Volume Ii Part 4 (2/2)

”I conceive that when a bad law has made the oath a condition to the performance of a public duty, it may be taken without dishonesty by a person who acknowledges no binding force in the religious part of the formality. Unless (as in your own case) he has made it the special and particular work of his life to testify against such formalities, and against the belief with which they are connected.”

I could not concur with this view. Personal candour is far-reaching in its effects, and should be cherished where we can, and as far as we can.

Truth is to the life of the mind what air is to the life of the body.

When the mind ceases to breathe truth, the mind is impaired or dies.

It is necessary to add the grounds which actuated me in endeavours to put an end to the outlawry of opinion. Many beside myself helped to obtain a law of affirmation, but I was the only person among them all who had never taken an oath. Sir George Cornewall Lewis demanded in Parliament how the oath could be a vital grievance to Atheists, whose throats were furrowed with swallowing it. When summoned on the grand jury at Clerkenwell I refused to take the oath in the sense the court attached to it, and I was fined twelve guineas for not taking it. I drew up a paper showing the privileges given by the law to those who were honestly unable to swear. They were exempted from the militia, from the duty of acting as special constable, they could procure the acquittal of any thief, fraudulent person, or murderer, where their evidence was necessary to conviction. In some cases the thief has escaped, and the person robbed has been imprisoned instead, for his contumacy in not lying. It became known among thieves that where they could find out a witness against them, who disbelieved in an avenging G.o.d, the counsel defending the thief had only to call the attention of the court to the fact for the witness to be ordered ”to stand down,” and the thief would ”leave the court without a stain on his character.” Mr. Francis, in his ”History of the Bank of England,” relates how Turner, whose fraud amounted to 10,000, escaped, because the only witness who could swear decidedly to his handwriting, was a disbeliever in the New Testament.

The jury returned a verdict of ”Not guilty.”

Sir John Trelawny told me that the fly-leaves I published on the ”Privileges of Sceptics and the Immunity of Thieves” made more impression upon members of Parliament than any pet.i.tion sent to the House. These and similar services, with my lifelong refusal to take the oath, caused John Stuart Mill to write to me, saying: ”It is a great triumph of freedom of opinion that the Evidence Bill should have pa.s.sed both Houses without being seriously impaired. You may justly take to yourself a good share of the credit of having brought things up to that pa.s.s.”*

These instances will no doubt satisfy the reader as to the peril of entertaining scruples in the face of power. The earliest instance which concerned me was a case in Birmingham in which several thousand pounds were left for the establishment of a secular school which I was to conduct. Not being willing to take the oath, I could not prosecute my claim. When a son of mine was killed by the recklessness of a driver, I could not give evidence on the inquest because I could not be sworn.

My private house was thrice robbed by servants who became aware of my inability to prosecute. When in business in Fleet Street, my property could be carted away, for which I had no remedy save lying in wait and knocking down the depredators, which would at the Mansion House have led to a public scandal and injured the business. Money was left to me which I could not claim, being an outlaw.

* Blackheath Park, Kent, August 8, 1869.

It would tire the reader to tell him all the instances of the perils attending scruples. Mr. Roebuck put the case in the House of Commons against Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Pointing his finger at Sir George, he asked, ”What is the right honourable gentleman going to do? Two men go into court. One disbelieves in the oath, but he takes it. The other takes the peril of outlawry rather than profess a faith which he does not hold. You believe the liar, whom you know to be a liar, and you reject the evidence of the man who speaks the truth at his peril.” I had asked Mr. Roebuck to speak when the question of affirmation was before the House. There were then only he, Sir John Trelawny, or Mr. Conyngham to whom such a question could be put It was upon Mr. Roebuck that I mostly relied. After his speech I thanked him for doing what no one else could do so well. He disclaimed any desert of thanks, saying, ”I have only done what Jeremy Bentham taught me.”

