Morrison Swift

Quotes from Human Submission.

If we eliminate consciousness from the universe I do not know of what consequence its existence is, and if consciousness is the greatest thing, the way this universe uses every conscious being is our test of the universe.

Quoting F.H. Hedge: "To the question, then, how evil consists with the goodness of God? I answer flatly, it does not consist with the goodness of God. Either there is no God, such as we figure him, or there is no evil. Pain and suffering in abundance, but no evil. For only that is really and absolutely evil which is . . . evil in its issue, evil for evermore. Nothing in God's universe answers to that condition."

Who knows anything about good or evil for evermore? Who is familiar with 'God's universe' beyond the immoral medley of it here? Is there then no evil? Let us try to conceive how men who are neither philosophers nor proprietors of the planet would answer this question.

On the llth of October, 1904, the press contained some curious information from Cleveland, Ohio:

"After murdering his two children, John, aged three, and Emma, aged four, Bohunil Schnepp, a Bohemian laborer, aged forty-one, made an unsuccessful attempt on his own, life at the grave of his wife in Woodland Cemetery here. He is now in a local hospital, where the doctors say he will recover. Schnepp has vainly searched for weeks for employment, and, becoming discouraged over the prospect of not being able to provide a home for himself and his two motherless babies, he yesterday decided to blot out the entire family.

" He took the two children into the basement of his boarding house, where, after tying handkerchiefs tightly over their mouths so that they could make no outcry, he fired a shot from an old revolver into each of their heads. The bullets failing to kill instantly, he seized an old hammer which was lying nearby and struck the children on the skull behind the temple. The two bodies were then placed side by side on the floor, while the frantic father went to the cemetery where the body of his wife was buried. There, with the pistol he had used on his babies, he fired a shot into his head.

" He was picked up unconscious and hurried to the hospital, where examination revealed the fact that the bullet had missed the brain and that he would recover. In the meantime the bodies of his unfortunate victims had been found, Emma being dead and John dyiug within half an hour. Schnepp left a letter in which he stated that he ' had nothing left to do' but kill himself; that he now ' had a job iu hell as a fireman ' and asked that he and the children be buried in the same grave."

This phenomenon happened in a world whose God is Love. In New York an old man starved to death : "Two shoemakers, Michael and Jacob Buthren, both more than 70 years old, have been living in a rear tenement in Gates Avenue, Brooklyn. To-day the police were notified by neighbors that something was wrong with the old men. They visited the house and found Michael dead and his brother Jacob lying half conscious and barely alive by his side. Both were victims of starvation. It is impossible to say how long they had been without food, but it must have been several days."

A tailor in Philadelphia paid his debts and took poison, writing, " The other world may be just as bad." Max Horn, a tailor, fearing that he would become blind and so be thrown out of work committed suicide yesterday, at 920 South Street, by drinking carbolic acid. He had been troubled with weak eyes for some time, and had been unable to work at his trade. This note addressed to the man with whom he lived, was found in the suicide's room:

" ' Friend Witkin—I leave you 30 cents for two suppers, Sunday and Monday, that belongs to you. Excuse me, friends, for the trouble, but I couldn't help myself. I hope you will excuse me. I want you to sell all my clothes and buy me new ones for the grave. I wish you good-by and good luck from me. Yours truly, Horn.

" ' The world aint more for me. The other world may be just as bad. Max Horn.' "

The records of many more such cases lie before me ; an encyclopedia might easily be filled with their kind. These few I cite as an interpretation of the universe. " We are aware of the presence of God in His world," says a writer in a recent English Review. " The Absolute is the richer for every discord, and for all diversity which it embraces," says F. H. Bradley {Appearance and Reality, 204). He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is Philosophy.

This is a beautiful summary of that ignoble resignation and acceptance which is all that religion can offer us against the blows of nature. Coerce your mind and subdue your insight, ignore realities and inwardly assert that the storms of evil beating down man are mysterious expressions of Divine Love.

The illuminations of religion and of philosophy are then identical, and the secret of both is Faith. Devoutly believe that the universe is Divine Love and a Perfect Whole. And now let us, as before we did with religion, apply the doctrine of philosophy to facts. When the obscure Cleveland workman, having vainly searched through weeks for employment, took his two children into the basement of his boarding house and tying handkerchiefs over their mouths fired a shot from an old revolver into each of their heads, and, failing to kill them, hammered their skulls in beneath the temple, we had ' a fragmentary glimpse of the Absolute life,' ' a revelation of the unity of the perfect Whole.' We had, I think, on the contrary a perfectly clear glimpse of what any one not besotted by the concepts of philosophy would call Absolute Imperfection, and of a universe in which the attributes of hate and hell were in cruel supremacy. And neither philosophy nor religion will much longer avail with intellectual charlatanry and sophistries to restrain mankind from so reasoning and seeing. When it does so, a change in its principles of action like that of the passage from an old to a new universe will transpire.

Ethics follows at the tail of philosophy and religion. "The joys of a good conscience," says Wundt, "far excelling all other sources of happiness, are so great that the really moral man is entirely satisfied with the position assigned him by Fate : he would not change places with any one." *

Patiently bringing our facts to bear upon this quaint academic thinker's fiction, the working man who, crazed by starving and seeing his boy and girl whom he could not feed pining and dying before his eyes, with no commisseration from God or man or moralist, crushed out their brains, would have been ' entirely satisfied with the position assigned him by Fate,' nor would he have changed places with anyone; for tip to the time when the frenzy seized him he must surely have had a good conscience, since for weeks he had zealously pursued the mocking phantasies of employment and honest food. Thus the ethical writer with the mysteries of his science can reduce the utmost misery that a human being can know to a joy far excelling all others; he can make the most horrible fate conceivable to man identical with his highest bliss. But he does more : he demonstrates that ethics is an archaic exercise of modern school-masters hundreds of years in arrears, that its message to the present and to the future is dead.

' Thou shalt not steal, neither shalt thou covet,' are suitable precepts in a state of equality, but in a social mechanism framed as Rome was for the spoliation of the many, they are advices to the many to meanly fall down and be pillaged.