Some of you may have seen specimens in Greek and Italian art of what man has done to gratify the lust of the eye that he might perpetuate the lusts of the soul, and gloat over his own moral deformity, immortalised by the utmost cunning wherewith art could animate the most precious forms of inanimate nature. He has set the image of his own corruption in the shining mirror of a stainless jewel, and figured forth his moral deformity in the lustre of a gem--think of giving the worst kind of human disease to a gem! He has cut the devil of his beastlier self in the diamond, enshrined the libidinous satyr, tongue-lolling and leering from a sapphire's azure heaven, made the innocent emerald flush the face with the reflection of what was enacted in its green coolness, called up spirits of all uncleanness in the purity of a crystal. All this was very bad--very horrible--this corruption of art for the delectation of the beast with a taste in man! But what was such degradation at its wantonest and worst compared with that of a drunken man--no matter with which passion he may be aflame--furiously stamping his own hideous face, and the features of his vice, on that form of humanity which he so darkens and defiles as to well-nigh blast or blot out of it the image of God or man altogether! These jewels of life, these creations of love, to be thus brutally defaced in such a cruel way! It is horrible, most horrible! Enough to make all womankind, all motherhood, nay, all manhood, rise in revolt against it, and sicken, and spew it out. If men go reeling to the marriage-bed, reeking with the foul effluvia of drink, gross with gluttony, and stained through and through with moral disease, if
the children are made from the scum of bad blood into an outer likeness of the inner corruption, what can we expect the men
and women to be? If you held a tiny little bird's egg in your hand, how tenderly would you touch it! how protectingly would you
fence it round and shield it from all danger! and here is an immortal soul in embryo, susceptible to every influence of the father,
every feeling of the mother, looking with all its life to them for its environing conditions! Here then, instead of the ancient
damnation of the flesh we need a religion of the body as well as of the soul, and a gospel of human physics. Hitherto the utmost
that has been aimed at scientifically has been a better breed of horses or cattle; we ought to be at least as careful in the bringing
forth of human beings. Make the tree good and its fruit will be good (barring certain "throws back" or "sports" of nature). The
work has to be done from the root, and not by late trying to graft the good on a bad stock. Remember that life comes into the
world according to conditions, and the first of these conditions are those of the married life. Human embryology has now to be
studied religiously in the light of evolution. If I were a woman I doubt whether I should consider a smoker, or chewer of
tobacco, quite good enough to father my children! The final effect--the supposed beneficial effect--of nicotine is to arrest the
decay of matter that ought to be sloughed off in order that it may be renewed. No smoker is so live a man, all round, as he
ought to be, or might be; and you can study them in all the various stages and degrees of dreaming, decaying, dying, poisoning
the springs of future life, or bringing death into the world.
The truth is, that woman at her best and noblest must be monarch of the marriage-bed. We must begin in the creatory if we are
to benefit the race, and the woman has got to rescue and take possession of herself, and consciously assume all the
responsibilities of maternity, on behalf of the children. No woman has any right to part with the absolute ownership of her own
body, but she has the right to be protected against all forms of brute force. No woman has any business to marry anything that
is less than a man. No woman has any right to marry any man who will sow the seeds of hereditary disease in her darlings. Not for all the money in the world! No woman has any right, according to the highest law, to bear a child to a man she does not love. No mother has any right to allow her innocent little ones to be injured mentally for life by orthodox drugs and false nostrums of salvation that are vended from the pulpit by pious impostors. These--and other things as vital--will become practical so soon as womankind co-operate and insist that they shall be practised. "Women, obey your husbands," is a text that, when wrongly applied, has wrought as much human
misery as that other relic of barbarism, "Spare the rod and spoil the child!" Why, the great and sole incentive with the mass of
male hypocrites who support the Churches is because orthodox Christianity encourages the subjection of women, and helps to
make them better--that is more spiritless--household slaves. They do not believe for themselves, but they think anything good
enough for their wives and daughters to believe.
"You cannot serve two masters, saith the Word,"
But Satan nudges them and whispers "Gammon;"
"You lend your Wives and Daughters to the Lord,
You give yourselves to love and worship Mammon."
