the word means. The writer does not even know that it was "the Father of Catholic History," Cardinal Baronius, who coined the phrase.

Even worse, from the historical angle, is the article "Democracy." It is said that "there was no room" for the idea of democracy in the Dark Age," but "Christianity with its doctrine of brotherhood and its sense of love and pity had brought into being an idea unknown to the pagan world, the idea of man's inherent dignity and importance." We resent this dumping of the sermons of priests into a modern encyclopedia, but it is even worse when the emancipation of the serfs and the granting of charters to cities are traced to that source. The purely economic causes of those developments are treated in every modern manual. What is worse, the writer conceals, or does not know, that when the democratic aspiration did at length appear in Italy the Papacy fought it truculently for two centuries. I find only one scrap of virtue in the article. American Catholics had not yet invented the myth that Jefferson got the idea of democracy from the Jesuit Suarez, so it makes no appearance here, but the writer, not anticipating it, says:

"The revolt of the colonies was not, strictly speaking, inspired by a belief in democracy though it resulted in the establishment of a republic,"

How many times have I pointed that out against the Jesuits!

The article "Education" is another beautiful piece of work -- from the Catholic angle. The historical part of it was written for the earlier edition by a strictly orthodox Christian schoolmaster, Welton, and was a sheer travesty of the history of education as it is now written in all manuals, yet the article in the new edition is signed "X and C.B." (Cloudsley Brereton, a British inspector of schools with not the least authority but with the virtue of faith). In point of fact it is Welton's original article a little condensed but little altered. They could not well have made it worse from the historical point of view. The abridgment has cleared away most of the few good points about Roman education, because any reference to the system of universal free schooling in Roman days clashes with the clerical slogan, which is the theme of this article, that the new religion "gave the world schools." "It was," says the writer, "into this decaying civilization that Christianity brought new life." Although only a few catholic schools are mentioned the reader is given the impression that the new religion inspired a great growth of schools in an illiterate world. The undisputed truth is that by 350 A.D., before Christianity was established by force, there were free primary and secondary schools everywhere, and by 450 A.D. they had all perished: that in 350 the majority of the workers was literate, and by 450 -- and for centuries afterward -- probably not 1 percent of them could read. Of course it is all put down to the barbarians. "Most of the public schools disappeared, and such light of learning as there was kept burning in the monasteries and was confined to priests and monks." The monks were, as I have repeatedly shown from Christian writers from Augustine to Benedict, mostly an idle, loose, and vagrant class, and the few regular houses later established were interested only in religious education. Pope Gregory I forbade the clergy to open secular schools.

The article proceeds on these totally false lines through the whole of the Middle Ages. The work of Charlemagne, which is now acknowledged to have been paltry and to have perished at his death, is grossly misrepresented, and the fact that he was inspired in what educational zeal he had by the school-system of the anti-Papal Lombards is concealed. Not a word is said about the Lombard system. It is almost as bad in explaining why at last -- six centuries after the Papacy took over the Roman rule -- schools did begin to spread. There is just one line of reference to the Spanish-Arabs who inspired it by their restoration of the Roman system of free general education. Not a word is said about the fact that in Arab- Spain there were millions of books, finely written on paper and bound, while no abbey in Europe had more than a few hundred parchments. The origin of the universities is similarly misrepresented, It is all covered by this monstrous statement:

"On the whole it may be concluded that in medieval times the provision of higher instruction was adequate to the demand and that relatively to the culture of the time the mass of the people were by no means sunk in brutish ignorance."

"Brutish" is, of course, part of the trick. Read it simply as a denial that the mass of the people were totally illiterate and then ask your-self how it is that, even after all the work, of the Jesuits and the Protestants, still by the middle of the 18th century between 80 and 90 percent of the people of Europe were illiterate. The writer is so reckless in clerical myths that he even says that the Age of Chivalry greatly helped:

"The education of chivalry aimed at fitting the noble youth to be a worthy knight, a just and wise master, and a prudent manager of an estate."

