CHAPTER VIII.
The conversation that I had with Wauna gave me so much uneasiness that Isought her mother. I cannot express the shock I felt at hearing suchyouthful and innocent lips speak of the absurdity of religious forms,ceremonies, and creeds. She regarded my belief in them as a species ofbarbarism. But she had not convinced me. _I was resolved not to beconvinced._ I believed she was in error.
Surely, I thought, a country so far advanced in civilization, andpracticing such unexampled rectitude, must, according to my religiousteaching, have been primarily actuated by religious principles whichthey had since abandoned. My only surprise was that they had notrelapsed into immorality, after destroying church and creed, and I beganto feel anxious to convince them of the danger I felt they wereincurring in neglecting prayer and supplication at the throne tocontinue them in their progress toward perfection of mental and moralculture.
I explained my feelings to the Preceptress with great earnestness andanxiety for their future, intimating that I believed their immunity fromdisaster had been owing to Divine sufferance. "For no nation," I added,quoting from my memory of religious precepts, "can prosper withoutacknowledging the Christian religion."
She listened to me with great attention, and when I had finished, asked:
"How do you account for our long continuance in prosperity and progress,for it is more than a thousand years since we rooted out the lastvestige of what you term religion, from the mind. We have had a longimmunity from punishment. To what do you attribute it?"
I hesitated to explain what had been in my mind, but finally falteredout something about the absence of the male sex. I then had to explainthat the prisons and penitentiaries of my own land, and of all othercivilized lands that I knew of, were almost exclusively occupied by themale sex. Out of eight hundred penitentiary prisoners, not more thantwenty or thirty would be women; and the majority of them could trace_their_ crimes to man's infidelity.
"And what do you do to reform them?" inquired the Preceptress.
"We offer them the teachings of Christianity. All countries, however,differ widely in this respect. The government of my country is not asgenerous to prisoners as that of some others. In the United States everypenitentiary is supplied with a minister who expounds the Gospel to theprisoners every Sunday; that is once every seven days."
"And what do they do the rest of the time?"
"They work."
"Are they ignorant?"
"Oh, yes, indeed;" I replied, earnestly. "You could not find one scholarin ten thousand of them. Their education is either very limited, oraltogether deficient."
"Do the buildings they are confined in cost a great deal?"
"Vast sums of money are represented by them; and it often costs acommunity a great deal of money to send a criminal to the penitentiary.In some States the power to pardon rests entirely with the governor, andit frequently occurs that a desperate criminal, who has cost a county agreat deal of money to get rid of him, will be pardoned by the governor,to please a relative, or, as it is sometimes believed, for a bribe."
"And do the people never think of educating their criminals instead ofworking them?
"That would be an expense to the government," I replied.
"If they would divide the time, and compel them to study half a day asrigorously as they make them work, it would soon make a vast change intheir morals. Nothing so ennobles the mind as a broad and thorougheducation."
"They are all compelled to listen to religious instruction once a week,"I answered. "That surely ought to make some improvement in them. Iremember hearing an American lady relate her attendance at chapelservice in a State penitentiary one Sunday. The minister's education wasquite limited, as she could perceive from the ungrammatical language heused, but he preached sound orthodox doctrine. The text selected had aspecial application to his audience: 'Depart from me ye accursed, intoeverlasting torment prepared for the Devil and his angels.' There wereeight hundred prisoners, and the minister assured them, in plainlanguage, that such would surely be their sentence unless theyrepented."
"And that is what you call the consolations of religion, is it?" askedthe Preceptress with an expression that rather disconcerted me; asthough my zeal and earnestness entirely lacked the light of knowledgewith which she viewed it.
"That is religious instruction;" I answered. "The minister exhorted theprisoners to pray and be purged of their sins. And it was good advice."
"But they might aver," persisted the Preceptress, "that they had prayedto be restrained from crime, and their prayers had not been answered."
"They didn't pray with enough faith, then;" I assured her in theconfidence of my own belief. "That is wherein I think my own church isso superior to the other religions of the world," I added, proudly. "Wecan get the priest to absolve us from sin, and then we know we are ridof it, when he tells us so."
"But what assurance have you that the priest can do so?" asked thePreceptress.
"Because it is his duty to do so."
