THE FREETHOUGHT REVIEW.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 7, 1 April 1884, Page 1

THE FREETHOUGHT REVIEW.

VOL. I.—No. 7.

WANGANUI, N.Z.: APRIL, i, 1884

English politicians have just discovered that a vast mass of the population of the large cities is living in dwellings utterly unfit for human beings. The political economists are discredited by socialistic schemes of reform, and less is heard of cheap food and buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market. Lord Salisbury is in favor of applying the borrowing and taxing powers of the State to the erection of model dwellings. Mr. Chamberlain traces the evil to the ground landlord, and would make him find the remedy. The ' Saturday Review' thinks the discussions have established three things" First, the existing rookeries " must come down as soon as possible. In the next "place, it is manifest that the poverty of the poor, with " the consequent degradation which make them put up " with styes for homes, is the result of two main causes " —over-population and drink. No laws, no reform, " no franchise, no revolution, can do any good to the enormous class of Englishmen who love to drink." Over-population and drink, however, are due to the absence of the self-regarding qualities which follow upon education and the means of material comfort. The " causes " of the ' Saturday Review ' are but the effects of economical causes associated with the laws governing the distribution of wealth. It is here the permanent remedy must be looked for.

And will "no laws, no reform, no franchise, no " revolution " do good ? This is just the problem that awaits solution. It is not in socialism the remedy ought to be sought until political economy and individualism have failed. Now there is one natural and economical law that has not been discredited namely, that the supply shall not, without suffering depreciation, exceed the demand. The working classes have yet to understand that if they increase their number at a rate faster than that in which they can be maintained in a state of comfort, degradation must follow. If again the laws, by artificial arrangements, foster the hoarding of wealth in the hands of the few, the many will be impoverished. Let social reforms go on apace, but we incline strongly to the opinion that the secret of promoting the prosperity of the mass is in political rather than social reform; or in other words, that social improvement must follow those changes which political justice demands.

The Congregational Union, meeting about the same time as the Presbyterian Assembly, passed a resolution unanimously in favor of the existing secular system of education. The Rev. Mr. Treadwell must have been unconscious of the fact when he spoke as follows: —" They did not owe the secular " system of education to the churches. They " knew that the Roman Catholic Church insisted " upon the children of her communion being taught her " own special belief. There was a grand unity running " through the diversities of the various religious " denominations, and there cpuld be no difficulty, in

SCIENCE. RELIGION. PHILOSOPHY

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" consequence of that unity, in the matter of religious " education. He believed the existing secular system was a concession to the Freethinkers. It was to " that section of the community that the secular " Education Act had been thrown as a sop by the "Government of the land." This rapprochement of hostile communions is apparently due to the action of the Freethinkers, who seem to have created a feeling of alarm in the breasts of the doughty lieutenants of the Lord of Hosts. The "unity" however is not yet complete: one sect holds aloof, while the Catholics haughtily reject the alliance except on terms humiliating to the sons of the Reformation. The Rev. Mr. Calder, another Presbyterian Minister, assumed a reassuring tone, remarking ; —" He did not believe that " statesmen, looking at the thing merely from the " standpoint of a politician, would for a moment put " the avowed Freethinkers of this colony against the " combined influence of the churches, were the churches "at all united among themselves." There is a fine touch of political philosophy in the way the power of the majority is here invoked. Politicians depend on the breath of the majority we know, and if the Education Act had no more friends than avowed Freethinkers, it would not long remain free, secular, and compulsory. The salvation of the system may be found after all in the fact, that the " united churches " are not the equivalent of a majority of the adult males of the colony, and that the Freethinkers are more numerous than statistics show them to be.