You might just as well pretend that Cinderella is a true account of certain events in the Middle Ages. The whole long article which is signed X is an outrage when it is presented to the 20th century. The falsehood is carried on over the Reformation period and into the supposed account of the real beginning of education of the people in the 18th century.

I should have to write another encyclopedia if I proposed to analyze the hundreds of articles in the Britannica which are, like this, just tissues of clerical false claims, It might be said that, like the religious literature in which these myths still flourish, the Encyclopedia has to cater to the religious public. That plea is in itself based upon an anachronism and on untruth. There is abundant evidence that today the majority of the reading public, whatever they think about God, do not accept the Christian religion. In Britain and France the clergy frankly acknowledge this, and it is concealed only by sophistry in America. But I am not suggesting that an Encyclopedia that professes to have been rewritten to bring it into harmony with modern life and thought ought to exclude religious writers. I say only that when they are entrusted with articles which are wholly or in part historical they must conform to modern historical teaching. These articles, judged not by atheistic but by ordinary historical works, are tissues of untruth; and a good deal of this untruth, the part which chiefly concerns me here, has been inserted in the new edition by the Catholic "revisers" who lurk behind the signature X.

As this mark X is in the new edition added to the initials of Mark Pattison at the foot of the article "Erasmus" we look for adulterations. As, however, the original article softened the heresies of the great Dutch humanist there is not much change. Just a few little touches make him less important and nearer to orthodoxy, and passages reflecting on the foul state of the Church at the time are excised. With the subject "Evolution," on the other hand, no modern editor would dare to allow a Catholic writer to insert his fantastic views in a publication that professes to be up-to-date in science. But a place is found for reaction. The British, Professor Lloyd Morgan is commissioned to write for the new edition a special article on the evolution of the mind, and it is based upon the eccentric theory of "emergent evolution" worked out by him in support of religion, which was dying when he wrote the article and is now quite dead in the scientific world. Next is added a section on ethics and evolution by Sir Arthur Thompson, a Unitarian whose peculiar twists of the facts of science to suit his mysticism have no place whatever outside religious literature.

The article "Galilee" would be examined eagerly by most critics for evidence of this clerical "reviser." But even in the 11th edition the article was written by a Catholic astronomer, Miss Agnes Clerke, and X seems to have been given the task of cutting her five pages down to two (while 16 are devoted to football), that gives him opportunities. He leaves untouched the statement that at the first condemnation Galileo was ordered to write no more on the subject and "he promised to obey"; which is seriously disputed and rests on poor evidence. Both Catholic writers refuse to insert the actual sentence of condemnation, which pledged the Roman Church to the position that it is "formal heresy" to say that the earth travels round the sun. When he comes to the second condemnation X suppresses Miss Clerke's hint that Galileo had ridiculed the Pope in his Dialogue, which was the main motive of the Pope's vindictive action, and attributes the procedure to Galileo's supposed breaking of his promise. He saves a precious line by cutting out Miss Clerke's perfectly true statement that he was detained in the palace of the Inquisition. In short, it is now a sound Catholic version of the condemnation of Galileo from first to last, and it does not warn the reader or take into account in the least the fact that since Miss Clerke wrote her article Favar has secured and published (in Italian) new and most important documents on the case, and they have made the character and conduct of the Pope more contemptible than ever.

The fine eight-page article on Gibbon by the learned Professor Bury in the earlier edition could not expect to escape. Space must be saved; though one would hardly realize this when one finds 60 pages devoted to Geometry, which no one ever learns from an encyclopedia. The reviser condenses the six and a half pages of Gibbon's life and character to one page and then sublimely adds his X to Bury's initials as the joint authors of the article. You can guess how much of Gibbon's greatness is left.

