y they have started
Theosophy, in order to provide themselves with fresh residences.
Little devils of course involve the big Devil--Apollyon, Beelzebub,
Abaddon, Satan, Lucifer, Old Nick. He commands the infernal armies, and
is one of the deities in Mr. Gladstone's pantheon. He is even embedded
in the revised version of the Lord's Prayer--like a fly in amber.
"Deliver us from evil" now reads "Deliver us from the Evil One." Thus
the Devil triumphs, and the first of living English statesmen is reduced
by Christian superstition to the level of modern savages and ancient
barbarians. Mr. Gladstone is perhaps the highest type of the Christian
statesman. But how small and effeminate he appears, after all, in
comparison with a great Pagan statesman like Julius Caesar, whose brain
was free from all superstition! Were the "mighty Julius" to re-appear
on earth, and see a great statesman believing the story of devils being
turned out of men into pigs, he would wonder what blight had fallen upon
the human intellect in two thousand years.
HUXLEY'S MISTAKE.
No one will suspect us of any prejudice against Professor Huxley. We
have often praised his vigorous writings, and his admirable service to
Freethought. We recognise him as a powerful fighter in the great battle
between Reason and Faith. He is a born controversialist, he revels in
the vivisection of a theological opponent, and it is easy to understand
how the more placid Darwin could cry to him admiringly, "What a man you
are!"
But for some reason or other it seems the fate of Professor Huxley, as
it is the fate of Herbert Spencer, to be made use of by the enemies
of Freethought; and it must be admitted that, to a certain extent, he
gratuitously plays into their hands.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has been a perfect god-send to the Christians with
his "Unknowable"--the creation of which was the worst day's work he ever
accomplished. It is only a big word, printed with a capital letter, to
express the objective side of the relativity of human, knowledge. It
connotes all that we do not know. It is a mere confession of ignorance;
it is hollowness, emptiness, a vacuum, a nothing. And this nothing,
which Mr. Spencer adorns with endless quasi-scientific rhetoric, is used
as a buttress to prop up tottering Churches.
Professor Huxley has been nearly as serviceable to the Churches with
his "Agnosticism," which belongs to the same category of substantially
meaningless terms as the
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