George Jacob Holyoake

“ The department of progress in which Carlile worked has not yet received recognition by society. Society only remembers the genius which is creative, not that which is practical—though it profits in its ulterior stages more by the practical than the creative. The world has been rich in theory ages ago, and would have realised universal happiness by this time had it encouraged those who reduce its theories to practice. When a great truth is proclaimed, it produces no fruit till society is ploughed and sown with it. ”

“ But science thrown into the church as a substitute for superstition in the education of the people, begins at once to regenerate the people, the parliament, the institutions, and the throne. It is the substitution of the known for the unknown, the real for the unreal, the certain for the uncertain. Religion is the erroneous mind’s chief direction. It must be corrected by and through the medium which it most respects. It rejects all other opposing conditions, and increases its tenacity for its errors. To reform religion by science, is to regenerate fallen man, and to save a sinking country. ”

“ It was a sense of duty alone that made him brave, his moral courage was great, but it was the courage of conviction. Carlile was an illustration of Bulwer’s remark, that courage in one thing, is not to be mistaken for courage in everything. He who opposed himself without fear to the spies of Sidmouth, and the edicts of Castlereagh, who singly withstood public opinion on the questions of Marriage and Religion, when that opinion knew no reason and no mercy, he felt, through his whole life, a want of fair confidence in himself, when addressing a public audience. ”

“ Can the sins of man disturb the peace of God? If so, as men exist in myriads and action is incessant, then is God, as Jonathan Edwards has shown, the most miserable of beings and the victim of his meanest creatures. We, see, therefore, that sin against God is impossible. All sin is finite and relative—all sin is sin against man. Will God punish this, which punishes itself? If man errs, the bitter consequences are ever with him. ”

“ Carlile was one of those men who are tattooed by the enemy into whose hands they fall, and who are dyed by the influences against which they struggle. He was like a man who fights all day in the front rank; who is discoloured by the powder expended in the battle, and never after wears the hue of peace. ”

“ Men who are patriotic in easy chairs and by the fire-side only, who never incur damped feet in the public cause, and essay the reform of society in kid gloves and white waistcoats, know nothing, and can allow nothing for that strife of spirit in which men live, who take up the dice box of oppression to play for liberty, and whose stakes are their lives. Let the Christian whose altar is protected by law, whose arrogance over infidels is part and parcel of the statutes, and is applauded by public opinion ”

“ It was in this department that Carlile laboured. He left no distinct book, he bequeathed no invention, he is the author of no famous theory; but his life was a poem of heroic and voluntary sacrifice, by which new freedom was won and secured to posterity; and men are now benefited through his exertions who remember him not, who know him not, and who would disown him or revile him if they did. Attorney-Generals delight to prate about the danger to society of dissemminating new opinions—the danger is to him alone who undertakes the task. ”

“ The pioneer, the orator, and the journalist, are they who practicalise truth: and he who re-asserts it, who insists upon it, and re-echoes it by all the arts of repetition—he it is who really advances society. He is the worker; yet society accords him no distinction, no posthumous memory. Hence it requires more generosity of sentiment to be useful than to be great. ”

“ In this Carlile erred, as he did with the theory of personalities, which he conceived with equal ability. I conceive that Science is independent of Theology in its essence and its terms. Religion may be brought to science by adroit interpretations, and improved in character and significance; but Science can never be brought to Religion without being ‘paltered in a double sense,’ and lowered in dignity and intelligibility. ”

“ In the autumn of his career, he grew to think better of himself than of other men, but it was in a great measure because he had done more and dared more. He was impatient of a rival, because his rivals as political or anti-religious leaders wanted the proper qualification. Carlile had suffered so much, and so long, that he not unnaturally became convinced that suffering was the sole qualification of a public teacher. He confounded endurance with ability, and doubted the integrity or the courage of those who had dared nothing. ”

“ But if man has fallen at his conscious peril—has thoughtlessly spurned salvation—has offended God—will God therefore take vengeance? Is God without dignity or magnanimity? If I do wrong to him, who does wrong to me, I come down (has not the ancient sage warned me) to the level of my enemy? Will God thus descend to the level of vindictive man! ”

“ The course he took is indeed not to be imitated now. We exist in better times, when the conflict of reason has succeeded to the strife of passion. We have better arts, because we have a fairer field, and we owe that fairer field to such men as Carlile. Let us not impose our modes of warfare on men who fought with savages, and demand of the actors of other times that virtue which belongs exclusively to our opportunities. ”

“ In what is called a religious state of society, that is, a state of idolatry and superstition, can reform be carried out through any other medium than its religion! My experience, added to the best advice I could find, is, that, with a religious people, religion is the only medium of reform. If I were opposed in that problem, I could successfully defend my side of it. The Charter shall change the constituency of the House of Commons, without improving the House. Socialism may create 20 Tytherlies, but it has still done nothing for the nation. ”

“ We despise the poet who is not above a patron; we despise the citizen who crawls before the throne; and shall God be said to have less love of self-respect than man! He who will consent to be saved after this fashion hath most need to fear that he shall perish, for he deserves it. ”

“ Nothing remains to be reformed but the ignorance and vices of the people, whose ignorance cannot be removed, while their bodies are starved and their church remains a theatre of idolatry and superstition.’ These were the proud and wise words uttered in the last periodical edited by Richard Carlile. ”

