his celestial Serpent; the god of Dogma maintains his government by
support of the infernal Serpent. Fear beheld him appearing in Durham to
vindicate the mass and the Sabbath; but the same fear still sees him
in the fiery world punishing Sabbath-breakers and blasphemers against
his Creator and chief. That fear built every cathedral in Christendom,
and they must crumble with the phantasm evoked for their creation.
The Serpent in itself is a perfect type of all evil in nature. It is
irreconcilable with the reign of a perfectly good and omnipotent man
over the universe. No amount of casuistry can explain its co-existence
with anthropomorphic Love and Wisdom, as all acknowledge when a
parallel casuistry attempts to defend any other god than their own
from deeds that are, humanly considered, evil. It is just as easy to
defend the jealousy and cruelty of Jove, on the ground that his ways
are not as our ways, as it is to defend similar tempers in Jehovah. The
monster sent by one to devour Prometheus is ethically atwin with the
snake created by the other to bite the heel of man.
Man is saved from the superstitious evolution of the venomous Serpent
into a Dragon by recognising its real evolution as seen by the eye
of Science. Science alone can tell the true story of the Serpent,
and justify its place in nature. It forbids man his superstitious
method of making a god in his own image, and his egotistic method
of judging nature according to his private likes and dislikes, his
convenience or inconvenience. Taught by Science man may, with a freedom
the barbarian cannot feel, exterminate the Serpent; with a freedom the
christian cannot know, he may see in that reptile the perfection of
that economy in nature which has ever defended the advancing forms of
life. It judges the good and evil of every form with reference to its
adaptation to its own purposes. Thus Science alone wields the spear
of Ithuriel, and beneath its touch every Dragon shrinks instantly to
its little shape in nature to be dealt with according to what it is.
CHAPTER XII.
FATE.
Dorè's 'Love and Fate'--Moira and Moiræ--The 'Fates' of Æschylus
--Divine absolutism surrendered--Jove and Typhon--Commutation of
the Demon's share--Popular fatalism--Theological fatalism--Fate
and Necessity--Deification of Will--Metaphysics, past and present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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