CHAPTER x.x.x. TAKING SIDES

Every one of manly mind, every person of thought and determination, takes sides upon important questions. Those who say they are indifferent which side prevails, are indifferent whether good or evil comes uppermost. Those who are afraid to choose a side, command only the cold respect accorded to cowardice. Those who sit upon a fence to see which side is likely to prevail before they jump down, are not seeking the success of a principle, but their own interests. In most questions--as in business--there is a side of honesty and a side of fraud. Some do not take either separately, thinking they can better take both at discretion. If they profit by their dexterous duplicity, they command no regard. Some persons have no fervour for the right, and would rather see the wrong prevail than take the trouble to prevent it. They would be on the side of truth altogether if it gave them no discomfort, and caused them no outlay. They belong to the large Laodicean lukewarm cla.s.s, of whom he who sought their allegiance said he would ”spue them out of his mouth.” Not a pleasant simile, but it is not mine. It shows that no one is enthusiastic about those who are undecided where decision interferes with advancement.

If the selfish, or the politic, or the supine do not care to take sides with right, they have no cause to complain if the triumph of wrong involves them in discredit or disaster. But whatever be their fate, I am not concerned with them. What I am concerned with is the omission of all information of what may follow to him who shall take the right side.

These consequences ought never to be out of sight.

It is too often forgotten that in this world virtue has its price as well as vice, and neither can be bought cheap. Vice can be bought on the ”hire system,” by which a person gets into debt pleasantly--which introduces s.h.i.+ftlessness into life. Wrong is a money-lender, whose concealed charges and heavy interest have to be paid one day at the peril of ruin. Right doing may be said to pay as it goes along, which implies conscience, effort, and often sacrifice of some immediate pleasure. But independence lies that way, and no other. Right principle incurs no deferred obligation. Debt is a chain by which the debtor binds himself to someone else. The connection may be disregarded, but the chain can never be broken, except by rest.i.tution. Many persons are beguiled into doing right under the impression that it is as pleasant as doing wrong. This is not so, and the concealment of the fact has injurious consequences. When a person who has been, as it were, betrayed into virtue, without being instructed as to the inconvenience which may attend it, when he encounters them, he suspects he has been imposed upon, and thinks he had better give vice a turn. It was this that made Huxley declare that the hardest as well as the most useful lesson a man could learn, was to do that which he ought to do, whether he liked it or not. Character, which can be trusted, comes that way, and that way alone. He who enters on that path reaps reward daily in the pleasure and strength which duty imparts, while sooner or later follow advantage and honour. The most useful character George Eliot drew was that of t.i.to, who was wrecked because he had no sense that there was strength and safety in truth. The only strength he trusted to lay in his ingenuity and dissimulation. The world is pretty full of t.i.tos, who all come to one end, and n.o.body mourns them.

A few instances may be relevantly given in which rightness has been attended by disadvantages, when wrongness appeared to have none--yet wrongness was found to bring great unpleasantness in the end.

When there were pet.i.tions before the House of Commons to change the oath which excluded Jews, and pet.i.tions to permit persons to make affirmations who had conscientious objections to taking an oath, it was represented to me that if both claims were kept before Parliament at the same time both would be rejected. The Jewish claim was the older, and concerned the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of a race. I therefore caused the omission for several years of any pet.i.tion for affirmation--though my disability of being unable to take the oath excluded me from justice and rendered me an outlaw.

When the Jews had obtained their relief, Sir Julian Goldsmid, a Jew, became a candidate at Brighton. Mr. Matthews, a political friend of mine in the town, went to Sir Julian and asked whether, as Mr. Holyoake and those of his way of thinking had deferred their claim for affirmation that the Jews might become eligible for Parliament, would he vote for the Affirmation Bill? He said, ”No! he would not” Mr. Matthews then wrote to ask me whether he and others who were in favour of Affirmation should vote for Sir Julian. I answered, ”Certainly, if he in other respects was the best candidate before the const.i.tuency. However strongly we might be persuaded our own claim was just, we had no right to prefer it to the general interest of the State.”

