Felix L. Oswald

“ Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes drives our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become the Lethe in which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their misery. The curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to the grave, and for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens of life to outweigh its blessings. ”

“ That dynasty of scamp-gods was, at last, forced to abdicate, but only to yield their throne to a celestial Phalaris, a torture-god who cruelly punished the gratification of the most natural instincts, and foredoomed a vast plurality of his children to an eternity of horrid and hopeless torments. Every natural enjoyment was denounced as sinful. Every natural blessing was vilified as a curse in disguise. Mirth is the sunshine of the human mind, the loveliest impulse of life’s truest children; yet the apostle of Antinaturalism promised his heaven to the gloomy world-despiser. ”

“ Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma. ”

“ It is no trifle that the prevalent system of ethics and the temporal and eternal hopes of millions of our brethren are still based on a lie. It is no trifle that the health and happiness of millions of our fellow-men are still sacrificed on the altar of that untruth by the suppression of public recreations on the only day when a large plurality of our working-men find their only chance of leisure. ”

“ God is paid when man receiveth;
To enjoy is to obey;
says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into disease or candor into hypocrisy.
The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on mental prostitution. ”

“ Theological training had failed to kindle the dawn of a supernatural millennium, but had thoroughly succeeded in extinguishing the light of human reason. Not absolute ignorance only, but baneful superstition—worse than ignorance by just as much as poison is worse than hunger—was for centuries the inevitable result of all so-called school-training; and the traditions of that age of priest-rule have made religion almost a synonyme of cant. ”

“ But if we confine our comparison to the records of authentic history, it would be no exaggeration to say that during the period named the type of a Christian priest represented the absolute extreme of all the groveling ignorance, the meanest selfishness, the rankest sloth, the basest servility, the foulest perfidy, the grossest superstition, the most bestial sensuality, to which the majesty of human nature has ever been degraded. Thousands of monasteries fattened on the toil of starving peasants. ”

“ Race-running and wrestling were the favorite pastimes of young Romans in the undegenerate age of the republic; and, in spite of all restraints, similar propensities still manifest themselves in our school-boys. They pass the intervals of their study-hours in competitive athletics, rather than in listless inactivity, and brave frosts and snowstorms to get the benefit of outdoor exercise even in midwinter. They love health-giving sports for their own sake, as if instinctively aware that bodily strength will further every victory in the arena of life. ”

“ In that midnight hour of unnatural superstitions every torch-bearer was persecuted as an enemy of the human race. Bruno, Campanella, Kepler, Vanini, Galilei, Copernicus, Descartes, and Spinoza had to force their way through a snapping and howling pack of monkish fanatics who beset the path of every reformer, and overcame the heroism of all but the stoutest champions of light and freedom. From the tenth to the end of the sixteenth century not less than 3,000,000 “heretics,” i.e., scholars and free inquirers, had to expiate their love of truth in the flames of the stake. ”

“ Why should they rage about the riddle of the veiled hereafter to please the ordainer of the eternal law that visits such inexorable penalties upon the neglect of the present world? Should the friends of common sense quarrel about guesses at the solution of unknowable secrets? We need not grudge our wonder-loving brother the luxury of meditating on the mysteries of the unseen or the possibilities of resurrection. Shall the soul of the dying patriarch live only in his children? ”

“ With a meal of barley cakes and milk, a straw couch, and scant clothing of homespun linen, a shepherd-boy in the highlands of the Austrian Alps may enjoy existence to a degree that exuberates in frolic and jubilant shouts, while all the resources of wealth cannot recall the sunshine which sickness has banished from the life of the dyspeptic glutton. If happiness could be computed by measure and weight, it would be found that her richest treasures are not stored in gilded walls, but [22] in the homes of frugal thrift, of rustic vigor and nature-loving independence. ”

“ For a long series of centuries the predominance of insane dogmas had actually made science a mere mockery, and application to the prescribed curriculum of the monastic colleges a clear waste of time—clear to all but the dullest minds. The neglect of such studies, of the disgusting sophistry of the patristic and scholastic era, was, indeed, a proof of common sense, since only dunces and hypocrites could muster the patience required to wade through the dismal swamp of cant, pedantry, and superstition which for thirteen centuries formed the mental pabulum of the priest-ridden academics. ”