The Rev. Mr. Fraser at the same meeting soared in the region of antithesis and syllogism. "He was an " advocate (he said) of a compulsory system of " education, but not of a free system. He did not " think a free system was at all a corollary of a " compulsory system. The State compelled a man to " see that his child was fed—it did not feed it; to see " that the child was properly clothed—it did not clothe

" it; so that free education was by no means a " necessary consequence of a compulsory system." The style is wonderfully conclusive. It is simply not true that the State acknowledges or discharges any such responsibility as to see that children are properly fed and clothed. The theory is purely socialistic. The following syllogistic argument is not from Thomas Aquinas, but is evidently Mr. Fraser's own:—" It was " the duty of the State to provide for the moral and " intellectual training of its Subjects. The basis of " all government was good citizenship, the basis of good " citizenship was morality, and the basis of morality " was the nature of God. The State that did not " instruct its people in the nature of God could not " imbue them with sound morality, and therefore it cut " away the basis of good citizenship, and destroyed the " end [the beginning ?] of its existence." If all government is founded on good citizenship and the nature of God, how is it we have bad governments? Does it arise from bad instruction ? Then who are to give the good instruction ? The priests ? Of course

they have agreed among themselves about the nature of God, whose picture is wonderfully drawn in their sacred book as the being who slaughtered nations, men women and children, and prepared a hell for the souls of the majority of his creatures! The doctrine is Romish; the system a theocracy; the priests the statesmen who. by denning the nature of God determine the ultimate action of government. Is this what the Presbyterian Church wishes to attain? The " churches " may all find unity and refuge in Rome at last.

Mr .Chantry Harris, the proprietor the « New Zealand Times,' has lately been giving a series of lectures upon Spiritualism, in the course of which he is reported to have said " that any doctrine, no matter "what its beliefs and tenets might be, was to be " respected if it struck a blow at the evils of the day. " (Applause.) He did not include freethought among " the reforms of the present time, because he did not "consider that., its followers had any settled objects; "they were standing aloof." From what follows in the report it seems that Mr Harris thinks freethought is too purely negative in its aims, and that to remedy this defect Freethinkers ought to embrace spiritualism. The reply to this is that to remove error is the first operation required to enable truth to take its place. If you want grass to grow you must get rid of the fern. To many people any destructive process is unpleasant, and in matters affecting the feelings and higher sentiments, extremely painful. To an Alchemist who had spent his life searching for the philosopher's stone which was to transmute all base metals into gold, and with that and other cognate objects in view, had diligently studied the writings of the great Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, and a host of other pious learned and extremely unintelligible authors, the dawn of chemistry in the seventeenth century must have looked like the beginning of a terrible conflagration which threatened to burn up all that he considered most valuable. These chemists, he might have said, have no " settled objects." They don't even profess to search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, or the universal solvent, and instead of trying to "catch the flying. bird," and unite it to the "red eagle," they are content simply to " interrogate nature" and to listen to her replies without dictating her answers. Yet somehow the Alchemy which promised much has performed nothing, while the Chemistry which promised nothing performed much. Theology and its allies are more nearly akin to Alchemy than might be suspected at first sight, and Freethought and Chemistry, as representing scientific method, are as closely related to each other.

. Rev. J. S. Black, a prominent orthodox minister of Montreal, in a recent discourse in that city, as reported in the ' Montreal Witness,' in reply to the question, Why has the Church never taken the lead in great moral movements in their infancy ? said :—" The Church was '.' a huge "body, and as such moved slowly. By the very " necessity laid upon her to preserve the peace " within her own borders, and to do no injury to the " consciences of her members, a new moral movement "must be well under way before the Church, with " united and harmonious front, could join in the grand "inarch of progress. The Church, too, was an a"-ed " body, and as such was inclined to be conservative " and was a censor, and not a caterer. . ' . . A wain " the Church's true work was not so much to inculcate

" particular items in moral reform as to inculcate the " principles which lie at the root of all reforms. In "this respect the Church was not a knight-errant, " running a tilt at particular abuses, but a sage teacher "of those things which lead to sound moral life. All "moral movement, too, had a social or political " environment or both ; and it was only right that every " innovation should reach an assured vitality before it was accepted. . . . The church, in every age, " has enough to do in enforcing moral truths about " which all agree, instead of championing those things " which are undergoing a probation. She was not the " motive power in the engine of social progress. God " is the living fire, and His Church is the controlling " balance-wheel." This description of " The Church " might have proceeded from one of the most pronounced opponents of ecclesiasticism. Read by the light of history, it means that religious organisations have clung to error—enforcing their mandates by means of all the secular and spiritual authority within their reach—until the discoveries of Science rendered it unsafe to continue in their particular course. The admission that "it was " only right that every innovation should reach an " assured vitality before it was accepted," is logically fatal to " The Church." For when a moral truth has once attained " an assured vitality," it cannot matter whether " an aged body," conservative and censorious, accepts it or not. Equally stultifying is the statement that " The Church, in every age, has enough to do in " enforcing moral truths about which all agree, instead " of championing those things which are undergoing a " probation." Truths about which all agree need no enforcing, having reached "an assured vitality." And it is just those truths struggling for recognition which require championing in the interests of humanity. Religious corporations are represented by their apologist unintentionally in their true light. How much inferior are they morally to the schools of philosophy of Ancient Greece !