Our women and children are bound to break away from this system of fettered thought. If I could stand where stood the cock
when all the world could here him crow, my cry would be to the wives and mothers on behalf of the children. The women are
bound to rescue the children, and to head their Exodus from the bondage of orthodoxy, even if the men are too unmanly--too
cowardly to help them. No doubt, one real crux is, What are we going to teach the children? And here there is so much to be
done and lived by the parents in presence of the children, and so little to be said! The life we live with them every day is the
teaching that tells; and not the precepts uttered weekly that are continually belied by our own daily practices. Give the children
a knowledge of natural law, especially in that domain of physical nature which has hitherto been tabooed. If we break a natural
law we suffer pain in consequence, no matter whether we knew the law or not. This result is not an accident, because it always
happens, and is obviously intended to happen. Punishments are not to be avoided by ignorance of effects; they can only be
warded off by a knowledge of causes. Therefore nothing but knowledge can help them. Teach the children to become the
soldiers of duty instead of the slaves of selfish desire. Show them how the sins against self reappear in the lives of others. Teach
them to think of those others as the means of getting out of self. Teach them how the laws of nature work by heredity. How
often has the apparently pious, God-fearing parent produced a child that seemed to the outside world the very opposite of
himself, as if the devil had dropped an egg in the good man's nest. And yet this Satan of a son was but the nature of the saintly
father turned inside out--only an exposure of that which had been hidden for a time beneath the cloak of hypocrisy; because in
the end nature is honest, and will out with it. Children have ears like the very spies of nature herself; eyes that penetrate all
subterfuge and pretence; and a sense of justice that, if allowed fair-play, would straightway wreck the orthodox gospel. Guide
the curiosity of the little ones whilst it is yet innocent, and give them all necessary knowledge fresh and sweet from the lips of the
mother and father, Mr. Ruskin notwithstanding. Let the children be well grounded in the doctrine of development, without which we cannot begin to think coherently. Give them the best material, the soundest method; let the spirit-world have a chance as a living influence on them, and then let them do the rest. Never forget that the faculty for seeing is worth all that is to be seen. It is good to set before the
youngsters the loftiest and noblest ideals--not those that are mythical and non-natural, but those that have been lived in human
reality. The best ideal of all has to be pourtrayed by the parents in the realities of life at home. The teaching that goes deepest
will be indirect, and the truth will tell most on them when it is overheard. When you are not watching, and the children are--that
is when the lessons are learned for life.
Possibly our Coming Religion may suggest a coming revolution? I should not wonder if it does. Anyway, we mean to do our own thinking, and to have absolute freedom of thought and expression. We mean to rescue our Sunday from the sacerdotal ring. But we do not mean that the day of rest and recreation shall fall into the hands of the capitalists. We mean to try and rescue this world from the clutches of those who profess to have the keys and the keeping of the other--they who hold up the other world in front of that beast of burden, the producer, as a decoying lure, like the bunch of carrots before the donkey's
nose, in order that the suggestion of plenty in paradise may induce him to forego his common right to grazing-ground on earth.
We mean to have a day of reckoning with the unjust stewards of the earth. We mean to have the national property restored to
the people, which the churches and other bodies have withheld from the people. We mean that the land, with its inalienable right
of living, its mineral wealth below the soil and its waters above, shall be open to all. We mean to have our banking done by the
State, and our railways worked for the benefit of the whole people. We mean to temper the terror of rampant individualism with the principles of co-operation. We mean to show that the wages' system is a relic of barbarism and social serfdom. That under it labour must remain a slave in the prison-house of property. We mean for woman to have perfect equality with man, social, religious, and political, and her fair share in that equity which is of no sex. We mean also that the same standard of morality shall apply to the woman as to the man. In short, we intend that the redress of wrongs and the righting of inequalities,
which can only be rectified in this world, shall not be put off and postponed to any future stage of existence. The religion of the
future has got to include not only Spiritualism, but the salvation of humanity for this life--any other may be left to follow
hereafter. It has to be a sincerity of life, in place of pretended belief. A religion of science, in place of superstition. Of joy,
instead of sorrow. Of man's Ascent, instead of his Fall. A religion of fact in the present, and not of mere faith for the future. A
religion in which the temple reared to God will be in human form, instead of being built of brick or stone. A religion of work,
rather than worship; and, in place of the deathly creeds, with all their hungry parasites of prey, a religion of life--life actual, life
here, life now, as well as the promise of life everlasting! |