On the other hand the notice of Pope "St." Gregory I, the Pope who forbade the opening of schools and made the Papacy the richest landowner and slave-owner in Europe by persuading the rich that the end of the world was at hand and they had better pass on their property to the church, remains as fragrant as ever in the new edition. So does the account of Gregory VII (Hildebrand), the fanatic who violently imposed celibacy upon the clergy (impelling mobs to attack them and their wives), who put the crown on Papal Fascism, who used forgeries and started Wars in the interest of the Church, who hired the savage Normans to fall upon the Romans (who then drove him into exile), etc. Naturally, the modern reader must not know these things.

The article "Guilds" in the 11th edition; by Dr Gross, is the source of the monstrous Catholic claim that the Church inspired these medieval corporations of the workers. It is preserved in all its untruthfulness in the new edition. After a short and disdainful notice of various profane theories of the origin of the Guilds he says:

"No. theory of origin can be satisfactory which ignores the influence of the Christian Church."

It was, as usual, the sublime and unique Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man: yet this had been the cardinal principle of Stoicism and Epicureanism 300 years B.C. The statement is, in the mouth of an expert on the Guilds, breath-taking in its audacity. The documents preserved in the Migne (Catholic) collection show clearly that the Guilds were pagan in origin -- they were most probably relies of the old Roman trade unions -- and that the Church fought them truculently for 100 years after their appearance in Germany. Gross shows that he has read these documents. He says that the Guilds were suspected of political conspiracy and opposed on that ground. On the contrary they were denounced as pagan orgies (suppers, like those of the Roman unions, at which priests got drunk and behaved improperly.) X, of course, leaves this pious creed in all its purity.

Haeckel, like Gibbon, gets his distinction reduced in the grim need of curtailing the old articles: a need which looks peculiar when, a few pages later, General Smuts is invited to contribute a four-page article on his ridiculous "Philosophy" (Holism), which has never been taken seriously. But it favors religion and -- not to put too fine a point on it -- Smuts rendered high political service to Britain. However while space is so precious the reviser of the Encyclopedia finds it necessary to add this to the decimated article on Haeckel: "Although Haeckel occupies no serious position in the history of philosophy there can be no doubt that he was very widely read in his own day and that he is very typical of the school of extreme evolutionary thought."

The last three words give the writer away. It is only the Catholic writer who makes a distinction between schools of "evolutionary thought." As to his having been widely read, no scientific work since Darwin's "Origin" had anything like the circulation of Haeckells "Riddle." It sold millions of copies in more than 20 languages. And a serious modern writer on Haeckel would have pointed out that while he despised philosophers and never claimed to be one, he remarkably anticipated modern thought in insisting that matter and energy are just two aspects of one reality. Of this fundamental doctrine of his the writer says not a word.

Even the article "Heresy" of the old edition, though certainly not written by a heretic, suffers the usual discriminating process of curtailment. The writer had said:

"As long as the Christian Church was itself persecuted by the pagan empire it advocated freedom of conscience . . . but almost immediately after Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire the persecution of men for religious opinions began."

That of course is cut out. Then a long list of Catholic persecutions in the Middle Ages is cut out and replaced by this grossly misleading sentence:

"The heresies of the Middle Ages were not matters of doctrine merely (however important) but were symptoms of spiritual movements common to the people of many lands and in one way or other threatening the power of the Roman Catholic system."

An article on the subject which frankly aimed at providing facts for modern folk would have at least mentioned the death- sentence for heresy, which is obstinately kept in force in Catholic Canon Law today. Not a word about it, though on this subject of penalizing religious opinions it is the question most frequently asked today.

The article "Hospitals" gives us a choice specimen of the art of X-ing. It consist of two parts, history and modern practice. To the historical section, which it is of considerable interest to the Catholic propagandist to misrepresent, X does not append his mark, but he puts it to the section on modern practice, of which he knows nothing. Was this due to an editorial or typographical error? Listen. The old article properly gave a gummary account of the ample provision for the sick in many pre-christian civilizations, especially the Roman, and added:

"In Christian days no establishments were founded for the relief of the sick till the time of Constantine."