The complaint that Freethought stands aloof from Spiritualism, is only another way of saying, that as a rule Freethinkers exercise due scientific caution, and that finding from experience how prone the bulk of mankind are to accept any theory that accords with their prejudices and personal interests, they are not prepared to give credence either to the theory of Spiritualism or to its. evidence quite so readily as its advocates wish. Having abandoned one superstition on grounds of fact and reason, they are not prepared to adopt what looks so suspiciously like another superstition without very good reason and without being perfectly sure of the facts. So far the reasoning of " spiritists," as the Rev. J. Bavin prefers to call them, is like his own, of the theological type, which giving free range to what professor Tyndall calls the " mythologic imagination " requires a mere atom of fact to support a huge edifice of fancy. The Bible recognises a whole host of spiritual existences and denounces unlawful dealings with them, therefore the facts of " spiritism " must be admitted, and being admitted they prove the truth of the Bible ! This is reasoning in a remarkably small circle, but then people don't want logical fallacies exposed when to hold them is both pleasant and profitable. " What shall a " man give in exchange for his soul ?" To get truth only seems to many a bad bargain. It is. so much easier to write superficial twaddle about "the uncomfortable and "foolish creed of Mr. Bradlaugh," and to quote nonsense from a book called " Isis Unveiled " in support

of the immortality, not only of men but of animals, than to study the historical and scientific principles involved in what is in itself a matter of fact, and one as to which our belief ought to depend on the evidence. Freethought has not the slightest objection to accepting the doctrine of immortality or any other doctrine if true, but it strongly objects to take a baseless phantasy for a solid fact.

The Freethought Conference at Dunedin has held its first meeting, when the lines of a Federal Union of the Freethought Associations of New Zealand were laid down. A Constitution in outline was adopted by the Conference, and it remains for the different Associations to ratify what has been done by passing resolutions in accordance with the clause which provides for affiliation. The Conference neither did too little nor too much. The basis of Union has been provided ; the Constitution is comprehensive enough to allow for expansion in any direction which the consensus of opinion among the Associations may hereafter determine ; and Freethinkers may at last realise the fact that they can speak, protest, and appeal in unison on all questions of national interest. The Conference recognised that the constitution must contain the element of growth' and development, and was careful not to hamper in any way the action of future conferences. It was wise to give small Associations equal voting power with large, thus to encourage the formation of Societies in small centres of population, and to preserve the feeling of equality. The privilege conceded might of course be abused, but it will not ; and it is one of the first principles of federation that the rights of the weakest member as of the strongest are maintained inviolate. It may be said that the objects of the Union are not important or urgent enough to have called for the organisation. The defence of liberty, the abolition of improper privileges, religious or political, the promotion of social well-being, and the elevation of Humanity, may not be ends of great importance in the eyes of practical people whose gospel is the ten per cents ; but to Freethinkers they are the only ends worthy of the highest moral effort, constituting an ideal which may enlist the enthusiasm and the energies of the best and wisest. The Freethought Federal Union will have plenty of work to do in a wide sphere, and if it be animated by the true spirit of its mission its voice will not be unheard or powerless in matters of legislation and government, in social and political progress.

Suffering becomes beautiful, when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility, but through greatness of mind. — Aristotle. “ Even at this day, and in Europe, ask any of the vulgar why he believes in an Omnipotent Creator of the world, he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant; he will not hold out his hand and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of the hand, with all the other circumstances which render that member fit for the use to which it as destined. To these he has been long accustomed ; and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such-a-one ; the fall and bruise of such another; the excessive drought of this season ; the cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate operation of Providence ; and such events as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a Supreme Intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it.”— Hume.