Gospel of Mammonism
Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any
notion of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not. Often as
the words are on our tongue, they have got a fabulous or
semifabulous character for most of us, and pass on like a kind of
transient similitude, like a sound signifying little.
Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that
they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable; that they
are an everlasting highest fact! "No Lake of Sicilian or other
sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou? Well,
and if there did not! Believe that there does not; believe it
if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher
stages, to wider horizons and empires. All this has vanished, or
has not vanished; believe as thou wilt as to all this. But that
an Infinite of Practical Importance, speaking with strict
arithmetical exactness, an _Infinite,_ has vanished or can vanish
from the Life of any Man: this thou shalt not believe! O
brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it not at
any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, unnameable?
Came it never, like the gleam of preternatural eternal Oceans,
like the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart
of hearts? Never? Alas, it was not thy Liberalism then; it was
thy Animalism! The Infinite is more sure than any other fact.
But only men can discern it; mere building beavers, spinning
arachnes, much more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species,
do not discern it well!--
'The word Hell,' says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use
among the English People: but I could not without difficulty
ascertain what they meant by it. Hell generally signifies the
Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and
shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to
escape from it. There is a Hell therefore, if you will consider,
which accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and
religious or other development: but the Hells of men and Peoples
differ notably. With Christians it is the infinite terror of
being found guilty before the just Judge. With old Romans, I
conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably
they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously,
which was their word for un_man_fully. And now what is it, if
you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he
calls his Worships and so forth,--what is it that the modern
English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and
contemplate with entire despair? What is his Hell; after all
these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With
hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror
of "Not succeeding;" of not making money, fame, or some other
figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a
somewhat singular Hell?
Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not 'succeed,'
where is the use of us? We had better never have been born.
"Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says:
_there_ is the black Bottomless of Terror; what Sauerteig calls
the 'Hell of the English!'--But indeed this Hell belongs
naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which also has its
corresponding Heaven. For there is one Reality among so many
Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in earnest: The
making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world with
idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is
even a Mammonism, anything we are in earnest about! Idleness is
worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at
anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things.
There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.
True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-
Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society;
and go about professing openly the totalest separation,
isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather,
cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so
forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten
everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole relation of human
beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and
liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?"
answers the rich Mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the
market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum
covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?"--Verily
Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own
behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, "Where is thy
brother" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Did I
not pay my brother _his_ wages, the thing he had merited from me?
O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving Duke, is
there no way of 'killing' thy brother but Cain's rude way! 'A
good man by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as
a fellow wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, _promises_ so much:'
woe to him if he forget all such promises, if he never know that
they were given! To a deadened soul, seared with the brute
Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to Hell is equivalent to not
making money, all 'promises,' and moral duties, that cannot be
pleaded for in Courts of Requests, address themselves in vain.
Money he can be ordered to pay, but nothing more. I have not
heard in all Past History, and expect not to hear in all Future
History, of any Society anywhere under God's Heaven supporting
itself on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so; it is
made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that thinks it
is made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step after step;
but marches--whither we know! In these last two centuries of
Atheistic Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed
restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith,
Charles Second), I reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what
of 'firm earth' there was for us to march on;--and are now, very
ominously, shuddering, reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil,
on the cliff's edge!--
For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other _isms_
and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels!--A SOUL
is not like wind (_spiritus,_ or breath) contained within a
capsule; the ALMIGHTY MAKER is not like a Clockmaker that once,
in old immemorial ages, having _made_ his Horologe of a Universe,
sits ever since and sees it go! Not at all. Hence comes
Atheism; come, as we say, many other _isms;_ and as the sum of
all, comes Valetism, the _reverse_ of Heroism; sad root of all
woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever saw the above-said
wind-element enclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom
more deniable than conceivable; so too he finds, in spite of
Bridgewater Bequests, your Clockmaker Almighty an entirely
questionable affair, a deniable affair;--and accordingly denies
it, and along with it so much else. Alas, one knows not what and
how much else! For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable,
Godlike, present everywhere in all that we see and work and
suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever; and that once
denied, or still worse, asserted with lips only, and out of bound
prayerbooks only, what other thing remains believable? That Cant
well-ordered is marketable Cant; that Heroism means gas-lighted
Histrionism; that seen with 'clear eyes' (as they call Valet-
eyes), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all men are
Valets and Varlets. The accursed practical quintessence of all
sorts of Unbelief! For if there be now no Hero, and the Histrio
himself begin to be seen into, what hope is there for the seed of
Adam here below? We are the doomed everlasting prey of the
Quack; who, now in this guise, now in that, is to filch us, to
pluck and eat us, by such modes as are convenient for him. For
the modes and guises I care little. The Quack once inevitable,
let him come swiftly, let him pluck and eat me;--swiftly, that I
may at least have done with him; for in his Quack-world I can
have no wish to linger. Though he slay me, yet will I despise
him. Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkeys of the
Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that _he_ is
an Inanity; that for him and his there is no continuance
appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas, the Atheist
world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster Hall,
downwards through poor sevenfeet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen
hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of
it, is very wretched.
One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us much.* A poor
Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of
Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all
resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of
that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she
was refused; referred from one to the other, helped by none;--
till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart
failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected
her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of
fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon,
as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been
_economy_ to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and
killed seventeen of you!--Very curious. The forlorn Irish Widow
applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am
sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone
of your bone; one God made us: ye must help me!" They answer,
"No; impossible: thou art no sister of ours." But she proves
her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills _them:_ they actually
were her brothers, though denying it! Had man ever to go lower
for a proof?
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* _Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland:_ By
William Pulteney Alison, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1840)
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For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all government of
the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply-and-
demand, Laissez-faire and such like, and universally declared to
be 'impossible.' "You are no sister of ours; what shadow of
proof is there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving
indisputably our money-safes to be _ours,_ and you to have no
business with them. Depart! It is impossible!"--Nay, what
wouldst thou thyself have us do? cry indignant readers. Nothing,
my friends,--till you have got a soul for yourselves again. Till
then all things are 'impossible.' Till then I cannot even bid
you buy, as the old Spartans would have done, two-pence worth of
powder and lead, and compendiously shoot to death this poor Irish
Widow: even that is 'impossible' for you. Nothing is left but
that she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with
typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof
that she was flesh of your flesh; and perhaps some of the living
may lay it to heart.
'Impossible:' of a certain two-legged animal with feathers, it
is said if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits
imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate; and will die
there, though within sight of victuals,--or sit in sick misery
there, and be fatted to death. The name of this poor two-legged
animal is--Goose; and they make of him, when well fattened,
_Pate de foie gras,_ much prized by some!