I know that any writer who ventures to protest against what happens to be a popular cry has little chance even of respectful attention. The rapid inter-communication of our age has brought us one evil from which our forefathers were free: the mass is moved too suddenly and too violently: each tide of popular feeling runs headlong in one direction, sweeping all before it, and back again with an equally dangerous reflux, leaving ravage and ruin behind it. Only a few years ago, if any impure scandal arose, its investigation and punishment were left to those whose painful duty it was to know the sickening details: women and boys were turned out of court: no particulars were given in any respectable journal—nothing but the words “the evidence was unfit for publication.” But a horrible fashion seems to be setting in, of making all things public, and of forcing the most contaminating subjects on the attention even of those who can get nothing from them but the deadliest injury. Against this I desire to raise a warning voice.
The question at issue is not whether great evils exist—nor again whether the rousing of public opinion is a remedy for those evils—on these two points we are agreed. The real question is, whether this mode of rousing public opinion is, or is not, doing more harm than good.
And the worst of the danger is that all this is being done in the sacred name of Religion. If we had no other evidence for the existence of a devil, we might find it, I think, in the Argument from Design—in the terrible superhuman ingenuity with which temptation is adapted to the taste of the age. Not so many years ago, Vice was fashionable, and the literature of the day was openly profligate: no pretext of piety was offered to readers who would only have despised it. But in our day, to be popular, one must profess the very highest and purest motives. Straightway Satan is transformed into an angel of light, and with an air “devout and pure, sober, steadfast, and demure,” offers us his old wares, furbished up in new colours.
May I not plead with those, who have not yet lost their heads in the whirl and din of this popular Maelstrom, to consider whither the stream is really carrying us?
I plead for our young men and boys, whose imaginations are being excited by highly-coloured pictures of vice, and whose natural thirst for knowledge is being used for unholy purposes by the seducing whisper “read this, and your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil!” I plead for our womankind, who are being enticed to attend meetings where the speakers, inverting the sober language of the apostle, “it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret,” proclaim that it is a shame not to speak of them: who are being taught to believe that they are still within the bounds of true womanliness and modesty, while openly discussing the vilest of topics: and who all too soon prove, by the eagerness with which they turn to what so lately was loathsome to them, that there is but one step from prudishness to pruriency. Above all, I plead for our pure maidens, whose souls are being saddened, if not defiled, by the nauseous literature that is thus thrust upon them—I plead for them in the name of Him who said “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” For all these I plead, with whosoever has the power to interfere, to stay, before it is too late, the flood of abomination with which we are threatened.
Let me add some words, bearing on this matter, better and more eloquent than any that I could devise. I quote from “Sermons by the Rev. E. Monro,” published in 1850, p. 136.
By all means, and on all occassions, avoid dwelling on the object of impure sensation; we are told, by holy men of old, that on this point alone we may be cowards; we must fly from it. The mere dwelling on its forbidden pollutions, even to combat them, forms evil habits, and withers holiness. We are often led to bring the object of sinful desire before us, and that with the best intentions, when we pray against it, when we would examine ourselves on it, when we are regretting the past, when we unfold our grief to another, when we compare ourselves with ourselves. But on all these occassions as far as possible shun the image; do not let the coloured lights fall into a shape or outline, nor suffer, if you can help it, your vision to centre them in a focus; if they are dimmed, leave them so, and do not restore the view; repress even the slightest image, lest it should strengthen and invigorate evil desire; you are too weak to bear it. If you have to pray against it, to examine yourselves on it, let the object be an imperfect memory, a recollection of something past, rather than of the object itself; mean it without expressing it, intend without defining it. Let no excuse avail to dwell on it.
The contrast between these wise words and the conduct of those who are doing their best to “centre in a focus” the soul-destroying picture, and to add yet more “coloured lights” than the devil has already supplied, needs no words of mine to emphasize it.
A beautiful fiend is abroad in the midst of us: let the wise know her and shun her while yet there is time. On her fair brow she bears the title of “Religion”: “pacing with downward eyelids pure,” she passes, unsuspected, among our youths and maidens, and whispers to them the dark secrets of Hell. Like Arthur’s proligate queen,
being by our cowardice allow’d
Her station, taken everywhere for pure,
She like a new disease, unknown to men,
Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd,
Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps
The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse
With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the youth.
Lewis Carroll