He might have added that even then they were few and were merely intended to keep the Christian sick away from the pagan temples of Aesculapius which were the chief Roman hospitals. All this is cut but and replaced by the totally misleading or totally false statement:

"But although hospitals cannot be claimed as a direct result of Christianity no doubt it tended to instill humanist views, and as civilization grew men and women of many races came to realize that the treatment of disease in buildings set apart exclusively for the care of the sick were in fact a necessity in urban districts."

We have several good and by no means anti-Christian histories of hospitals today. They show a fine record in India under the Buddhists King Asoka and a creditable record for the Greek-Roman world in imperialist days. They show also that the Christian record the period of confusion after the fall of Roman Empire but from 450 to the 18th century is miserable; and thus in an encyclopedia that advertises that it is rewritten in order to ensure confidence that the reader is getting what is generally agreed upon by the experts in each department, writers are permitted to take the reader even farther away from the truth than -- in articles of this kind -- they were earlier in the century. A score of articles like this which are supposed to prove by historical facts the nature of the Christian social inspiration and social record are cheap and untruthful religious propaganda.

Even in the short notice of Hypatia the clerical surgeon has used his knife. Short as it was, we shall be told that it had to be curtailed (though the editor spares eight pages for Icelandic literature) but the omissions are significant. The earlier article rightly said that she was a "mathematician and philosopher," and contemporaries speak of her works on mathematics not philosophy. Yet even the word "mathematician," which does not take up much space does give us a better idea of the solid character of Hypatia, is cut out. The earlier writer says that she was "barbarously murdered by the Nitrian monks and the fanatical Christian mob," that the Caesareum to which her body was dragged was "then a Christian church" and that the remains of the aged scholar (as she was) were burned piecemeal. All the phrases I have italicized (BOLD) are carefully cut out, as is also the whole of the following passage:

"Most prominent among the actual perpetrators of the crime was Peter the Reader (cleric), but there seems little reason to doubt the complicity of Cyril (the archbishop)."

So the "correction of dates" and curtailing some articles to admit new matter" just happen to take a form which greatly reduces the guilt of the Christian Church in the foulest crime of the age; for the greatest lady in the whole Greek world at the time was stripped in the street and her flesh cut from her bones with broken pottery by monks and people directly inflamed against her by the archbishop. This is the sort of thing for which the University of Chicago now stands sponsor.

In the note on "Idealism," which is colorless, I notice that the improvers of the old Britannica have recommended a work by "J. Royce"; a point which must rather annoy the professors since Josiah Royce is one of the most distinguished philosophers America has yet produced. More important is the great saving of space in reducing the size of the article "Illegitimacy." In face of the drivel that Catholic apologists talk about influence of their church on sexual conduct we have been accustomed to point out, amongst other things, that bastards are far more common in countries where the Roman and Greek churches are, or were until recent years, more powerful. In the old Britannica the article gave a wealth of statistics, particularly about Ireland, to help the student on this point. Out they have all gone -- to find more space, of course, for cricket and football. "Illiteracy" is just as little seriously informing for the inquirer who wants to know whether it is true that the church is the Great Educator.

The article on "Immortality" was much too pious in the old edition of the Encyclopedia to need any "improvement." It stands, like a hundred other articles, as a monument of what respectable folk thought in Victorian days. It was out of date even in 1911. Since then the belief in immortality is almost dead in philosophy, and the teaching of psychology today emphatically excludes it. Even theologians doubt it or at least widely admit that attempts to prove it are futile. Of this state of modern thought the article gives no more idea than it does of Existentialism.

Similarly, the article "Infallibility" in the old edition was written by a Catholic and needed no "correction of dates." But it was better not to let the reader know that it was written by a Catholic, so away go his initials, The article "Infanticide" would be considered by many more important than archery and croquet and other genteel sports of our grandmothers, because it is one of the familiar claims of the apologist that while the ancient Romans were appallingly callous on the subject the new religion brought the world a new sense of the importance of even a newborn babe's life. The old edition was certainly defective in its account of the practice in ancient Rome but even the little it said has been cut out. An inquirer into the subject will not get one single ray of light on Roman practice from the new article; and it is candidly signed X.