"Education will root out more sin than all your creeds can," gravelyanswered the Preceptress. "Educate your convicts and train them intocontrolling and subduing their criminal tendencies by _their own will_,and it will have more effect on their morals than all the prayers everuttered. Educate them up to that point where they can perceive forthemselves the happiness of moral lives, and then you may trust them totemptation without fear. The ideas you have expressed about dogmas,creeds and ceremonies are not new to us, though, as a nation, we do notmake a study of them. They are very, very ancient. They go back to thefirst records of the traditionary history of man. And the farther you goback the deeper you plunge into ignorance and superstition.
"The more ignorant the human mind, the more abject was its slavery toreligion. As history progresses toward a more diffuse education of themasses, the forms, ceremonies and beliefs in religion are continuallychanging to suit the advancement of intelligence; and when intelligencebecomes universal, they will be renounced altogether. What is true ofthe history of one people will be true of the history of another.Religions are not necessary to human progress. They are really clogs. Myancestors had more trouble to extirpate these superstitious ideas fromthe mind than they had in getting rid of disease and crime. There wereseveral reasons for this difficulty. Disease and crime were self-evidentevils, that the narrowest intelligence could perceive; but beliefs increeds and superstitions were perversions of judgment, resulting from alack of thorough mental training. As soon, however, as education of ahigh order became universal, it began to disappear. No mind ofphilosophical culture can adhere to such superstitions.
"Many ages the people made idols, and, decking them with rich ornaments,placed them in magnificent temples specially built for them and therites by which they worshipped them. There have existed many variationsof this kind of idolatry that are marked by the progressive stages ofcivilization. Some nations of remote antiquity were highly cultured inart and literature, yet worshipped gods of their own manufacture, orimaginary gods, for everything. Light and darkness, the seasons, earth,air, water, all had a separate deity to preside over and control theirspecial services. They offered sacrifices to these deities as theydesired their co-operation or favor in some enterprise to be undertaken.
"In remote antiquity, we read of a great General about to set out uponthe sea to attack the army of another nation. In order to propitiate thegod of the ocean, he had a fine chariot built to which were harnessedtwo beautiful white horses. In the presence of a vast concourse ofpeople collected to witness the ceremony, he drove them into the sea.When they sank out of sight it was supposed that the god had acceptedthe present, and would show his gratitude for it by favoring winds andpeaceful weather.
"A thousand years afterward history speaks of the occurrence derisively,as an absurd superstition, and at the same time they believed in andlauded a more absurd and cruel religion. They worshipped an imaginarybeing who had created and possessed absolute control of everything. Someof the human family
it had pleased him to make eminently good, whileothers he made eminently bad. For those whom he had created with evildesires, he prepared a lake of molten fire into which they were to becast after death to suffer endless torture for doing what they had beenexpressly created to do. Those who had been created good were to berewarded for following out their natural inclinations, by occupying aplace near the Deity, where they were to spend eternity in singingpraises to him.
"He could, however, be persuaded by prayer from following his originalintentions. Very earnest prayer had caused him to change his mind, andsend rain when he had previously concluded to visit the country withdrouth.
"Two nations at war with each other, and believing in the same Deity,would pray for a pestilence to visit their enemy. Death was universallyregarded as a visitation of Providence for some offense committedagainst him instead of against the laws of nature.
"Some believed that prayer and donations to the church or priest, couldinduce the Deity to take their relatives from the lake of torment andplace them in his own presence. The Deity was prayed to on everyoccasion, and for every trivial object. The poor and indolent prayed forhim to send them food and clothes. The sick prayed for health, thefoolish for wisdom, and the revengeful besought the Deity to consign alltheir enemies to the burning lake.
"The intelligent and humane began to doubt the necessity of suchdreadful and needless torment for every conceivable misdemeanor, and itwas modified, and eventually dropped altogether. Education finallyrooted out every phase of superstition from the minds of the people, andnow we look back and smile at the massive and magnificent structureserected to the worship of a Deity who could be coaxed to change his mindby prayer."
I did not tell the Preceptress that she had been giving me a history ofmy own ancestry; but I remarked the resemblance with the joyous hopethat in the future of my own unhappy country lay the possibility of acivilization so glorious, the ideal heaven of which every sorrowingheart had dreamed. But always with the desire to believe it had aspiritual eternity.