Our Respect For Truth And Fair
Dealing, Such As It Is, Derives From Modern Commerce; In The Middle Ages
Nobody
Was concerned about honesty save a few trading companies like the
Hanseatic League, and the poor mediaeval devil (the only
Gentleman of
his age) who was generally pressed for time and could be relied upon to
keep his word. Even God, of whom they talked so much, was systematically
swindled. Where time counts for nothing, expeditious practices between
man and man are a drug in the market. Besides, it must be noted that
this churchly misteaching was only a fraction of that general shattering
which has disintegrated all the finer fibres of public life. It stands
to reason that the fragile tissues of culture are dislocated, and its
delicate edges defaced, by such persistive governmental brutalization as
the inhabitants have undergone. None but the grossest elements in a
people can withstand enduring misrule; none but a mendacious and servile
nature will survive its wear and tear. So it comes about that up to a
few years ago the nobler qualities which we associate with those old
Hellenic colonists - their intellectual curiosity, their candid outlook
upon life, their passionate sense of beauty, their love of nature - all
these things had been abraded, leaving, as residue, nothing save what
the Greeks shared with ruder races. There are indications that this
state of affairs is now ending.
The position is this. The records show that the common people never took
their saints to heart in the northern fashion - as moral exemplars; from
beginning to end, they have only utilized them as a pretext for fun and
festivals, a means of brightening the cata-combic, the essentially
sunless, character of Christianity. So much for the popular saints, the
patrons and heroes. The others, the ecclesiastical ones, are an
artificial product of monkish institutions. These monkeries were
established in the land by virtue of civil authority. Their continued
existence, however, was contingent upon the goodwill of the Vatican. One
of the surest and cheapest methods of obtaining this goodwill was to
produce a satisfactory crop of saints whose beatification swelled the
Vatican treasury with the millions collected from a deluded populace for
that end. The monks paid nothing; they only furnished the saint and, in
due course, the people's money. Can we wonder that they discovered
saints galore? Can we wonder that the Popes were gratified by their
pious zeal?
So things went on till yesterday. But now a large proportion of the ten
thousand (?) churches and monasteries of Naples are closed or actually
in ruins; wayside sanctuaries crumble to dust in picturesque fashion;
the price of holy books has fallen to zero, and the godly brethren have
emigrated to establish their saint-manufactories elsewhere. Not without
hope of success; for they will find purchasers of their wares wherever
mankind can be interested in that queer disrespect of the body which is
taught by the metaphysical ascetics of the East.
It was Lewes, I believe, who compared metaphysics to ghosts by saying
that there was no killing either of them; one could only dissipate them
by throwing light into the dark places they love to inhabit - to show
that nothing is there.
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