Speaking one night with Mr. John Morley when we both happened to be guests of Mr. Chamberlain at Highbury, Birmingham, I remarked that Cobden and Bright, without intending it, had introduced more immorality into politics than any other politicians in my time. Mr. Morley naturally demanded to be informed when, and in what way. I answered, ”When they advised electors to vote for any candidate, irrespective of their political opinion, who would vote against the Corn Laws. This incited every party to vote for its own hand--the priest for the church, the brewers for the barrel, and the teetotalers for the teapot, the anti-vaccinators for those who were against the lancet. Even women proposed to vote for any candidate who would give them the suffrage, regardless whether they put out a Ministry of Progress and put in a Ministry of Reaction. This was ignoring the general good in favour of a personal measure. The error of the great Anti-Corn Law advocates lay in their not making it plain to the country that when the population were deteriorating and dying from want of sufficient food, politics must give way to the claims of existence. That was the justification of Cobden and Bright, and had it been stated, smaller politicians with narrower aims could never then have pleaded their example for crowding the poll with rival claims in which the larger interests of the State are forgotten.

Like Bacon's maxim that 'speaking the truth was so excellent a habit, that any departure from that wholesome rule should be noted.' The Anti-Corn Law League election policy needed noting.”

However many instances may be given of the kind before the reader, the moral will be the same. Taking sides involves some penalty which enthusiasts are apt to overlook, and when it arrives ruddy eagerness is apt to turn pale and change into ign.o.ble prudence. Taking the side of honesty or fraud, unpleasantness may come. But on the side of right the consciousness of integrity mitigates regret and commands respect; while the penalties of deceit are intensified by shame and scorn. Many think there is safety in a judicious mixture of good faith and bad, but when the bad is discerned, distrust and contempt are the unevadable consequences. Besides, it takes more trouble to conceal a sinister life than to act uprightly. It is true, an evil policy often succeeds, but the interest of society is to take care that he who does evil shall be overtaken by evil. As this sentiment grows, the chances of illicit success continually decrease. Rascality--refined or coa.r.s.e--would have fewer adherents if society took as much trouble to secure that the rightdoer shall prosper, as it takes to render the career of the knave precarious.

The point of importance, I repeat, is--that persons should remember, or be taught to remember, that the course of right, like the course of wrong, is attended by consequences. Many who are honourably attracted by the right are disappointed at finding that it has its duties as well as its pleasures--which, had they known at first, they would have made up their minds to do them; but not being apprised of them, when they first encounter inconvenience, they think they have been deceived, falter, and sometimes turn from a n.o.ble course upon which they had entered.

Any one would think there was no great peril to be encountered by taking sides with veracity. Let him avoid the sin of pretension, and see what will happen.

The sin I referred to is not the common one of declaring that to be true which you know to be untrue--that has long been known by an appropriate name, and does not require any new epithet to denote its scandalousness.

The sin of pretension in question consists in a.s.suming, or declaring that to be true, which one does not know to be true. Years ago this was a very common sin, and everybody committed it. You heard it in the pulpit more frequently than on the stage. n.o.body complained of it, or rebuked it, or resented it. It was not until the middle of the last century that public attention was drawn to it. It was Huxley who first raised the question of intellectual veracity, and he devised the term Agnostic (which merely means limitation) to express it. Limitationism does not mean disbelief, but the limitation of a.s.sertion to actual knowledge. The theist used to declare--without misgiving--the absolute certainty of the existence of an independent, active Ent.i.ty, to whom Nature is second-hand, and not much at that. The anti-theist--also without misgiving--denied that there was such separate Potentiality.

The Limitationist, more modest in averment, not having sufficient information to be positive, simply says he does not know. He does not say that others may not have sufficient knowledge of a primal cause of things; but lacking it himself, he concludes that veracity in statement may be a virtue where omniscience is denied. There may be belief founded on inference. But inference is not knowledge. The Limitationist withholds a.s.sertion from lack of satisfying evidence. He is neutral--not because he wishes not to believe, or desires to deny, but because serious language should be measured by the standard of proof and conviction.

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