Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)Foote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
Mr. Hughes goes on to say that "our common humanity" is "a perfectly new
idea." "Max Muller," he tells us, "says that there was no trace of it
until Christ came. It is a purely Christian conception." Professor Max
Muller, however, is not infallible. He sometimes panders to Christian
prejudices, and this is a case in point. What he says about "humanity"
is an etymological quibble. Certainly the Greeks knew nothing about it,
simply because they did not speak Latin. But they had an equivalent word
in _philanthropia_, which was in use in the time of Plato, four hundred
years before the birth of Christ.*
* Mr. Hughes talks so much that he must have little time for
reading. Every educated man, however, is supposed to be
acquainted with Bacon's _Essays_, the thirteenth of which
opens as follows:--"I take goodness in this sense, the
affecting of the weal of men, which is that the Grecians
called Philanthropia; and the word humanity (as it is used)
is a little too light to express it." Bacon not only knew
the antiquity of _Philanthropia_, but preferred it to the
later and less weighty term so ignorantly celebrated by Mr.
Hughes.
Max Muller or no Max Muller, we tell Mr. Hughes that he is either
reckless or ignorant in declaring that the idea of human brotherhood
owes its origin to Christ, Paul, or Christianity. To say nothing of
Buddha, whose ethics are wider than the ethics of Christ, and confining
ourselves to Greece and Rome, with the teaching of whose thinkers
Christianity comes into more direct comparison--it is easy enough to
prove that Mr. Hughes is in error, or worse. Four centuries before
Christ, when Socrates was asked on one occasion as to his country, he
replied, "I am a citizen of the world." Cicero, the great Roman
writer, in the century before Christ, uses the very word _caritas_,
which St. Paul borrowed in his fine and famous chapter in the first
of Corinthians. Cicero, and not St. Paul, was the first to pronounce
"charity" as the tie which unites the human race. And after picturing a
soul full of virtue, living in charity with its friends, and taking as
such all who are allied by nature, Cicero rose to a still loftier level.
"Moreover," he said, "let it not consider itself hedged in by the walls
of a single town, but acknowledge itself a citizen of the whole world,
as though one city." In another treatise he speaks of "fellowship with
the human race, charity, friendship, justice."
We defy Mr. Hughes to indicate a single cosmopolitan text in the New
Testament as strong, clear, and pointed as these sayings of Socrates and
Cicero--the one Greek, the other Roman, and both before Christ. Let him
ransack gospels, epistles, acts, and revelations, and produce the text
we call for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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