The Life of Thomas Wanless, PeasantWilson, A. J. (Alexander Johnstone)
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The Life of Thomas Wanless, Peasant
Wilson, A. J. (Alexander Johnstone)
Peasants -- England -- Fiction
"These are the mere ravings of an ignorant peasant," most readers will
exclaim. I do not deny that in a certain sense they may seem only that.
Yet look around and consider the signs of the times before you dismiss
these things as of no significance. What means the spread of secularism
amongst the working classes of the present day, the contempt for
religion and parsons which most of them display? Is it not a most
ominous indication of future trouble for serene lord bishops and their
brood when events bring them face to face with the people? I do not
admire Charles Bradlaugh's teaching on many points; but I cannot deny
the power that he and such as he wield on the common people. It is a
power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it
betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who
now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The
churches and chapels themselves, with their exceedingly worldly
respectability, produce these men more certainly than all the teachings
of the Bradlaughs; nay, Bradlaugh himself is directly the product of a
corrupt, time-serving and utterly blasphemous church organisation.
Therefore be not too contemptuous of sentiments like those of this
peasant. They are significant of many things--of a coming democracy that
will at least try to burn up the rottenness of our modern ultra
Pagan-civilization.
On other questions than those of Church and State the opinions of
Thomas Wanless were equally uncompromising, and, perhaps, equally
impracticable. His intelligence was far deeper than his reading, and
much of his political economy, as well as of his code of social morals,
was taken from the Bible. To my thinking he could have gone to no better
book, but I am also free to admit that his too exclusive study of it
gave a quaint and sometimes impracticable turn to his conceptions that
may lead many to have a poor opinion of his wisdom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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