Hendrik Willem Van Loon

“ The Reformation really settled nothing.
It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book infallible in the place of a man and established (or rather, tried to establish) a rule by black garbed ministers instead of white garbed priests.
Such meager results after half a century of struggle and sacrifice had filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate disappointment. They had expected a millennium of social and religious righteousness and they were not at all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and economic slavery. ”

“ During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. ”

“ But when John asked, “Free to do what?” the answers greatly differed.
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“Free to go forth in quest of Beauty,” the Renaissance replied.
“Free to go in quest of Truth,” the Reformation admonished him.
“Free to search the records of the past when the world was truly the realm of men. Free to realize those ideals which once filled the hearts of poets and painters and sculptors and architects. Free to turn the universe into thine eternal laboratory, that thou mayest know all her secrets,” was the promise of the Renaissance. ”

“ But when he tries to invent an excuse for his own lack of mental faculties, he becomes a holy terror. For then he erects within his soul a granite bulwark of self-righteousness and from the high pinnacle of this formidable fortress, he defies all his enemies (to wit, those who do not share his own prejudices) to show cause why they should be allowed to live.
People suffering from this particular affliction are both uncharitable and mean. Because they live constantly in a state of fear, they easily turn to cruelty and love to torture those against whom they have a grievance. ”

“ But as we would cut a sorry figure with the world in general if we should ever dare to be quite honest with ourselves or our neighbors, we instinctively choose the most respectable and deserving among our many motives, brush it up a bit for public consumption and then expose it for all the world to behold as “the reason why we did so and so.”
But whereas it has been repeatedly demonstrated that it is quite possible to fool most of the people most of the time, no one has as yet discovered a method by which the average individual can fool himself for more than a few minutes. ”

“ But as he grew older and sat and sat and sat in his little olive grove and became more and more exasperated by the foolish quarrels of the little city-states of his native land, and witnessed the utter failure of the old democratic ideal, he grew convinced that some sort of religion was necessary for the average citizen, or his imaginary Republic would at once degenerate into a state of rampant anarchy. ”

“ There are few things more pathetic in this world than the man upon whom the Gods in their wisdom have bestowed a little bit of authority and who is in eternal fear for his official prestige. A king may lose his throne and may laugh at a misadventure which means a rather amusing interruption of a life of dull routine. And anyway he is a king, whether he wears his valet’s brown derby or his grandfather’s crown. ”

“ Rome by this time was no longer a city of free-born burghers. It was the temporary dwelling place of hundreds of thousands of disinherited peasants from all parts of the empire. Such a mob, obeying the mysterious laws that rule the behavior of crowds, is always ready to hate those who behave differently from themselves and to suspect those who for no apparent reason prefer to live a life of decency and restraint. The hail-fellow-well-met who will take a drink and (occasionally) will pay for one is a fine neighbor and a good fellow. ”

“ He tried (quite in vain) to carry a spark of enlightenment into that stronghold of orthodox bigotry, the far-famed University of Louvain. He spent much of his time in London and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in the University of Turin. He was familiar with the Grand Canal of Venice and cursed as familiarly about the terrible roads of Zeeland as those of Lombardy. The sky, the parks, the walks and the libraries of Rome made such a profound impression upon him that even the waters of Lethe could not wash the Holy City out of his memory. ”

“ Our old family horse, having spent the first twenty-five years of his placid life in a warm stable in Coley Town, resents the equally warm barn of Westport for no other reason than that he has always lived in Coley Town, is familiar with every stick and stone in Coley Town and knows that no new and unfamiliar sights will frighten him on his daily ambles through that pleasant part of the Connecticut landscape. ”

“ To describe the courage of leaders like Luther and Calvin, there exists only one word, and rather a terrible word, “colossal.”
A simple Dominican monk, a professor in a little tidewater college somewhere in the backwoods of the German hinterland, who boldly burns a Papal Bull and hammers his own rebellious opinions to the door of a church; a sickly French scholar who turns a small Swiss town into a fortress which successfully defies the whole power of the papacy; such men present us with examples of fortitude so unique that the modern world can offer no adequate comparison. ”