“ Legislative reform, the manful renunciation of entangling alliances with the ghosts of the past, is a sword that has more than once cut a Gordian knot of fatal complications. The suppression of monasteries saved four of our Spanish American sister republics from a brood of vampires that had drained the life-blood of Spain for a series of centuries. In England the timely repeal of the corn-laws averted an explosion that might have rent the coherence of the entire British empire. ”

“ And ages before the researches of agricultural chemistry began to reveal the protective influence of arboreal vegetation, an instinct which the child of civilization shares with the rudest savage revolted against the reckless destruction of fine woodlands, and sought to retrieve the loss by surrounding private homes with groves and parks. The love of forests is as natural to our species as the love of rocks to the mountain-goat. ”

“ And in spite of most discouraging circumstances, the love of knowledge sometimes revives in after years with the energy almost of a passionate instinct. On the veranda of a new hotel in a railroad town of southern Texas, I once noticed the expression of rapt interest on the face of a young hunter, a lad of eighteen or nineteen, who here for the first time came in contact with the representatives of a higher civilization and with breathless attention drank in the conversation of two far-traveled strangers. ”

“ The dogma of self-denial has not prevented our financial pharisees from amassing fortunes that would dwarf the spoils of a Roman triumphator; but the hospitality of Mæcenas has not survived the religion of Nature. Our philosophers have to study the problems of life in a personal struggle for existence; our poets have to choose between starvation and hypocrisy. Patriots are left to the consoling reflection that virtue is its own reward. The endowers of theological seminaries seem to rely on the mercy of Christ to cancel the odium of their shortcomings in the recognition of secular merit. ”

“ If the sorrows of poverty-straitened love could be measured against the misery of disgust blighted wealth, it would be admitted that the course of true love is, after all, the smoothest, in the long run as well as in the beginning. For the inspirations of genuine love will resist the assaults of misfortune as they defied its menace, and the ban of prejudice can detract but little from the happiness of a union hallowed by the sanction of Nature. ”

“ It still survives in the bigotry of those modern zealots who groan at sight of a horse-race or wrestling-match, and would fain suppress the undue worldliness of ball-playing children. Manly pastimes were banished from the very dreams of a world to come; and while the heroes of Walhalla contest the prizes of martial sports, and the guests of Olympus share in the joyful festivals of the gods, the saints of our priest-blighted heaven need the alternative of an eternal hell to enjoy the prospect of an everlasting Sabbath-school. ”

“ Our Protestant clergymen see their temple walls cracked by a breach of ever-multiplying schisms, and can prop their prestige only by more and more humiliating concessions, and in every intelligent community have to purchase popularity by rank heresies against the dogmas of their predecessors. Here and there the orthodox tenets of the New Testament have survived the progress of rationalism, but haunt the shade, like specters scenting the morning air, and momentarily expecting the summons that shall banish them to the realms of their native night. ”

“ Our season ends before the trees of hope have time to ripen their fruit; before their day’s work is done our toilers are overtaken by the shadows of approaching night. Sanitary reforms would undoubtedly lengthen our average term of life, and an increase of longevity alone would solve the most vexing riddles of existence: the apparent injustice of fate, the disproportion of merit and compensation, the aimlessness, the illusive promises and baffled hopes of life. ”

“ Because the pantheon of the Ammonites included a god with cannibal propensities, helpless infants were for centuries roasted on the consecrated gridiron of that god; and because eighteen hundred years ago the diseased imagination of a world-renouncing bigot conceived the idea of a deity delighting in the self-affliction of his creatures, the gloom of death still broods over the day devoted to the special worship of that God, and the coercive penalties of the law are weekly visited upon all who refuse to sacrifice their health and happiness on the altar of superstition. ”

“ Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food and drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit, and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers with the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance prolongs that sunshine to the evening of life. ”

“ Wherever the fanatics of the Galilean church have trampled the flowers of earth, the wasted gardens have been covered with a rank thicket of weeds. Outlawed freedom has given way to the caprice of despots and the license of crime; outraged common sense has yielded to the vagaries of superstition; the suppression of healthful recreation has avenged itself in the riots of secret vice. ”