On the Atheist Museum

moods melt into innocent and unmixed merriment.

So far as I can make out, you fit up an Anti-God Museum by getting hold of fragments and relics of all sorts of religions, or what you guess to be religions, and put them in glass cases with little labels on them. I have heard that the embalmed body of a Saint, let us say, will be on one side, and opposite to it an Eskimo who has been kept in cold storage, for some reason known or unknown. Then there would be an ordinary Egyptian mummy and the bones of a Hindu monk, or what not; and so on. And when the brilliant, piercing, penetrating, intelligence of the New Youth has once discovered that it is possible to put the relic of a Coptic hermit in the same room with a fetish from the South Sea Islands, it will instantly draw the logical deduction that the cosmos is devoid of any design. When that powerful intellect has wrestled for a few hours with the fact that the glass case containing a reliquary is very much like the other glass case containing a ju-ju, it will be fully and finally obvious that there is no God. How any human being could think any other human being could be affected, in deciding any serious question, by such a ridiculous jumble of Jarley's Waxworks I cannot imagine myself; but then I am of the old guard of the democratic idealists, and prefer to believe that all men are equal in the possession of human reason. But, in truth, there is really one sense in which such things can be taken seriously. Indeed, it has a moral against ourselves, which is sometimes more wholesome than a moral against our opponents.

The very worst part of the Bolshevist bosh is that it is by no means confined to Bolshevists. Indeed, all the worst parts of it the Bolshevists have borrowed from the sort of economic and biological materialism that had already existed in Western Europe long before they turned it into a wild but belated riot in Eastern Europe. Thus, while the Communists may be called mad in many ways, what they are really mad on is machinery; which is exactly what our own grandfathers and great-grandfathers were mad on, in the time of the Manchester School, It cannot be said of us now that we are mad on it, or even wild about it. It can only be said that we are tame, But Moscow has the same stupid belief in mechanical action and dead matter supporting its extreme Communism which our fathers had supporting their extreme Individualism. And just as their machinery is borrowed machinery, so their materialism is borrowed materialism. It is the old nineteenth-century materialism of the stalest and stuffiest kind; the kind that nearly all scientific men in the West have now abandoned, because it is stale and stuffy. The stuffiness is apparent in all that stupid old notion of discrediting the high religions by comparing them with the low religions. The staleness simply stinks from the open doors of the Anti-God Museum. Supposing I were to set out to abolish the art of Painting, and thought I could do it by opening a gallery in which good pictures were hung on one side and bad pictures on the other. Suppose I were a Moslem and an Iconoclast, fanatically desirous of destroying all statues and statuary. And suppose I did it by opening a museum in which I stuck up the Venus of Milo opposite a wax lady out of a low-class hairdresser's shop. Suppose I put the Madonna of Michelangelo side by side with a South Sea Island idol, little more than a lump of stone. Would it prove anything against Sculpture? And why should it prove anything against Religion? Would the earnest and cultured young Communist gravely go round my gallery, and deduce that men must be restrained from their too facile habit of carving great Greek sculpture, lest it should lead them to break out at last into making waxwork busts for shop-windows? Would that thoughtful young man infer that there was a serious danger of somebody beginning with something quite small and simple, like Michelangelo's statues, and be thus encouraged to make formless little fetishes for cannibals? Or dare we hope that there would dawn on htm the somewhat evident and elementary thought; that most things have a better form and a worse; that you cannot abolish a whole branch of human culture by showing that cultured people sometimes do it better than uncultured people; and that even when the two men are really aiming at the same thing (which is by no means always the case) you cannot prove from the unworthy example that the worthy example is worthless? Yet I am bound to say, as I have already said, that this obvious fallacy was not invented by the poor BoLshies; they only picked it up from the nineteenth-century materialists, along with a lot of other second-hand goods and third-rate theories,

To this we must add a thousand other things, which the antiquated atheist has probably never heard of at all There are endless complications of real and recent research, which have cut across the old simple lines of the rationalist theory of religious origins. There is the accumulating evidence of savages themselves, that they are not quite so savage as they were painted; the evidence about the deliberate simplification and voluntary convention in their religious art. There is what many old-fashioned people would call the increasing similarity between the highest modern art and the South Sea Island fetish. Then there is the whole department of demon-worship; and the cases in which idols were not beautiful because they were not meant to be beautiful, but deliberately meant to be ugly. There is the increasing comprehension of harshness and severity in certain schools of sculpture. Above all, there is the increasing interest in the higher religions, considered in an intrinsic and intellectual fashion, and not as they were considered by the superficial generation that mistook them for superstitions. All this is the result of real research as recorded in real museums, with real classification and real and responsible labels. And against all this the belated sect would set up what the Americans would call a Dime Museum, about as authoritative as a penny peep-show. I do not wonder that they have preserved the institution of a Censorship; lest the poor rustics, who look into the peep-show to see that there is no God inside, should be allowed to look outside and see what is going on in the world.

VI On the New Prudery

I HAVE discovered chat the New Prudery is much narrower and more prudish than the Old Prudery; even of the most dingy and dismal latter days of Puritanism, The discovery interests me not a little, for I always thought I had a pure and perfect and spotless hatred of the ordinary sort of Puritanism. But the pure Puritan is not so grim and negative and repressive as the pure Progressive, The New Prudery does not come out of stale sects or old shabby chapels: it comes out of all the new clubs, new leagues, new guilds of art and culture, new summer schools of science and philanthropy. It is altogether a thing of the Future; or at least of the Futurists, who think they will dominate the Future. It is even notably a thing of the young, and, what is far more extraordinary, of the young who would call themselves the free. And the Ten Commandments of the Christian, or even the Ten Hundred Commandments of the Puritan, arc themselves like perfect freedom compared with the terrorism and rigidity of its new Taboos.

I will give a practical case to prove the sober truth