“ From far and wide the high priests of half a hundred new creeds hastened to the New Jerusalem. There they were joined by all those who believed themselves possessed of a call for the great uplift, honest and sincere citizens, but as innocent as babes when it came to politics or statecraft.
The siege of Münster lasted five months and during that time, every scheme, system and program of social and spiritual regeneration was tried out; every new-fangled prophet had his day in court. ”

“ For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.
At last the reaction set in.
Both the body and the mind of Rome had been exhausted by the impossible task of a single city ruling an entire world.
And then a terrible thing happened. A whole people grew tired of life and lost the zest for living. ”

“ To speak of Golden Ages and Modern Eras and Progress is sheer waste of time as long as this world is dominated by fear.
To ask for tolerance, as long as intolerance must of need be an integral part of our law of self-preservation, is little short of a crime.
The day will come when tolerance shall be the rule, when intolerance shall be a myth like the slaughter of innocent captives, the burning of widows, the blind worship of a printed page. ”

“ There are many sorts of courage, but a special order of merit is reserved for those rare souls who, practically alone, dare to face the entire established order of society and who loudly cry for justice when the high courts of the land have pronounced sentence and when the community at large has accepted their verdict as equitable and just. ”

“ Lessing used this ancient folk-tale to prove his belief that no one religion possessed a monopoly of the truth, that it was the inner spirit of man that counted rather than his outward conformity to certain prescribed rituals and dogmas and that therefore it was the duty of people to bear with each other in love and friendship and that no one had the right to set himself upon a high pedestal of self-assured perfection and say, “I am better than all others because I alone possess the Truth.” ”

“ Exactly where and when and how man and his Gods had parted company was a more or less hazy point, never clearly established. Even then the friendship which those who lived beyond the clouds had always felt towards their subjects who crawled across the face of the earth had in no way been interrupted and it had remained flavored with those personal and intimate touches which gave the religion of the Greeks its own peculiar charm. ”

“ For the people who now ruled the world regarded science with a hostile eye and discouraged all independent labor in the field of mathematics, biology and zoology, not to mention medicine and astronomy, which had descended to [152] such a low state of neglect that they were no longer of the slightest practical value.
It is exceedingly difficult for a modern mind to understand such a state of affairs.
We men and women of the twentieth century, whether rightly or wrongly, profoundly believe in the idea of progress. Whether we ever shall be able to make this world perfect, we do not know. ”

“ During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting orgies of the Mather family. ”

“ Until the end of his days he protested that he was not really a writer at all, only a country gentleman who occasionally whiled away the tedious hours of winter by jotting down a few random ideas upon subjects of a slightly philosophic nature. All this was pure buncombe. If ever a man put his heart and his soul and his virtues and his vices and everything he had into his books, it was this cheerful neighbor of the immortal d’Artagnan. ”

“ I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. ”

“ When it is sometimes stated that the world has not changed at all and that the Athenians were no more broadminded than the people of later times, the name of Socrates is dragged into the debate as a terrible example of Greek bigotry. But today, after a very exhaustive study of the case, we know better and the long and undisturbed career of this brilliant but exasperating soap-box orator is a direct tribute to the spirit of intellectual liberty which prevailed throughout ancient Greece in the fifth century before our era. ”

“ For whenever the old lady undertakes to show us that systematic lying, continued during the course of centuries, will eventually play hob with the peace and happiness of the entire world, our planet is at once enveloped in the smoke of a thousand batteries. ”

“ Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was the intention of the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any one else on account of his religious convictions and turning to humanity in general, it made the following appeal:
“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for this is the rule set forth by the New Testament and by the example of the earliest church. Who are we, miserable people, that we would smother and extinguish in others the fire of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have any of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures? ”

“ No sooner was it ready for occupancy, no sooner had a new set of rules and regulations been posted upon the gates, than a wholesale walk-out occurred among the disgruntled trustees. As their keepers, now called ministers, had been deprived of the old methods of discipline (excommunication, torture, execution, confiscation and exile) they were absolutely helpless before this determined mob and were forced to stand by and look on while the rebels put up such a stockade as pleased their own theological preferences and proclaimed such new doctrines as happened to suit their temporary convictions. ”

“ How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in politics, literature, drama, sculpture, chemistry, physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during his career, has tried to give an answer. ”

“ But prison and torture meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until after death and who shouted with joy at the idea of being allowed to leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven. ”

“ How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.
While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages. ”