“ He who seeks distinction may advance society as he achieves distinction: but the advancement of society is secondary with him—the advancement of himself is the primary consideration, and he is often careless whether society advances or retrogrades provided he lays hold of its renown and keeps it. Hence he who seeks fame is selfish—he who seeks utility is generous, because he is certain that society will neglect him, as it pays its honours to those who serve it least. The theorist provides for the future, but it is the worker who makes the future by realising the fulness of the present. ”

“ What was this but erecting a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall God do less? Shall man be more just than God? Is there anything so grand in the life of Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? ”

“ If a parent placed his poor child near a fire at which he knew it would be burnt to death, or near a well into which he knew it would fall and be drowned, would any power of custom prevent our giving speech to the indignation of the heart, and pronouncing such a parent a miscreant! ”

“ It seems like the artifice of a beaten man to conciliate an implacable enemy. But Carlile was no beaten man. A few months only before his death, he wrote to Sir Robert Peel, in reference to the imprisonment of Mr. Southwell and myself, avowing his determination to renew martyrdom, if Sir Robert persisted in reviving persecution. But Carlile did make the capital error of proposing to explain science under Christian terms, which was giving to science, which is universal, a sectarian character. ”

“ And can we pretend to believe God has so acted, and at the same time be able to trust him! If God has so acted, he may so act again. This creed can afford no consolation in death. If he who disbelieves this dogma fears to die, he who believes it should fear death more. ”

“ Carlile began to write a man. Nature made him for an agitator. He had an iron will and limitless self-reliance. I have been told by one who advised him frequently, that no man could control him. His first papers in the Republican, are thoughtful, manly, self-possessed, nervous, and resolute. Sherwin preceded Carlile in the publication of a work, called the Republican, but, after the fourth number, it was changed into ‘Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register,’ on the ground that people were afraid of its name. ”

“ There is a strong vein of political wisdom in all this, not yet appreciated by popular politicians, and this has the merit of having been written at a time, when (as indeed now) the maxim of English popular progressive politics is not to find how much can be done within the law, but how much can be done without it and against it: a policy which dooms Democracy to ceaseless antagonisms in the attainment of its claims, and will, if persisted in, fetter it with impotence when the victory is won. ”

“ Being too much of a man to go to school again, he lived idly three months, amusing himself with colouring pictures to sell in his mother’s shop. His mother’s principal wholesale customers were the firm of Gifford and Co., which consisted of the brothers of that Attorney-General who had such extensive dealings with the son afterwards, in a different line. At the pressing wish of Carlile’s mother, he was apprenticed to a business which he never liked, that of tinplate working, and, like Bunyan, he became a tinman. ”

“ Carlile defined Morality as a rule of conduct relating to man and man—Religion as a rule of conduct, relating not to man, but to something which he fancies to be his Maker. (4) Next he observed, ‘I may have said that the changes observed in phenomenon argue the existence of an active power in the universe, but I have again and again renounced the notion of that power being intelligent or designing. (5) ‘It is not till since my imprisonment that I have avowed myself Atheist.’ (6) ”

“ But they have always remained Rationalists. None that 1 have known and watched—not even the weakest, have fallen into Evangelism. Carlile, by his new course, exposed himself to be distrusted by his less observing but warm friends, and he conciliated no foe among the Christians. Carlile, however, was no hypocrite, nor did he take this new course for venal ends. He was as in all things else conscientious. Still his course was one of choice, not of necessity. He was free as ever to expound science, as science, or to expound it in the language of religion. He adopted the mystic course. ”

“ Dishonour can come only by his own hands: and depravity has not come thus. Man, therefore, needs not this salvation. And, if he needed it, he could not accept it. Debarred from purchasing it himself, he must accept it as an act of grace. But it is not well to go even to heaven on sufferance. ”

“ I deem it far nobler and more useful to society, to submit to be the victim than to victimize others. But Carlile acted on a resolute sense of self-defence. He was a believer in Brutus and Colonel Titus, and he lived in darker times when the policy of moral resistance was less clear and less practicable than now. ”

“ Shall God be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him, not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust God is to degrade him. Those passages in the New Testament which give the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him ”

“ Of his own Every Woman’s Book, Carlile said, ‘It had sustained Mr. Cobbett’s malignity—one of the most powerful venoms which the animal world had produced.’ (3) Carlile characterised the weak point in his own character with severe felicity, when speaking of others. ‘Conceit,’ said he, ‘is a malady of humanity, of which some people die.’ (4) These words might stand as the epitaph of his own public influence. ”

“ But man is not fallen, except on the revolting hypothesis just discussed. And before man can be accepted by God, he must, according to Christians, own himself a degraded sinner. Is salvation worth this humiliation! But man is not degraded. No man can be degraded by the act of another. ”

“ Is not his destiny made for him; and shall God punish that sin which is his misfortune rather than his fault? shall man be condemned to misery in eternity because he has been made wretched, and weak, and erring, in time. ”

“ I have long formed the idea that an insurrection against grievances in this country must, to be successful, be spontaneous and not plotted, and that all political conspiracies may be local and even individual evils. ”

“ It is of no use that the unbeliever is told that he will be damned if he does not believe; what human frailty may do is another thing; but the judgment is clear, that a man ought not to believe, nor profess to believe, what seems to him to be false, although he should be damned. The believer, who seeks to propitiate heaven by this deceit, ought to fear its wrath, not the unbeliever who rejects the dishonourable terms and throws himself on its justice. ”

“ Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his body to dissection. Always above superstition, in practice as well as in theory, his wish had long been—that his body, if he died first, should be given to Mr. Lawrence. At that time the prejudice against dissection was almost universal, and only superior persons rose above it. His wish was complied with by his family, and the post mortem examination was published in the Lancet of that year. ”